Media

Our faces are said to be windows into the soul. But can they also reflect who we are as consumers? Can facial images predict brand preferences? To answer these questions, we analyze a unique dataset of over 100,000 single-face Twitter profile pictures linked with brand followership data for 444 brands across categories and brand personality metrics. Using advanced machine learning for automated face analysis, we demonstrate that consumers’ social media profile faces can reveal their preferences between rival brands (study 1).

Comment sections on social media extend social influence beyond offline networks, allowing  a small, vocal minority of users to reach much larger audiences. We provide causal evidence that  the views expressed in comments below social media posts shape both on-platform engagement  and off-platform attitudes and behavior, and that these effects move in opposite directions. In  collaboration with a leading racial justice organization, we conduct a large-scale field experi ment on Facebook reaching a million U.S.

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.

Social media platforms have become vital channels for businesses to reach consumers through advertising. But in the United States, the digital advertising market in which these platforms operate is dominated by a few major players, raising concerns for antitrust regulators. In such a concentrated market, the entry or exit of a single platform can reallocate billions in ad spending, affecting businesses and users.

This paper investigates the short-run effects of platform market concentration on advertising prices, leveraging the temporary outage of TikTok in the U.S. in January 2025 as a quasi-exogenous shock to advertising demand and supply on competing social media platforms. While increased advertiser demand on other platforms would raise prices, more impression opportunities from users substituting to those platforms would lower prices, creating opposing forces on ad prices.

From Netflix to Spotify to TikTok, consumers’ entertainment experiences increasingly revolve around personalized content. Does consuming personalized content in a specific entertainment domain influence the likelihood of consumers discussing that domain overall, beyond the specific content they engage with? Across eleven experiments, we investigate the impact of personalized content in the music and short-form video domains (i.e., content that feels tailored to one’s tastes) on the intent to discuss domain-related topics. We find that the impact of consuming personalized content (vs.

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.

Firms often rely on randomized experiments to estimate customer-level treatment effects for targeting policies. Standard “test-then-learn” approaches typically sample customers uniformly to optimize estimation accuracy but ignore economic objectives, leading to statistically sound yet suboptimal targeting policies. We propose a policy-aware sampling strategy—that directly incorporates the firm’s profit-maximizing objective into the selection of which customers to sample in the experiment.

In a data economy, transactions of goods and services generate data, which is stored, traded and depreciates. How are the economics of this economy different from traditional production economies? How do these differences matter for measurement of  GDP, firm values, depreciation rates, welfare and externalities? We incorporate active experimentation and data as an