Second Screening—The Influence of Concurrent TV Consumption on Online Shopping Behavior

The practice of using a “second screen” while concurrently watching television (TV) has become a widespread phenomenon. Whereas work on multitasking suggests that TV consumption may lead to lower online sales, research in the area of impulse buying suggests the opposite. In this paper, we study the impact of concurrent TV consumption on online shopping behavior and try to understand this conflict. Our first study analyzes the impact of TV consumption on online shopping behavior at the aggregate level using a panel of 100,000 U.S. customers over a period of 24 months. We address potential endogeneity problems with an instrumental variable approach. Our second study proposes a novel approach to realizing individual-level analysis over thousands of consumers and products. Examining massive amounts of data, we identify a sample of consumers who watched a certain TV show and who were simultaneously doing online shopping at Amazon.com. We then compare their shopping behavior on the day of the TV show to their shopping behavior one week prior. Both studies reveal that whereas TV consumption is correlated with a higher likelihood of online shopping in general, the causal effect of TV watching differs with respect to the complexity of the products purchased. If a TV program appeals to a large TV audience, then this results in fewer immediate sales of high-complexity products (1% increase in TV consumption leads to −2.2% sales) and more sales of low-complexity products (1% increase in TV consumption leads to +8.8% sales).