Sickles, Robin2020-04-202020-04-202020-052020-04-15May 2020Ngo, Van Thi Tuong. "Estimating the Effect of Paywalls in Media Economics: An Application of Empirical IO, Machine Learning, and NLP Methods." (2020) Diss., Rice University. <a href="https://hdl.handle.net/1911/108331">https://hdl.handle.net/1911/108331</a>.https://hdl.handle.net/1911/108331Media firms such as newspapers compete in a two-sided market, one between content providers and news consumers while the other between content providers and advertisers. I examine the impact of online subscription and advertisement revenues on newspapers' endogenous content choice. An analytical model demonstrates that switching from a subscription to advertising revenue model changes firms' horizontally differentiated content choice. Additionally, I provide an empirical analysis of U.S. digital newspapers and evaluate a structural model of supply and demand. An application of web scraping, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Machine Learning for data collection and data analysis is presented. The counterfactual estimation suggests that a subscription-based model improves firms' profits.application/pdfengCopyright is held by the author, unless otherwise indicated. Permission to reuse, publish, or reproduce the work beyond the bounds of fair use or other exemptions to copyright law must be obtained from the copyright holder.Media EconomicsIndustrial Organizationadvertisingstructural modelbig datatext analysisNatural Language Processing (NLP)neural networkssupport vector machine (SVM)topic modelingThesis2020-04-20