'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...

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...

Online sources sometimes publish information that is false or intentionally misleading. We study the role of social networks and advertising on social networks in the dissemination of false news stories about childhood vaccines. We document that anti-vaccine Facebook groups disseminate false...

We build a game-theoretic model to examine how better demand forecasting due to algorithms, machine learning and artificial intelligence affects the sustainability of collusion in an industry. We find that while better forecasting allows colluding firms to better tailor prices to demand...

This paper investigates the effectiveness of social media advertising and online video advertising using three large-scale controlled field experiments in the U.S., China and the Netherlands. The study was implemented using a technological approach that allows researchers to combine controls...

Online rating systems can lead, on occasion, to reviews that are unfair or un-representative of the true quality provided. On the one hand, receiving an unfairly low rating once, might induce someone a platform supplier to exert more effort and receive a better rating the next time. On the other...

US government investments in health information technology (IT) reflect the significant promise of digitization for improving quality and efficiency in health care. Previous studies of the impact of health IT have focused on the hospital setting, despite the fact that most care is delivered in...

There is plenty of hype around big data, but does it simply offer operational advantages, or can it provide firms with sustainable competitive advantage? To answer this question, we look at big data using a classic framework called the 'resource-based view of the firm,' which states that, for...

We develop an economic perspective on algorithmic fairness and the surrounding empirical, theoretical and policy issues. Our perspective draws from clear parallels between algorithms and issues in economics of discrimination, crime, personnel and technological innovation; as well as more subtle...

Online rating systems can lead, on occasion, to reviews that are unfair or unrepresentative of the true quality provided. On the one hand, receiving an unfairly low rating once, might induce participants to exert more effort and receive a better rating the next time. On the other hand, it might...