As much as forty percent of social media users have been harassed online, but there is scarce causal evidence of how toxic content impacts user engagement and whether it is contagious. In a pre-registered field experiment, we recruited participants to install a browser extension, and randomly...

Advertisers are demanding more accurate estimates of the impact of advertisements. The gold standard for evaluating the advertising effectiveness is to run randomized experience. However, due to costs and other issues, few advertisers use randomized experiments. Instead, advertiser use...

We analyze 432 online display ad field experiments on the Google Display Network. The experiments feature 431 advertisers from varied industries, which on average include 4 million users. Causal estimates from 2.2 billion observations help overcome the medium's measurement challenges to inform...

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 study the extent to which advertisers benefit from data that are shared across applications. These types of data are viewed as highly valuable for digital advertisers today. Meanwhile, product changes and privacy regulation threaten the ability of advertisers to use such data. We focus on one...

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...

In this paper, we study two features of digital video ads on content-streaming platforms: length and skippability. Working with vdo.ai, we conduct a field experiment and randomly assign users to the Skippable/Long and Non-Skippable/Short versions of the same ad. We find that compared to the...

This paper introduces the online behavioral store as a tool for conducting research through e-commerce platforms. Online behavioral stores offer many possible benefits, including enhancing experimental realism, measuring actual behavior, and creating a consequential choice environment. Stores do...

Consumers’ purchase decisions can be influenced by others’ opinions, i.e., word-of-mouth (WOM), and/or others’ actions, i.e., observational learning. While information technologies are creating increasing opportunities for firms to facilitate/manage these two types of social interaction,...

This research studies a psychosocial cost associated with positive word of mouth (WOM): positive WOM can decrease the uniqueness of one’s possessions, which hurts high-uniqueness individuals (pilot study 1). As a result, high- (vs. low-) uniqueness individuals are less willing to generate...