Measuring Strategic Behavior by Gig Economy Workers: Multihoming and Repositioning

Funded Research Proposal

Using a structural model, we show that workers are highly heterogenous in their preferences for both multihoming and repositioning. We provide counterfactual estimates on the effects of proposed firm and regulatory policies aimed at multihoming and repositioning.Read More

Welfare Effects of Common Ownership by Venture Capital Firms

Funded Research Proposal

This project aims to estimate the welfare effects of this strategy in the biotechnology industry, using a structural model of the investment decisions of VCs during the drug development process and the product market for the successful drugs.Read More

Field Experiments to Measure the Impact of Solar Lights at the Bottom of the Pyramid

Funded Research Proposal

Providing access to cleaner and cheaper lighting solutions is necessary to lift people out of poverty. The magnitude of the economic, health, and educational impacts created by these lighting solutions as we move up the energy ladder, however, is not clear.Read More

Implications of Revenue Models and Technology for Content Moderation Strategies

Working Papers

This paper develops a theoretical model to study the economic incentives for a social media platform to moderate user-generated content. We show that a self-interested platform can use content moderation as an effective marketing tool to expand its installed user base, to increase the utility of its users, and to achieve its positioning as a moderate or extreme content platform.Read More

Emission Targets as a Way for Tacit Coordination

Funded Research Proposal

The goal of the project is to identify cheap talk and faithful signaling in environmental reports issued by the U.S. largest firms and understand the determinants and consequences of cheap talk about firms’ climate responsibility.Read More

The Peril of Pay Variability: Determinants of Worker Aversion to Variable Compensation in Lower-Wage Jobs

Working Papers

Uber. Upwork. TaskRabbit. The world of work is transforming and my research agenda attempts to identify and explain 1) how work is changing and 2) how these changes affect workers, especially those who are marginalized or vulnerable.Read More

Towards a Causal Theory and Test of Network Effects: Structural Holes, Alliance-Network Externalities, and Organizational Innovation

Working Papers

We investigate whether the effect of network position on innovation is causal or spurious. Although empirical evidence demonstrates that certain structural positions in alliance networks (e.g. structural holes) affect firm innovation, it is hard to disentangle the factors allowing a firm to put itself in a certain position from the innovation outcomes that stem from being in that position.Read More

Social Media, Entrepreneurship and Institutional Environment

Funded Research Proposal

Entrepreneurial strategies to cope with dynamic environments are becoming increasingly important globally with the heightened technological and institutional disruptions in the recent and coming years. These dynamic environments are usually characterized by high velocity, complexity, ambiguity and unpredictability, creating additional challenges for entrepreneurs to find and realize opportunitiesRead More

Deep Causal Inequalities: Demand Estimation in Differentiated Products Markets

Funded Research Proposal

Supervised machine learning algorithms fail to perform well in the presence of endogeneity in the explanatory variables. In this paper, we borrow from literature on partial identification to propose deep causal inequalities that overcomes this issue.Read More

The Paradox of Destigmatization

Funded Research Proposal

This project examines destigmatization, or “the process by which low-status groups gain recognition and worth.” Destigmatization of identity is a central goal of egalitarian social movements. Yet destigmatization represents a paradox because while destigmatization benefits identity groups as a whole and creates opportunities for many individual members, organizations perceived as belonging that identity group may suffer.Read More

A Machine Learning Approach To Likeable, and Memorable Brand Slogans

Funded Research Proposal

We propose to develop and validate a model that uses automatically extracted, high-dimensional sentence embeddings to predict the likeability and memorability of new and existing slogans.Read More

Understanding the Network of Websites: How Can We Improve Digital Privacy?

Funded Research Proposal

The first study aims to investigate the online data network, in which personal information flows between websites, in order to analyze which privacy policy interventions would be most effective. The second study focuses on individual household’s internet browsing behavior and analyzes vulnerability of different socioeconomic groups to privacy violating data collection activities.Read More

Using Blockchain to Insure Against Climate Risk

Funded Research Proposal

Climate change will increase extreme weather events such as floods, droughts, and storms. In addition to tragic direct consequences that include deaths and physical damage to homes and businesses, climate change threatens to suppress business investments and slow economic growth by increasing the risk associated with capital investment.Read More

The Positive Effects of Sharing Innovation Successes and Failures

Funded Research Proposal

We postulate that interventions to increase sharing of failures can boost learning, increase the likelihood of creating a learning culture, and increase trust and reciprocal information sharing among teams and consumers. Further we examine the positive effects of sharing failures on interpersonal and in-group/out-group interaction at different stages of relationship (e.g., initial formation and stable relationship) and the effects on repeated interaction (e.g., a future relationship).Read More

How Do Job Candidates’ Salary Expectations Affect Firms’ Hiring Evaluations?

Funded Research Proposal

Firms often ask workers to indicate their salary expectations when they are applying for jobs. But, we currently have a limited understanding on how these salary expectations affect firms’ evaluation of the candidate: do firms evaluate candidates with low or high salary expectations more favorably? The goal of this research is to enrich our understanding of the labor market by elucidating the relationship between workers’ salary expectations and hiring evaluations.Read More

How Do Various Ways of Collecting Feedback Affect Consumers’ Evaluations?

Funded Research Proposal

Companies use a variety of methods to collect consumer feedback: some ask for an overall rating only, while others also ask for ratings of specific attributes (e.g., cleanliness), and some include several pages of questions. Across two projects, we find that the way companies collect feedback affects consumer’s evaluations.Read More

The Welfare Value of Online Review Aggregators: Internet, Search Frictions and the Restaurant Industry in France

Funded Research Proposal

The main aim of this project is to understand how online aggregators such as TripAdvisor or Yelp have impacted competition in the restaurant market, and whether and how much they have benefited consumers.Read More

Privately Owned Battery Storage: Re-Shaping the Utility Business Case

Working Papers

How can rooftop solar owners capture economic value from investing in battery technologies? Storage adds at least three strategic options for homeowners that previously could only directly consume solar generation and sell any excess instantaneously, thus they traditionally relied on feed-in tariffs or other subsidies.Read More

Social Media and Content Regulation

Funded Research Proposal

A significant challenge that online social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter face today is acting as the custodians of the Internet while at the same time being the center of self-expression and user-generated content.Read More