Doing Good for (Maybe) Nothing: How Reward Uncertainty Shapes Observer Responses to Prosocial Behavior

Published Research

Consumers are often skeptical of social innovation (e.g., CSR), thinking that firms undertake such innovations to increase profit rather than to “do the right thing.” How can firms convey the social and monetary benefits of investing in social innovations to consumers and stakeholders to best improve their brand image?Read More

Credit Supply & Entrepreneurship in Low-Income Regions

Working Papers

We show that bank credit affects entrepreneurship, but only in low-income regions. We use a novel methodology to identify credit supply shock from regional demand shock using comprehensive data on small business loans between pairs of banks and counties in the US.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

Be an Ally: The Role of Identity in Inspiring Collective Action

Funded Research Proposal

People are frequently asked to engage in collective action—voting, protesting, signing petitions, donating—to uplift members of traditionally marginalized groups and encourage social change. Prior research suggests that minority group members who advocate for collective action are penalized for doing so, while majority group members are not. In this work, I shift focus from perceptions of people who take collective action to how effectively people are able to persuade others to engage in collective action.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

Behavioral Health Integration in Primary Care

Funded Research Proposal

We propose to study the impact of integrating behavioral health (BH) care into primary care practices (e.g., co-location of behavioral health specialists and implementation of patient care teams) on access to behavioral and mental health (MH) services, treatment, appropriate patient evaluation, avoidable hospitalizations, and quality.Read More

Mergers and Innovation: Evidence from the Pharmaceutical Industry

Funded Research Proposal

The goal for this paper is to detangle whether mergers and acquisitions occurring in the biopharmaceutical industry yield their intended effects. More specifically, how does increasing M&A activity affect different measures of innovation in the pharmaceutical industryRead More

Unmasking Sex-Trafficking Supply Chains With Deep Web Data

Funded Research Proposal

High resource constraints and the covert nature of sex trafficking provide significant barriers to developing data-driven innovations that inform law enforcement investigations and trials. We leverage massive deep web data (collected globally from leading adult services websites) in tandem with a novel machine learning framework to unmask sex-trafficking recruitment-to-sales pathways.Read More

Insider vs. Outsider Judgments of Diversity in Organizations

Funded Research Proposal

We propose that an important hurdle preventing organizations from diversifying is their ability to accurately diagnose a lack of diversity in their ranks in the first place. Specifically, we theorize that people who belong to or create groups within organizations (organizational “insiders”) perceive those groups to be more diverse than outside observers (organizational “outsiders”).Read More

Economies of Scope in Prescription Drug Development

Funded Research Proposal

The pharmaceutical industry is one of the most innovative industries in the US. An important driver of innovation in the pharmaceutical industry is research & development (R & D). How do the portfolios of drugs being developed by pharmaceuticals affect the success rates of innovation? In this project, we will quantify the extent of economies of scope in prescription drug development.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