Platforms refer to intermediaries that facilitate economic interaction between two sets of agents wherein the decisions of one set of agents is likely to have an effect on the other via direct and/or indirect externalities. Given their nature, platforms need to find the appropriate balance...

We exploit China's heating policy to investigate how non-labor income affects marriage. From the mid-1950s, the policy gave substantial subsidies to urban residents north of the Huai River. Applying geographic regression discontinuity, we find that, with the policy, urban men in the north...

The prevalence and widespread usage of email has given businesses a direct and cost effective way of providing consumers with targeted discount offers. While these discounts are expected to increase the demand for the promoted products, are they effective in increasing revenues? Do they have...

In collaboration with three companies selling a diverse set of products, we conducted randomized field experiments in which experimentally tailored email ads were sent to millions of individuals. We found consistently that personalizing the emails by adding consumer-specific information (e.g.,...

Peer referrals are a common strategy for addressing asymmetric information in contexts such as the labor market. They could be especially valuable for increasing testing and treatment of infectious diseases, where peers may have advantages over health workers in both identifying new patients and...