The Attention Economy
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Series
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Speaker(s)Alex Imas (University of Chicago Booth School of Business, United States)
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FieldBehavioral Economics, Empirical Microeconomics
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LocationOnline
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Date and time
May 11, 2026
15:00 - 16:00
Abstract
Digital advertising markets increasingly revolve around consumer engagement metrics, with platforms competing for attention through short-form video content. These strategies rest on the assumption that higher engagement proportionally enhances advertising impact. We challenge this assumption by testing whether greater engagement with video content crowds out attention to advertising. Using experiments with TikTok and YouTube Shorts users, we find substantial crowd-out: attention-grabbing video content significantly reduces ad recall. Our results also indicate an engagement-memory tradeoff when platforms choose the similarity of ad content to short-form video content: higher similarity increases engagement, but decreases recall, consistent with interference.
Please contact the secretariat if you wish to attend this online seminar.