Digital Interventions & Services

Digital technology is transforming the way we drive social impact, making solutions more accessible, scalable, and efficient. From connecting underserved communities to essential resources through digital applications to leveraging data analytics for better decision-making, digital technology empowers organizations to broaden their reach and impact.

Our lab specializes in designing, developing, deploying, and scaling digital products and services in partnership with organizations across a variety of industries, catering to their goals and needs of their users to achieve outsized impact. We also define outcome metrics, measure heterogeneity in impact, and provide targeted recommendations to drive continuous improvement in those digital products and services.

Project Abstracts

Read about some of the research projects the lab is working on.

Academic Publications

Publication Search
Journal Article

Presidential Address: The Economist as Designer in the Innovation Process for Socially Impactful Digital Products

Susan Athey
American Economic Review April2025
Working Paper

Service Quality on Online Platforms: Empirical Evidence about Driving Quality at Uber

Susan Athey, Juan Camilo Castillo, Bharat Chandar
October2024
Working Paper

Estimating Wage Disparities Using Foundation Models

Keyon Vafa, Susan Athey, David Blei
September2024
Working Paper

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

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

The Value of Non-traditional Credentials in the Labor Market

Susan Athey, Emil Palikot
April2024
See More Digital Interventions & Services Publications

Interviews & Thought Leadership

Learn firsthand from researchers and practitioners associated with the lab.

Designing and evaluating digital interventions for social impact

Susan Athey talks about several recent implementations of digital technology to social impact applications, including childhood literacy, programs to enable career transitions and demonstrate skills, and digital assistants that help workers and service providers be more effective.

Stones2Milestones: Educational Technology for Impact

Stones2Milestones (S2M) is an Indian EdTech firm that has helped over one million Indian children improve their English reading skills. They have demonstrated the effectiveness of personalization of content selection in driving engagement with a digital reading app and the impact of gamification on forming long-term learning habits.

What Really is 'Adaptive Learning’?

The answer may vary based on which platform you currently have in mind. The edtech industry is bursting with platforms that attempt to tailor lessons and materials to individual students.