Tan, YongMitkina, Mariia2024-02-122024-02-122023Mitkina_washington_0250E_26433.pdfhttp://hdl.handle.net/1773/51103Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2023This dissertation consists of two essays studying how specific artifacts of social media platforms create conditions for improved offline outcomes for their users. The contemporary landscape of social media is marked by a burgeoning number of platforms and an ever-expanding user base, giving rise to a multitude of novel social media artifacts that have the potential to significantly influence the outcomes experienced by users. Within this context, our research aims to shed light on two distinct and understudied social media phenomena and assess their causal impact on offline outcomes. In the first essay, the focus is on the potential aid of User Generated Content (UGC) in the rising of political consumerism. In recent years, there have been multiple social movements that resulted in consumer choice shifts of the engaged social movement participants. For example, during the recent Black Lives Matter protests, the movement participants were actively looking for Black-owned businesses to support. In the absence of detailed lists for such and similar businesses, UGC mentioning the ownership status has become instrumental in the minority-owned business search. In this essay, we estimate the impact of increased digital visibility for Black-owned restaurants on Yelp through user-generated reviews mentioning Black ownership. We also study the heterogeneity of this effect across different consumer and business categories. The second essay focuses on the role of creators on social media and how their content and growth strategies can benefit content consumers. We use the context of the physical exercising genre posted on social media and study whether the popular free fitness content is able to provide a setting for consistent exercising for a wide audience. Namely, we study the effect of fitness challenges -- a common content posting strategy utilized by fitness content creators -- on the engagement dynamics of content consumers. We demonstrate that structured fitness programs improve immediate and future creator performance and provide improved individual user engagement as well as habit formation, a sense of progress, and a feeling of community among content consumers.application/pdfen-USnoneBusiness administrationBusiness administrationThesis