Publications

We present the task of predicting individual well-being, as measured by a life satisfaction scale, through the language people use on social media. Well-being, which encompasses much more than emotion and mood, is linked with good mental and…

We present the results of a large field experiment on setting reserve prices in auctions for online advertisements, guided by the theory of optimal auction design suitably adapted to the sponsored search setting. Consistent with the theory,…

The failure of financial regulation can, and did, cause significant harm to the economy. I argue that confusion about the nature of the problems in the financial system and about the trade-offs associated with key regulations has prevented…

This Research Spotlight provides a summary of the academic literature on how shareholder voting on executive compensation plans influences executive pay. It reviews the evidence of:

• The impact of “vote no” campaigns
• The…

This paper presents a theory of the market for activism where citizens fund activists, campaigning activists pressure firms to change their practices, and firms self-regulate to forestall or mitigate campaigns. Activists have leverage because…

Early identification of individuals at risk for chronic diseases is of significant clinical value. Early detection provides the opportunity to slow the pace of a condition, and thus help individuals to improve or maintain their quality of…

We study trading behavior and the properties of prices in informationally complex markets. Our model is based on the single-period version of the linear-normal framework of Kyle (1985). We allow for essentially arbitrary correlations among the…

In knowledge-based economies, many businesses enterprises defy traditional industry boundaries. In this study, we evaluate six “big data” approaches to peer firm identifications and show that some, but not all, “wisdom-of-crowd” techniques…

When do voters win? We derive conditions under which a democracy will produce policies that favor the voter over special interests in a setting where politicians can be influenced by contributions from special interests, and are also motivated by…

Psychological certainty plays a key role in shaping people’s thoughts, judgments, attitudes, and behaviors. This article provides an overview of recent work on attitude certainty, which has been the subject of considerable attention in…

No abstract available.

The development of predictive models in healthcare settings has been growing; one such area is the prediction of patient arrivals to the Emergency Department (ED). The general premise behind these works is that such models may be used to help…

Can social–psychological theory provide insight into the extreme racial disparities in school disciplinary action in the United States? Disciplinary problems carry enormous consequences for the quality of students’ experience in…

This chapter explores three issues in prostitution markets and their implications for prostitution law: bargaining, coercion, and entry. The discussion is organized around three different views on violence: prostitution as a product of…

In the Workshop on Computational Personality Recognition (Shared Task), we released two datasets, varying in size and genre, annotated with gold standard personality labels. This allowed participants to evaluate features and learning techniques,…

Court-mandated downsizing of the CA prison system has led to a redistribution of detainees from prisons to CA county jails, and subsequent jail overcrowding. Using data that is representative of the LA County jail system, we build a mathematical…

Temporal orientation refers to individual differences in the relative emphasis one places on the past, present, or future, and it is related to academic, financial, and health outcomes. We propose and evaluate a method for automatically measuring…

Two heterogeneous agents exert effort over time to complete a project and collectively decide its scope. A larger scope requires greater cumulative effort and delivers higher benefits upon completion. To study the scope under collective choice,…

We present a laboratory experiment to study the formation of dynamic coalitions in a bargaining setting where the current status quo policy is determined by the policy implemented in the previous period. Our main experimental treatment is the…