Online Exploration, Content Choice & Echo Chambers: An Experiment

Neil Gandal and Sagit Bar-Gill

No 11909, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: In this experiment, we create an online search environment where users explore the TED Talks collection, and choose a talk to watch. As users search in this environment, they can separately control two search dimensions - topic and popularity. Furthermore, in topic-based searches, we randomly block/show popularity information. We ask: what types of users are most likely to get caught in a content echo chamber and what is the role of popularity information provision in facilitating echo chambers? Susceptibility to echo chambers is proxied by: (I) conducting little to no exploration in the search process, and (II) relying on popularity in content choice. We find that high levels of sociability and previous experience with similar content are associated with susceptibility to echo chambers. Opinion leadership, on the other hand, is associated with more exploration and lower reliance on popularity. Interestingly, popularity information provision increases opinion leaders’ popularity sorting, and thus raises the potential for content echo chambers.

Keywords: Content exploration; Online search; Opinion leadership; Echo chamber; Filter bubble (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP11909 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:11909

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP11909

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CEPR ().