Bitcoin falls dramatically short of the scale provided by banks for payments. Its ledger grow by the addition of blocks of ∼ 2000 transaction every 10 minutes. Intuitively, one would expect that increasing the block capacity would solve this scaling problem. However, we show that increasing...

We investigate the economic impact of images and lower-level image factors that influence property demand in Airbnb. Using Difference-in-Difference analyses on a 16-month Airbnb panel dataset spanning 7,711 properties, we find that units with verified photos (taken by Airbnb's photographers)...

Machine Learning algorithms are becoming widely deployed in real world decision-making. Ensuring fairness in algorithmic decision-making is a crucial policy issue. Current legislation ensures fairness by barring algorithm designers from using demographic information in their decision-making. As...

Accurate forecasting of sales/consumption is particularly important for marketing because this information can be used to adjust marketing budget allocations and overall marketing strategies. Recently, online social platforms have produced an unparalleled amount of data on consumer behavior....

We study the effect of Airbnb’s smart-pricing algorithm on the racial disparity in the daily revenue earned by Airbnb hosts. Our empirical strategy exploits Airbnb’s introduction of the algorithm and its voluntary adoption by hosts as a quasi-natural experiment. Among those who adopted the...

We propose a dynamic structural model that illuminates the economic mechanisms shaping individual behavior and outcomes on crowdsourced ideation platforms. We estimate the model using a rich data set obtained from IdeaStorm.com, a crowdsourced ideation initiative affiliated with Dell. We find...

A rich literature has demonstrated facial attractiveness related discrimination (beauty bias ) in a wide range of contexts, such as personal marketing, election voting and employment. Under a controlled lab setting, most of these studies have found that attractiveness is rewarded. However, these...