We conducted a field experiment that randomized advertisements, advertisement content, and prices across 2,204 counties in the United States to study the impacts on online purchases of naloxone, an opioid overdose reversal drug. Advertising increased website users but only impacted purchases...

A growing body of empirical work shows that social recognition of individuals' behavior can meaningfully influence individuals' choices. This paper studies whether social recognition is a socially efficient lever for influencing individuals' choices. Because social recognition generates utility...

We study the long-run evolution of brand preferences, using new data on consumers' life histories and purchases of consumer packaged goods. Variation in where consumers have lived in the past allows us to isolate the causal effect of past experiences on current purchases, holding constant...

We consider identification of nonparametric random utility models of multinomial choice using "micro data," i.e., observation of the characteristics and choices of individual consumers. Our model of preferences nests random coefficients discrete choice models widely used in practice with...

'Notice and Choice' has been a mainstay of policies designed to safeguard consumer privacy. This paper investigates distortions in consumer behavior when faced with notice and choice which may limit the ability of consumers to safeguard their privacy using field experiment data from the MIT...

We study the effect of price salience on whether a product is purchased and, conditional on purchase, the quality purchased. Consistent with our theoretical predictions, we find that making the full purchase price salient to consumers reduces both the quality and quantity of goods purchased. The...

We report the results of a field experiment where we exogenously vary the use of social comparisons "nudges" and subsidies for participation in an in-home energy audit program, and follow subjects through to the subsequent purchase of durable goods. We therefore can compare the causal effect of...

Firms and governments often use moral suasion and economic incentives to influence intrinsic and extrinsic motivations for various economic activities. To investigate the persistence of such interventions, we randomly assigned households to moral suasion and dynamic pricing that stimulate energy...

We argue that reputation mechanisms used by platform markets suffer from two problems. First, buyers may draw conclusions about the quality of the platform from single transactions, causing a reputational externality across sellers. Second, for a variety of reasons we discuss, reputations will...