Publications

Most users of educational technology disengage within weeks of joining, and whether temporary incentives can durably change engagement remains unclear. We study contest-based gamification in a randomized controlled trial with 10,000 students on…

What explains wealth and portfolio differences between black and white Americans? We find that disparities in economic factors explain portfolios well, but only partly explain the wealth gap. In a dynamic setting, economic factors often change…

Does media influence operate primarily on low-information swing voters, or can it also affect party activists who shape intraparty ideological factions? We examine Fox News’ role in the rise of the Tea Party movement within the Republican Party,…

Agentic AI systems capable of autonomous planning and extended environmental interaction pose a fundamental control problem: how can humans maintain meaningful oversight of systems that may exceed their own capabilities? Existing approaches to…

Unravelling the complex dynamics of past symbolic behaviour is challenging using traditional archaeological approaches alone. Drawing on the cognitive sciences, we here present novel computational measures of the portable art of Mesolithic South…

This paper measures concentration in narrowly defined product markets for a broad range of consumer goods and services in the United States from 1994 to 2019. We document two main empirical facts. First, concentration levels are high. Of the…

Using a mandatory, purpose-designed Census Bureau survey of approximately 28,500 establishments, we provide new evidence on industrial AI adoption in US manufacturing. Despite widespread digitization, only 22.8 percent of plants report any AI use…

Third-party litigation finance is an increasingly popular practice in commercial litigation. Despite calls for mandated disclosure, litigation funders are mostly anonymous to defendants, judges and juries. We first present an equilibrium model of…

From early human groups, to classical republics, to modern open-source software communities, many societies scale cooperative economic activity through hierarchies of trust: a public, coarse, and slowly evolving rank order that regulates who is…

Despite their potential to advance financial inclusion and improve business outcomes, digital payment solutions have low adoption rates among retail merchants in developing economies. Prior interventions have tackled pre-purchase frictions such…

Personality Computing is a field at the intersection of Personality Psychology and Computer Science. Started in 2005, research in the field utilizes computational methods to understand and predict human personality traits. The expansion of the…

Much digital ink has been spilled recently (and no doubt will continue to be) on how Artificial Intelligence (AI) will reshape management and organizational processes. Some argue that AI will ultimately make managers obsolete. Others predict the…

Digital biomarkers (DBMs) are a new class of health indicators derived from digital technologies — including smartphones, wearable devices and ambient sensors — that enable continuous, real-time monitoring of signals in everyday settings. By…

A persistent puzzle throughout the cognitive and social sciences is how people manage to learn social conventions from the sparse and noisy behavioral data of diverse actors, without explicit instruction. Here, we show that the dominant theories…

What job should I take to maximize my impact potential, that is my potential to generate positive social impact? Which deal will maximize the impact return of my investment dollars? Which nonprofit will make the most of my donation? Can a well-…

In this Closer Look, we provide a detailed examination of the labor market for directorships among the senior executives of publicly traded U.S. companies with a focus on non-CEO-level executives. We find that directorships held by…

Bankruptcy insures consumers against large and unexpected wealth shocks. However, debtors may abuse this insurance. Indeed, close to 20% of consumer bankruptcy filings contain at least one material misstatement. I exploit the conditionally random…

Motivated by recent concerns surrounding the use of third-party pricing algorithms by competing firms, we study repeated Bertrand competition where market demand or the cost of serving the market is observed by an intermediary (or “algorithm”)…