Pith Number

pith:7UBX667U

pith:2026:7UBX667UL7TR7KCV5FZCLCVTBI

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Engagement vs. Commitment: The Economic Trade-Offs of Polarizing News Content

Klaus M. Miller, Shunyao Yan

Polarizing news content increases time on site but does not raise subscriptions and reduces them during elections.

arxiv:2605.18357 v1 · 2026-05-18 · econ.GN · q-fin.EC

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Claims

C1strongest claim

We find that supply-driven increases in polarizing content raise engagement but not subscriptions. During the high-salience election window, the same content reduces subscriptions and accelerates churn, with affective polarization driving the sharpest divergence.

C2weakest assumption

The two instrumental variables (Bartik supply-side editorial variation and election-period demand-side salience) satisfy the exclusion restriction and are not correlated with unobserved demand shocks that directly affect subscriptions or retention.

C3one line summary

Polarizing content raises engagement but fails to increase subscriptions and harms retention during elections on a major news platform, with effects driven by affective polarization rather than confirmation bias.

References

65 extracted · 65 resolved · 1 Pith anchors

[1] Econometrica , volume = 1997

[2] Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series B (Methodological) , volume =

[3] Milkman , year =

[4] Consuming Cross-Cutting Media Causes Learning and Moderates Attitudes: A Field Experiment with 2025

[5] DellaVigna, Stefano and Ethan Kaplan , year =. The. The Quarterly Journal of Economics , volume =

Formal links

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Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-05-20T00:05:56.880020Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

fd037f7bf45fe71fa855e972258ab30a1e14d0b5a026b2d941ed5faac163cbd3

Aliases

arxiv: 2605.18357 · arxiv_version: 2605.18357v1 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2605.18357 · pith_short_12: 7UBX667UL7TR · pith_short_16: 7UBX667UL7TR7KCV · pith_short_8: 7UBX667U

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Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/7UBX667UL7TR7KCV5FZCLCVTBI \
  | jq -c '.canonical_record' \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: fd037f7bf45fe71fa855e972258ab30a1e14d0b5a026b2d941ed5faac163cbd3

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "8440501f39d7d222a2da1ba30efb83cfd62d8c39dcba9a9e70dffff1e67d5a6f",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [
      "q-fin.EC"
    ],
    "license": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
    "primary_cat": "econ.GN",
    "submitted_at": "2026-05-18T13:12:30Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "4bf8e8bc14203413c82b78fdc2a391b79583eb5791baf76dd9150b15b1ac0dd2"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
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    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 1
  }
}