Working Papers

We provide the first systematic empirical evidence on factors that successfully mobilized one of the world’s first non-violent mass movements in favor of democratic self-government, using novel data from an unlikely venue for such collective…

We construct a measure of consumption-equivalent welfare for Black and White Americans. Our statistic incorporates life expectancy, consumption, leisure, and inequality. Based on this incomplete list of factors, welfare for Black Americans was 43…

Tractable contextual bandit algorithms often rely on the realizability assumption — i.e., that the true expected reward model belongs to a known class, such as linear functions. We investigate issues that arise in the absence of realizability and…

Are ordinary citizens or political party leaders better positioned to select candidates?  While the direct vote primary system in the United States lets citizens choose, it is exceptional, as the vast majority of democracies rely instead on…

Alongside the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, an “infodemic” of myths and hoax cures is spreading over online media outlets and social media platforms. Building on the literature on combating fake news, we evaluate experimental interventions…

Comparison Lift is an experimentation-as-a-service (EaaS) application for testing online advertising audiences and creatives at JD.com. Unlike many other EaaS tools that focus primarily on fixed sample A/B testing, Comparison …

In the urgent setting of the COVID-19 pandemic, treatment hypotheses abound, each of which requires careful evaluation. A randomized controlled trial generally provides the strongest possible evaluation of a treatment, but the efficiency and…

Problem definition: We study how online platforms can leverage the behavioral considerations of their users to improve their assortment decisions. Motivated by our collaboration with a dating company, we study how a platform…

In many areas, practitioners seek to use observational data to learn a treatment assignment policy that satisfies application-specific constraints, such as budget, fairness, simplicity, or other functional form constraints. For example, policies…

For an incompatible patient-donor pair, kidney exchanges often forbid receipt-before-donation (the patient receives a kidney before the donor donates) and donation-before-receipt, causing a double-coincidence-of-wants problem. Our proposed…

An increasingly popular trend is for consumers to get paid more often, resulting in more frequent, yet smaller paychecks. However, surprisingly little is known about whether and how payment frequency impacts consumer behavior. The current work…

As households reduce discretionary spending in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, concerns are high that a resulting fall in aggregate demand can lead to a lasting recession post-COVID-19. Consequently, policies aimed at stimulating consumer…

When debt is priced fairly, governments face a trade-off between insuring bondholders and taxpayers. If the government decides to fully insure bondholders by manufacturing risk-free debt, then it cannot insure taxpayers against permanent macro-…

In severe viral pneumonia, including Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), the viral replication phase is often followed by hyperinflammation (‘cytokine storm syndrome’), which can lead to acute respiratory distress syndrome, multi-organ failure,…

This note presents a preliminary approach to the design of an across-the-curve credit spread index (AXI). The index is a measure of the recent average cost of wholesale unsecured debt funding for publicly listed U.S. bank holding companies and…

We introduce a new class of methods for finite-sample false discovery rate (FDR) control in multiple testing problems with dependent test statistics where the dependence is fully or partially known. Our approach separately calibrates a data-…

What leads people to feel negatively about members of other social groups? While recent work has mostly focused on the strength of group identity, we propose that perceptions of intergroup difference, and the animus they catalyze, are often…

We study the joint determination of product quality and complexity in a rational setting. We introduce a novel notion of complexity, which affects how costly it is for an agent to acquire information about product quality. In our model, an agent…

We compare the revenue of the optimal third-degree price discrimination policy against a uniform pricing policy. A uniform pricing policy offers the same price to all segments of the market. Our main result establishes that for a broad class of…

There has been an increase in interest in experimental evaluations to estimate causal effects, partly because their internal validity tends to be high. At the same time, as part of the big data revolution, large, detailed, and representative,…