Marketplace Design

Salespeople frequently face the dynamic screening decision of whether to persist in a conversation or abandon it to pursue the next lead. Yet, little is known about how these decisions are made, whether they are efficient, or how to improve them. We study these decisions in the context of high-volume outbound sales where leads are ample, but time is scarce and failure is common.

A large portion of life as a consumer is spent mind-wandering from one off-task, spontaneous, and imaginative thought to the next. Psychology research has thoroughly documented the various characteristics of mind-wandering, showing that this default state of mind occupies much of our waking life and shapes outcomes ranging from goal pursuit and decision-making to present-moment experience. However, consumer research has largely overlooked mind-wandering as a phenomenon and mechanism that shapes consumption.

We quantify the impact of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) on firm productivity through a series of large-scale randomized field experiments involving millions of users and products at a leading cross-border online retail platform. Over six months in 2023-2024, GenAI-based enhancements were integrated into seven consumer-facing business workflows. We find that GenAI adoption significantly increases sales, with treatment effects ranging from 0% to 16.3%, depending on GenAI’s marginal contribution relative to existing firm practices.

Personalization has become the heartbeat of modern marketing. The rapid expansion of individual-level data, the proliferation of personalized communication channels, and advancements in experimentation have fundamentally reshaped how firms tailor their marketing strategies. Furthermore, causal inference and machine learning enable companies to understand how the same marketing action can impact the choices of individual customers differently. This article provides an academic overview of these developments.

Experiments in online platforms frequently suffer from network interference, in which a treatment applied to a given unit affects outcomes for other units connected via the platform. This SUTVA violation biases naive approaches to experiment design and estimation.

How has Wikipedia activity changed for articles with content similar to ChatGPT following its introduction? We estimate the impact using differences-in-differences models, with dissimilar Wikipedia articles as a baseline for comparison, to examine how changes in voluntary knowledge contributions and information-seeking behavior differ by article content. Our analysis reveals that newly created, popular articles whose content overlaps with ChatGPT 3.5 saw a greater decline in editing and viewership after the November 2022 launch of ChatGPT than dissimilar articles did.

One of the most crucial aspects and significant levers that gaming companies possess in designing digital games is setting the level of difficulty, which essentially regulates the user’s ability to progress within the game. This aspect is particularly significant in free-to-play (F2P) games, where the paid version often aims to enhance the player’s experience and to facilitate faster progression.

Wash trading refers to the practice of buying and selling securities without taking a net position, for the purpose of artificially inflating recorded volume. It is prohibited by law in the United States, but evidence suggests that it is widespread on some exchanges, especially those involving cryptocurrencies where trader identities can be shielded. The reliable detection of wash trading is challenging because it can be implemented using a variety of different approaches, some of which resemble authentic and lawful strategies such as automated market making.