Measuring the causal effects of digital advertising remains challenging despite the availability of granular data. Unobservable factors make exposure endogenous, and advertising's effect on outcomes tends to be small. In principle, these concerns could be addressed using randomized controlled...

Yahoo! Research partnered with a nationwide retailer to study the effects of online display advertising on both online and in-store purchases. We use a randomized field experiment on 3 million Yahoo! users who are also past customers of the retailer. We find statistically significant evidence...

Keyword searches with brand names occur very commonly on search engines, which enables firms to infer not only when customers are searching for them, but also when customers are searching for their competitors. In other words, firms can generate traffic from search engine advertising by bidding...

“North” ads, or sponsored listings appearing just above the organic search results, generate the majority of clicks and revenues for search engines. In this paper, we ask whether the competing north ads exert externalities on each other: does increasing the number of rival north ads decrease...

Despite substantial efforts to help consumers search in more intuitive ways, text search remains the predominant tool for product discovery online. In this paper, we explore the effects of visual and textual cues for search refinement on consumer search and purchasing behavior. We collaborate...

Social advertising uses information about consumers' peers, including peer affiliations with a brand, product, organization, etc., to target ads and contextualize their display. This approach can increase ad efficacy for two main reasons: peers' affiliations reflect unobserved consumer...

We evaluate how traditional parties may respond to populist parties on issues that are particularly fitting for populist messages. The testing ground is the 2020 Italian referendum on the reduction of members of Parliament. We implement a large-scale field experiment, with almost one million...

We document the effectiveness of robo calls for increasing voter participation despite most published research finding little or no effect of automated calls. We establish this finding in a large field experiment in a targeted, partisan get-out-the-vote campaign. Our experimental design includes...

We present findings from a controlled field experiment that allows us to investigate the dynamic effects of retail advertising. The experimental design overcomes limitations that have hindered previous investigations of this issue. Our study uncovers dynamic advertising effects that have not...