arXiv subjects

Pinar Yildirim

Publications and source records attributed to Pinar Yildirim.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Artificial Intelligence in Team Dynamics: Who Gets Replaced and Why?

This study investigates the effects of artificial intelligence (AI) adoption in organizations. We ask: First, how should a principal optimally deploy limited AI resources to replace workers in a team? Second, in a sequential workflow, which workers face the highest risk of AI replacement? Third, would the principal always prefer to fully utilize all available AI resources, or are there any benefits to keeping some slack AI capacity? Fourth, what are the effects of optimal AI deployment on the wage level and intra-team wage inequality? We develop a sequential team production model in which a principal can use peer monitoring--where each worker observes a signal of their predecessor's effort--to discipline team members. The principal may replace some workers with AI agents, whose actions are not subject to moral hazard. Our analysis yields four key results. First, the optimal AI strategy stochastically replaces workers rather than fixating on a single position. Second, the principal replaces workers at the beginning and at the end of the workflow, but does not replace the middle worker, since this worker is crucial for sustaining the flow of information obtained by peer monitoring. Third, the principal may optimally underutilize available AI capacity. Fourth, the optimal AI adoption increases average wages and reduces intra-team wage inequality.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2021

Social Media, Content Moderation, and Technology

This paper develops a theoretical model to study the economic incentives for a social media platform to moderate user-generated content. We show that a self-interested platform can use content moderation as an effective marketing tool to expand its installed user base, to increase the utility of its users, and to achieve its positioning as a moderate or extreme content platform. The optimal content moderation strategy differs for platforms with different revenue models, advertising or subscription. We also show that a platform's content moderation strategy depends on its technical sophistication. Because of imperfect technology, a platform may optimally throw away the moderate content more than the extreme content. Therefore, one cannot judge how extreme a platform is by just looking at its content moderation strategy. Furthermore, we show that a platform under advertising does not necessarily benefit from a better technology for content moderation, but one under subscription does. This means that platforms under different revenue models can have different incentives to improve their content moderation technology. Finally, we draw managerial and policy implications from our insights.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2020

Competition, Politics, & Social Media

An increasing number of politicians are relying on cheaper, easier to access technologies such as online social media platforms to communicate with their constituency. These platforms present a cheap and low-barrier channel of communication to politicians, potentially intensifying political competition by allowing many to enter political races. In this study, we demonstrate that lowering costs of communication, which allows many entrants to come into a competitive market, can strengthen an incumbent's position when the newcomers compete by providing more information to the voters. We show an asymmetric bad-news-good-news effect where early negative news hurts the challengers more than the positive news benefit them, such that in aggregate, an incumbent politician's chances of winning is higher with more entrants in the market. Our findings indicate that communication through social media and other platforms can intensify competition, how-ever incumbency advantage may be strengthened rather than weakened as an outcome of higher number of entrants into a political market.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2020

Social Media and Political Contributions: The Impact of New Technology on Political Competition

Political campaigns are among the most sophisticated marketing exercises in the United States. As part of their marketing communication strategy, an increasing number of politicians adopt social media to inform their constituencies. This study documents the returns from adopting a new technology, namely Twitter, for politicians running for Congress by focusing on the change in campaign contributions received. We compare weekly donations received just before and just after a politician opens a Twitter account in regions with high and low levels of Twitter penetration, controlling for politician-month fixed effects. Specifically, over the course of a political campaign, we estimate that the differential effect of opening a Twitter account in regions with high vs low levels of Twitter penetration amounts to an increase of 0.7-2% in donations for all politicians and 1-3.1% for new politicians, who were never elected to the Congress before. In contrast, the effect of joining Twitter for experienced politicians remains negligibly small. We find some evidence consistent with the explanation that the effect is driven by new information about the candidates, e.g., the effect is primarily driven by new donors rather than past donors, by candidates without Facebook accounts and tweeting more informatively. Overall, our findings imply that social media can intensify political competition by lowering costs of disseminating information for new entrants to their constituents and thus may reduce the barriers to enter politics.

econ.GN↗