The Digital Future Initiative is focused on advancing knowledge of global transformation to the digital economy. The initiative provides research grants to faculty members of the Columbia Business School for promising projects with implications for business. Preference will be given to collaborative research that substantially elevates the external visibility of the Digital Future Initiative and Columbia Business School. Typical proposals have been in the range of $10,000-$30,000. A call for grant proposals is e-mailed to faculty each year. Research funding is awarded through the Digital Future Initiative labs: Algorithmic Economy Lab, the Briger Family Digital Finance Lab and Humans in the Digital Economy Lab.
2022-2023 Digital Future Initiative Grant Recipients
- Andrey Simonov (CBS), George Beknazar-Yuzbashev (Columbia), Rafael Jimenez-Duran (Bocconi), and Mateusz Stalinski (University of Warwick), for “Advertising Load Discrimination on Social Media”
- Hongseok Namkoong (CBS), for “Adaptive Experimentation at Scale”
- Suresh Naidu (Columbia), Lena Song (University of Illinois), and Elliott Ash (Warwick), for “Making Public Law: Artificial Intelligence for Legal Accessibility and Judicial Legitimacy”
- Rachel Cummings (Columbia) and Tamalika Mukherjee (Columbia), for “Visual Explanations of Differential Privacy for Engineers to Improve Decision-Making in Privacy Systems”
- Sandra Matz (CBS), Heinrich Peters (CBS) and Moran Cerf (CBS), for “Using Generative AI to Develop Scalable Psychological Screening Tools”
- Hongyao Ma (CBS), Chenkai Yu (CBS), and Arpit Agarwal (Columbia), for “Who Ate the Lunch? Peer Networks for Customer Support and Fraud Detection”
- Tim Roughgarden (Columbia) and Naveen Durvasula (Berkeley), for “The Economics of Block Production”
- Thomas Bourveau (CBS), Janja Brendel (CUHK) and Jordan Schoenfeld (University of Utah), for “Decentralized Finance (DeFi) Assurance: Audit Adoption and Capital Market Effects”
- Ciamac Moallemi (CBS) and Omid Malekan (CBS), for “Blockchain Data Lab”
- Gita Johar (CBS) and Yu Ding (Stanford), for “Involving Global Citizens in Fact-Checking Efforts”
- Dante Donati (CBS) and Lena Song (University of Illinois), for “Can we Talk about Race and Racism on Social Media? Evidence from a Feed Experiment”
- Bo Cowgill (CBS) and Nataliya Langburg Wright (HBS, Columbia), for “AI, Cheap Talk, and Costly Signaling”
- Oded Netzer (CBS), Christopher Frank (American Express), and Paul Magnone (Google), for “Leading in a data-driven World Initiative”
- Dan Wang (CBS) and Stephan Meier (CBS), for “Adoption of AI and Organizational Structure: Investigating a Missing Link”