Understanding Online Media Reactions to Significant Price Increases for Eggs

Retail prices for eggs surged during the period from early 2022 to mid-2023 in the U.S. Eggs are important to a wide range of people because of their nutritional benefits and cost relative to other protein sources. Thus, rapidly increasing egg prices can cause risks to numerous people. Using social media listening data, we analyzed the relationship between egg prices and online and social media attention and the relationship between egg prices and online and social media sentiment. Our findings suggest that egg prices are associated with the sentiment of the public as expressed in online media. However, the relationship between egg prices and online and social media attention is complex when studying the timing of increased concern with the timing of online news media coverage. Importantly, by leveraging a method of regression discontinuity in time, we show that online and social media conversations about eggs and egg prices tend to increase after the rapid rise in online news coverage. Similarly, online and social media conversations about eggs and egg prices tend to decrease after the rapid rise in online news coverage. This research also provided an example of how a total number of statements and sentiment score of social media listening data can be utilized to capture people’s attention levels, overall sentiment, and how they change over time.