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

The Effects of Content Ephemerality on Information Processing

Working Papers

Most digital communication platforms store content and allow users to see it multiple times. Despite the benefits that recording content holds for both users and companies, many applications delete it after it was seen by the receiver (i.e., ephemeral communication channels). Read More

Clicks Bias in Editorial Decisions: How Does Popularity Shape Online News Coverage?

Published Research

Identifying whether newspaper editors focus on what is newsworthy or what is trendy when choosing stories is important for the design of media regulation. This column shows how the popularity of an article, reflected by online clicks, influences the coverage of the story.Read More

Optimal Taxation of Intermediate Goods in a Partially Automated Society

Working Papers

A recent rapid-automation movement has been displacing routine labor and has sparked a series of discussions about taxation on automation such as a robot tax. However, the government’s dilemma is that the planner may want to tax such physical capital that displaces routine labor for redistributive motives but does not want to tax other physical capital that increases such workers’ productivities.Read More

Commuting and Innovation: Are Closer Inventors More Productive?

Published Research

Commuting is costly for employees, but is it costly for employers in terms of lost productivity? We study the causal effects of commuting distance on inventor productivity. Specifically, we estimate how inventor productivity changes when their employer relocates.Read More

Experimentation and Appropriability in Early-Stage Ventures: Evidence from the U.S. Software Industry

Working Papers

This study examines the tension between learning and appropriability in the experimentation process of early-stage ventures. I build a stylized model to argue that, when formal intellectual property is weak, the learning benefit of experimentation may be offset by its imitation risk. Read More

Who Benefits from Having a Partner? Intrinsic Motivation, Partnership Decisions, and the Chance of Becoming a Profitable Firm

Working Papers

Entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial firms are often the drivers of innovation, and success for entrepreneurial firms often means development and introduction of innovative products and services. This project examines the role that having a partner plays in early-stage entrepreneurial firm performance.Read More

Does Unlimited Vacation Benefit Firms? An Examination of How and When

Working Papers

This paper addresses the recent trend of offering unlimited vacation to employees. While potentially useful for acquiring human capital benefits, unlimited vacation is a risky perk for firms due to the possibility of abuse.Read More

Does Immediate Feedback Make You Not Try as Hard? A Study on Automotive Telematics

Published Research

Mobile and Internet-of-things (IoT) devices increasingly enable tracking of user behavior, and they often provide real-time or immediate feedback to consumers in an effort to improve their conduct. Growing adoption of such technologies leads to an important question: “Does immediate feedback provided to users improve their behavior?”Read More