Related papers: Consumption Stimulus with Digital Coupons
During the Great Recession, Democrats in the United States argued that government spending could be utilized to "grease the wheels" of the economy in order to create wealth and to increase employment; Republicans, on the other hand,…
Humans have developed considerable machinery used at scale to create policies and to distribute incentives, yet we are forever seeking ways in which to improve upon these, our institutions. Especially when funding is limited, it is…
Electrification is contributing to substantial growth in U.S. commercial and industrial loads, but the cost and Scope 2 carbon emission implications of this load growth are opaque for both power consumers and utilities. This work describes…
Cryptoeconomic incentives in the form of blockchain-based tokens are seen as an enabler of the sharing economy that could shift society towards greater sustainability. Nevertheless, knowledge of the impact of these tokens on human sharing…
This paper proposes a brand-new measure of energy efficiency at household level and explores how it is affected by access to credit. We calculate the energy and carbon intensity of the related sectors, which experience a substantial decline…
This paper develops a practical framework for using observational data to audit the consumer surplus effects of AI-driven decisions, specifically in targeted pricing and algorithmic lending. Traditional approaches first estimate demand…
The production of goods we buy on a daily basis accounts for a large portion of greenhouse gas emissions. Although consumers have the power to influence industries' behavior through their demand, making sustainable purchases is challenging.…
In this note, we introduce a distributed twist on the classic coupon collector problem: a set of $m$ collectors wish to each obtain a set of $n$ coupons; for this, they can each sample coupons uniformly at random, but can also meet in…
This paper investigates how the cost of public debt shapes fiscal policy and its effect on the economy. Using U.S. historical data, I show that when servicing the debt creates a fiscal burden, the government responds to spending shocks by…
We consider a context-based dynamic pricing problem of online products, which have low sales. Sales data from Alibaba, a major global online retailer, illustrate the prevalence of low-sale products. For these products, existing…
Many marketing applications, including credit card incentive programs, offer rewards to customers who exceed specific spending thresholds to encourage increased consumption. Quantifying the causal effect of these thresholds on customers is…
A central challenge in using price signals to coordinate the electricity consumption of a group of users is the operator's lack of knowledge of the users due to privacy concerns. In this paper, we develop a two-time-scale incentive…
A growing body of evidence has shown that incorporating behavioral economics principles into the design of financial incentive programs helps improve their cost-effectiveness, promote individuals' short-term engagement, and increase…
Portfolio underdiversification is one of the most costly losses accumulated over a household's life cycle. We provide new evidence on the impact of financial inclusion services on households' portfolio choice and investment efficiency using…
This paper revisits the discussion on determinants of budget balances and investigates the change in their effect in light of the COVID-19 crisis by utilizing data on 43 countries and a system generalized method of moments approach. The…
There is, among the economist ecosystem, the idea of virtuous public spending as a form of promotion of economic growth. If we think on the way GDP is measured, it is not possible to get that conclusion because it becomes circular:…
We apply classical statistical methods in conjunction with the state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to develop a hybrid interpretable model to analyse 454,897 online customers' behavior for a particular product category at the…
Budget officers often assess public project proposals based on available financial support and expected outcomes. However, behavioral factors such as time discounting and psychological hesitation may lead to underinvestment in programs with…
Individuals are often faced with temptations that can lead them astray from long-term goals. We're interested in developing interventions that steer individuals toward making good initial decisions and then maintaining those decisions over…
We study online decision making problems under resource constraints, where both reward and cost functions are drawn from distributions that may change adversarially over time. We focus on two canonical settings: $(i)$ online resource…