Manav Raj, Assistant Professor of Management and Organizations at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania
Friday, February 21, 2025 1:30 - 3:00pm
Abstract
Digitization has democratized markets, enabling the entry of new offerings and transforming how audiences search for and evaluate them. Although this has led to a proliferation of new content and producers, its impact on the nature of creative content is less clear. In this study, we examine how market-level digitization influences a key attribute of creative goods—content novelty. Studying the book industry from 2000 to 2014 and utilizing a difference-in-differences estimation strategy that leverages the staggered rollout of the Amazon Kindle e-book ecosystem across the United States and Europe, we find that market-level digitization reduces book-level content novelty. We explore the mechanisms underlying this relationship, and find evidence that suggests that the negative relationship between digitization and novelty is driven by both changes to supply-side dynamics, namely lower barriers to entry and the reduced role of industry gatekeepers that typically promote novelty, as well as changes to demand-side dynamics, namely reduced returns to content novelty. This research deepens our understanding of how digitization reshapes the structural dynamics of creative industries and influences product characteristics.
Biography
Manav Raj is an Assistant Professor of Management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. His research studies are: a) how firms respond to innovation and technological change, with a focus on digital platforms and technologies; and b) how institutional features and non-market forces affect innovation and entrepreneurship. Manav graduated from Dartmouth College in 2015, with a major in Economics and a minor in Public Policy. Prior to entering the Ph.D. program at NYU, he worked as a consultant with Cornerstone Research in Boston.