Blockchain technology allows a network of individuals, institutions or devices to coordinate economic activity on a global scale ('internet-level consensus') without assigning the same degree of control to the intermediary operating and facilitating transactions in the marketplace. This allows...

'Notice and Choice' has been the reference framework for how firms elicit data from consumers. This paper investigates distortions in consumer behavior which may limit the ability of consumers to safeguard their privacy using data from a field experiment at MIT. There are three findings. First,...

This paper presents some of the first evidence on the effect of the spread of coronavirus (COVID-19) in the US on retail footfall traffic. The paper uses granular visit data from cell-phone tracking to estimate the shift in visits to different types of restaurants as coronavirus spread in the...

'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...

The use of testimonials from existing customers has always been an important technique in traditional marketing communications. However, it is not clear whether attempts by firms to promote customer testimonials in social media will be equally effective. First, often the reach of a firm on...

Customers with more education may get better service after complaining, because they are better placed to advocate for themselves. It is unclear how digitization of the consumer complaint process will change this situation. To investigate this, we analyze 364,189 customer complaints to the city...

In October 2014, all 4,494 undergraduates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were given access to Bitcoin, a decentralized digital currency. As a unique feature of the experiment, students who would generally adopt first were placed in a situation where many of their peers received...