Collegio Carlo Alberto study on Wikipedia and tourism gains international media coverage

Assistant Professor Marit Hinnosaar (Collegio Carlo Alberto) has performed an experiment on the impact of digital content on informing individual choices. The results from this experiment are featured in a recent article on The Guardian and on several other media outlets.

In her study, “Wikipedia Matters” (joint with Toomas Hinnosaar, Michael Kummer and Olga Slivko; forthcoming in the Journal of Economics & Management Strategy), Marit tests whether small additions to a Wikipedia entry for a small city can affect tourists’ choices of overnight visits. The authors randomly select cities across Spain and add content to their Wikipedia pages.  They find that these improvements have a sizeable impact on tourists’ consumption choices, increasing hotel stays of about 9%.

The results shed light on the impact of online user-generated information on real-world economic outcomes. Moreover, these findings have implications on economic inequality and the digital divide, while highlighting the importance of online presence.

Here is the full media coverage received so far:

Quartz, Guardian, BBC Radio (at 45:00), Telegraph, Independent, MSN, IndianExpress, BusinessMagazine (Albanian), Dosja (Albanian), Seznam Zprávy (Chezh), Sina Technology (Chinese), Zimo (Croatian), Eesti Ekspress (Estonian), Tivi (Finnish), Business Insider France (French), France Soir (French), Business AM (French), Clubic (French), FR24news (French), Siècle Digital (French), Travelestate (Greek), PiaceProfit (Hungarian), mfor.hu (Hungarian), Privátbankár (Hungarian), Morgunblaðið (Icelandic), Daily-planet (Indonesian), FocusTech (Italian), Gazeta.pl (Polish), 1pezeshk (Persian), Pagina Jornal (Portuguese), Inc. Russia (Russian), Roskom Svoboda (Russian), Nuevo Periodico (Spanish), La Información (Spanish), Turkish BBC (Turkish), Bursa Hakimiyet (Turkish)