Research for Business, Government, and Society

Our cutting-edge research advances new ideas to inform, inspire, and shape decisions that impact our collective future.

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Working Paper

Service Quality in the Gig Economy: Empirical Evidence about Driving Quality at Uber

Susan Athey, Juan Camilo Castillo, Bharat Chandar
September2024

The rise of marketplaces for goods and services has led to changes in the mechanisms used to ensure high quality. We analyze this phenomenon in the Uber market, where the system of pre-screening that prevailed in the taxi industry has been…

Journal Article

Policy Learning with Adaptively Collected Data

Ruohan Zhan, Zhimei Ren, Susan Athey, Zhengyuan Zhou
Management Science August2024 Vol. 70 Issue 8

In a wide variety of applications, including healthcare, bidding in first price auctions, digital recommendations, and online education, it can be beneficial to learn a policy that assigns treatments to individuals based on their characteristics…

Working Paper

LABOR-LLM: Language-Based Occupational Representations with Large Language Models

Tianyu Du, Ayush Kanodia, Herman Brunborg, Keyon Vafa, Susan Athey
June2024

Many empirical studies of labor market questions rely on estimating relatively simple predictive models using small, carefully constructed longitudinal survey datasets based on hand-engineered features. Large Language Models (LLMs), trained on…

Working Paper

The Heterogeneous Impact of Changes in Default Gift Amounts on Fundraising

Susan Athey, Undral Byambadalai, Matias Cersosimo, Kristine Koutout, Shanjukta Nath
April2024

When choosing whether and how much to donate, potential donors often observe a set of default donation amounts known as an “ask string.” In an experiment with more than 400,000 PayPal users, we replace a relatively unused donation amount ($75) on…

Working Paper

The Value of Non-traditional Credentials in the Labor Market

Susan Athey, Emil Palikot
April2024

This study investigates the labor market value of credentials obtained from Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and shared on business networking platforms. We conducted a randomized experiment involving more than 800,000 learners, primarily from…

Journal Article

CAREER: A Foundation Model for Labor Sequence Data

Keyon Vafa, Emil Palikot, Tianyu Du, Ayush Kanodia, Susan Athey, David Blei
Transactions on Machine Learning Research January2024

Labor economists regularly analyze employment data by fitting predictive models to small, carefully constructed longitudinal survey datasets. Although machine learning methods offer promise for such problems, these survey datasets are too small…

Working Paper

Digital Interventions and Habit Formation in Educational Technology

Keshav Agrawal, Susan Athey, Ayush Kanodia, Emil Palikot
January2024

We evaluate a contest-based intervention intended to increase the usage of an educational app that helps children in India learn to read English. The evaluation included approximately 10,000 children, of whom about half were randomly selected to…

Working Paper

Impact Matters for Giving at Checkout

Susan Athey, Matias Cersosimo, Dean Karlan, Kristine Koutout, Henrike Steimer
December2023

We conducted two experiments on PayPal’s Give at Checkout feature to learn about the effect of 1) information about charity outcomes on donations, and 2) exposure to these point-of-sale microgiving requests on subsequent giving. In this “…

Journal Article

Optimal Experimental Design for Staggered Rollouts

Ruoxuan Xiong, Susan Athey, Mohsen Bayati, Guido W. Imbens
Management Science December2023

In this paper, we study the design and analysis of experiments conducted on a set of units over multiple time periods where the starting time of the treatment may vary by unit. The design problem involves selecting an initial treatment time for…

Journal Article

Low-Intensity Fires Mitigate the Risk of High-Intensity Wildfires in California’s Forests

Xiao Wu, Erik Sverdrup, Michael D. Mastrandrea, Michael W. Wara, Stefan Wager
Science Advances November2023 Vol. 9 Issue 45

The increasing frequency of severe wildfires demands a shift in landscape management to mitigate their consequences. The role of managed, low-intensity fire as a driver of beneficial fuel treatment in fire-adapted ecosystems has drawn interest in…

White Paper

Preparing for Generative AI in the 2024 Election: Recommendations and Best Practices Based on Academic Research

Ethan Bueno de Mesquita, Brandice Canes-Wrone, Andrew B. Hall, Kristian Lum, Gregory J. Martin, Yamil Ricardo Velez
Stanford Graduate School of Business and the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy November2023

The rapid development of generative AI technology is transforming the political landscape, presenting both challenges and opportunities for the 2024 US election. This document provides a research-based overview of the potential impact of…

Working Paper

What Kinds of Incentives Encourage Participation in Democracy? Evidence from a Massive Online Governance Experiment

Andrew B. Hall, Eliza R. Oak
November2023

How can we democratically govern the AI, social media, and online platforms of the future? Today, low participation is a major barrier to community governance online. We leverage a digital quasi-experiment that allows us to study the links…

Journal Article

Can Personalized Digital Counseling Improve Consumer Search for Modern Contraceptive Methods?

Susan Athey, Katy Bergstrom, Vitor Hadad, Julian C. Jamison, Berk Özler, Luca Parisotto, Julius Dohbit Sama
Science Advances October2023 Vol. 9 Issue 40

This paper analyzes a randomized controlled trial of a personalized digital counseling intervention addressing informational constraints and choice architecture, cross-randomized with discounts for long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs),…

Working Paper

Machine Learning Who to Nudge: Causal vs Predictive Targeting in a Field Experiment on Student Financial Aid Renewal

Susan Athey, Niall Keleher, Jann Spiess
October2023

In many settings, interventions may be more effective for some individuals than others, so that targeting interventions may be beneficial. We analyze the value of targeting in the context of a large-scale field experiment with over 53,000 college…

Journal Article

Federated Causal Inference in Heterogeneous Observational Data

Ruoxuan Xiong, Allison Koenecke, Michael Powell, Zhu Shen, Joshua T. Vogelstein, Susan Athey
Statistics in Medicine August2023

We are interested in estimating the effect of a treatment applied to individuals at multiple sites, where data is stored locally for each site. Due to privacy constraints, individual-level data cannot be shared across sites; the sites may also…

Journal Article

Machine-Learning-Based High-Benefit Approach versus Conventional High-Risk Approach in Blood Pressure Management

Kosuke Inoue, Susan Athey, Yusuke Tsugawa
International Journal of Epidemiology August2023 Vol. 52 Issue 4

In medicine, clinicians treat individuals under an implicit assumption that high-risk patients would benefit most from the treatment (‘high-risk approach’). However, treating individuals with the highest estimated benefit using a novel machine-…

Working Paper

The Heterogeneous Earnings Impact of Job Loss Across Workers, Establishments, and Markets

Susan Athey, Lisa K. Simon, Oskar N. Skans, Johan Vikstrom, Yaroslav Yakymovych
July2023

Using generalized random forests and rich Swedish administrative data, we show that the earnings effects of job displacement due to establishment closures are extremely heterogeneous across workers, establishments, and markets. The decile of…

Working Paper

Market Re-Design of Framework Agreements in Chile Reduces Government Procurement Spending

M. Olivares, Daniela Saban, Gabriel Weintraub, E. Lara, P. Zanocco, P. Moreno
April2023

Framework agreements (FAs) are procurement mechanisms used in private and public organizations by which a central procurement agency selects an assortment of products, typically through auctions, and then affiliated organizations can purchase…

Working Paper

On Frequentist Regret of Linear Thompson Sampling

Nima Hamidi, Mohsen Bayati
April2023

This paper studies the stochastic linear bandit problem, where a decision-maker chooses actions from possibly time-dependent sets of vectors in ℝd and receives noisy rewards. The objective is to minimize regret, the difference between the…

Stanford Closer Look

The Evolving Battlefronts of Shareholder Activism

Andrew C. Baker, David F. Larcker, Brian Tayan, Derek Zaba
Stanford Closer Look Series Corporate Governance Research Initiative March62023

In this Closer Look, we consider current trends in shareholder activism and their potential impact. We examine the introduction of universal proxies, the increase in “activism experience” among directors, and the changing strategies of activists…

Journal Article

The Design of Optimal Pay-as-Bid Procurement Mechanisms

Je-ok Choi, Daniela Saban, Gabriel Weintraub
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management March2023 Vol. 25 Issue 2

Problem definition: We consider the mechanism design problem of finding an optimal pay-as-bid mechanism in which the platform chooses an assortment of suppliers in order to balance the trade-off between two objectives: providing enough variety to…

Journal Article

Analytics Saves Lives During the COVID-19 Crisis in Chile

L.J. Basso, M. Goic, M. Olivares, D. Sauré, C. Thraves, A. Carranza, Gabriel Weintraub, J. Covarrubias, C. Escobedo, N. Jara, A. Moreno, D. Arancibia, M. Fuenzalida, J.P. Uribe, F. Zuñiga, M. Zuñiga, M. O’Ryan, E. Santelices, J.P. Torres, M. Badal, M. Bozanic, S. Cancino, E. Lara, I. Neira
INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics January2023 Vol. 53 Issue 1

Franz Edelman Award 2022, Winning Project

During the COVID-19 crisis, the Chilean Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Sciences, Technology, Knowledge and Innovation partnered with the Instituto Sistemas Complejos de Ingeniería…

Working Paper

Battling the Coronavirus Infodemic Among Social Media Users in Africa

Molly Offer-Westort, Leah R. Rosenzweig, Susan Athey
January2023

During a global pandemic, how can we best prompt social media users to demonstrate discernment in sharing information online? We ran a contextual adaptive experiment on Facebook Messenger with users in Kenya and Nigeria and tested 40 combinations…

Journal Article

Digital Public Health Interventions at Scale: The Impact of Social Media Advertising on Beliefs and Outcomes Related to COVID Vaccines

Susan Athey, Kristen Grabarz, Michael Luca, Nils Wernerfelt
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences January2023 Vol. 120 Issue 5

Public health organizations increasingly use social media advertising campaigns in pursuit of public health goals. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of about $40 million of social media advertisements that were run and experimentally tested…