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The pervasive use of social media has grown to over two billion users to date, and is commonly utilized as a means to share information and shape world events. Evidence suggests that passive social media usage (i.e., viewing without taking…
A customized internet survey experiment is conducted in Japan to examine how individuals' relative income position influences preferences for income redistribution and individual perceptions regarding income tax burden. I first asked…
Before A/B testing online a new version of a recommender system, it is usual to perform some offline evaluations on historical data. We focus on evaluation methods that compute an estimator of the potential uplift in revenue that could…
This article reviews recent advances in fixed effect estimation of panel data models for long panels, where the number of time periods is relatively large. We focus on semiparametric models with unobserved individual and time effects, where…
In this paper, the influence of the social media on the opinion formation process is modeled during an election campaign. In the proposed model, peer- to-peer interactions and targeted online propaganda messages are assumed to be the…
Emotions that somebody develops based on an argument do not only depend on the argument itself - they are also influenced by a subjective evaluation of the argument's potential impact on the self. For instance, an argument to ban plastic…
We develop a difference-in-differences framework to measure the persuasive impact of informational treatments on behavior. We introduce two causal parameters, the forward and backward average persuasion rates on the treated, which refine…
Evaluative bibliometrics is concerned with comparing research units by using statistical procedures. According to Williams (2012) an empirical study should be concerned with the substantive and practical significance of the findings as well…
In a wide variety of applications, including personalization, we want to measure the difference in outcome due to an intervention and thus have to deal with counterfactual inference. The feedback from a customer in any of these situations…
Despite the increasing diffusion of the Internet technology, TV remains the principal medium of communication. People's perceptions, knowledge, beliefs and opinions about matter of facts get (in)formed through the information reported on by…
In this paper, we build a new test of rational expectations based on the marginal distributions of realizations and subjective beliefs. This test is widely applicable, including in the common situation where realizations and beliefs are…
While previous sentiment analysis research has concentrated on the interpretation of explicitly stated opinions and attitudes, this work initiates the computational study of a type of opinion implicature (i.e., opinion-oriented inference)…
We examine how causal beliefs affect an agent's choices and how feedback on those choices leads to updated causal beliefs. Building on the structural-equations framework for modeling causality, we first examine the general problem of…
We explore conclusions a person draws from observing society when he allows for the possibility that individuals' outcomes are affected by group-level discrimination. Injecting a single non-classical assumption, that the agent is…
Counterfactual explanations indicate the smallest change in input that can translate to a different outcome for a machine learning model. Counterfactuals have generated immense interest in high-stakes applications such as finance,…
We investigate how individuals form expectations about population behavior using statistical inference based on observations of their social relations. Misperceptions about others' connectedness and behavior arise from sampling bias…
We address a practical problem ubiquitous in modern marketing campaigns, in which a central agent tries to learn a policy for allocating strategic financial incentives to customers and observes only bandit feedback. In contrast to…
Much of economic theory is built on observations of aggregate, rather than individual, behavior. Here, we present novel findings on human shopping patterns at the resolution of a single purchase. Our results suggest that much of our…
Collective opinions affect civic participation, governance, and societal norms. Due to the influence of opinion dynamics, many models of their formation and evolution have been developed. A commonly used approach for the study of opinion…
Opinion formation and persuasion in argumentation are affected by three major factors: the argument itself, the source of the argument, and the properties of the audience. Understanding the role of each and the interplay between them is…