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Online social networks such as Facebook disclose an unprecedented volume of personal information amplifying the occasions for social comparisons. We test the hypothesis that the use of social networking sites (SNS) increases people's…
In search engines, online marketplaces and other human-computer interfaces large collectives of individuals sequentially interact with numerous alternatives of varying quality. In these contexts, trial and error (exploration) is crucial for…
We study the consequences of job markets' heavy reliance on referrals. Referrals lead to more opportunities for workers to be hired, which lead to better matches and increased productivity, but also disadvantage job-seekers with few or no…
To choose between two discrete goods, a consumer pays attention to only those with prices below a threshold. From these, she chooses her most preferred good. We assume consumers in a population have the same preference but may have…
Signalling social status through the consumption of visible goods has often been perceived as a way in which individuals seek to emulate or move up compared to others within the community. Using representative migration survey data from the…
I study labor markets in which firms hire via referrals. I develop an employment model showing that--despite initial equality in ability, employment, wages, and network structure--minorities receive fewer jobs through referral and lower…
A broad range of on-line behaviors are mediated by interfaces in which people make choices among sets of options. A rich and growing line of work in the behavioral sciences indicate that human choices follow not only from the utility of…
We investigate whether preferences for objects received via a matching mechanism are influenced by how highly agents rank them in their reported rank order list. We hypothesize that all else equal, agents receive greater utility for the…
We study the market selection hypothesis in complete financial markets, populated by heterogeneous agents. We allow for a rich structure of heterogeneity: individuals may differ in their beliefs concerning the economy, information and…
Congestion is a common failure mode of markets, where consumers compete inefficiently on the same subset of goods (e.g., chasing the same small set of properties on a vacation rental platform). The typical economic story is that prices…
Strong empirical evidence from laboratory experiments, and more recently from population surveys, shows that individuals, when evaluating their situations, pay attention to whether they experience gains or losses, with losses weighing more…
Recommendation systems (RSs) are increasingly used to guide job seekers on online platforms, yet the algorithms currently deployed are typically optimized for predictive objectives such as clicks, applications, or hires, rather than job…
We develop a model of social media in which users produce different types of content and choose whom to follow. Even when abstracting from algorithmic bias, linking costs shape networks and polarization. In the welfare-maximizing…
Individuals often navigate several options with incomplete knowledge of their own preferences. Information provisioning tools such as public rankings and personalized recommendations have become central to helping individuals make choices,…
We present a recommender system based on the Random Utility Model. Online shoppers are modeled as rational decision makers with limited information, and the recommendation task is formulated as the problem of optimally enriching the…
As a firm varies the price of a product, consumers exhibit reference effects, making purchase decisions based not only on the prevailing price but also the product's price history. We consider the problem of learning such behavioral…
As the scale of machine learning models increases, trends such as scaling laws anticipate consistent downstream improvements in predictive accuracy. However, these trends take the perspective of a single model-provider in isolation, while…
It is commonly believed that patterns of social ties affect individuals' economic status. Here, we translate this concept into an operational definition at the network level, which allows us to infer the economic wellbeing of individuals…
The structure of a society depends, to some extent, on the incentives of the individuals they are composed of. We study a stylized model of this interplay, that suggests that the more individuals aim at climbing the social hierarchy, the…
In social network markets, the act of consumer choice in these industries is governed not just by the set of incentives described by conventional consumer demand theory, but by the choices of others in which an individual's payoff is an…