We use a theory of apologies to design a nationwide field experiment involving 1.5 million Uber ridesharing consumers who experienced late rides. Several insights emerge from our field experiment. First, apologies are not a panacea: the efficacy of an apology and whether it may backfire depend...

Platform marketplaces can potentially steer buyers to certain sellers by recommending or guaranteeing those sellers. Money-back guarantees--which create a direct financial stake for the platform in seller performance--might be particularly effective at steering, as they align buyer and platform...

New technologies have enabled firms to elicit granular behavioral data from consumers in exchange for lower prices and better experiences. This data can mitigate asymmetric information and moral hazard, but it may also increase firms' market power if kept proprietary. We study a voluntary...

Using Visa debit and credit card transactions in the U.S. from 2016 to 2019, we document the importance of customers in accounting for sales variation across merchants, across stores within retail chains, and over time for individual merchants and stores. Customers, as opposed to transactions...

We study the staggered introduction of a generative AI-based conversational assistant using data from 5,179 customer support agents. Access to the tool increases productivity, as measured by issues resolved per hour, by 14 percent on average, with the greatest impact on novice and low-skilled...

In this paper, we compare subjective principal assessments of teachers to the traditional determinants of teacher compensation ¡V education and experience ¡V and another potential compensation mechanism -- value-added measures of teacher effectiveness based on student achievement gains. We...

The use of government-mandated report cards to diminish uncertainty about the quality of products and services is widespread. However, report cards will have little effect if they simply confirm consumers' prior beliefs. Moreover, documented "responses" to report cards may reflect learning about...

Conventional outcomes report cards-- public disclosure of information about the patient-background-adjusted health outcomes of individual hospitals and physicians -- may help improve quality, but they may also encourage providers to "game" the system by avoiding sick and/or seeking healthy...

Three types of firms -- nonprofit, for-profit, and government -- own U.S. hospitals, yet we do not know whether ownership results in the specialization of medical service provision. This study of over 30 medical services in urban, general hospitals (1988-2000) shows that ownership types...