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Publications
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- January–February 2025
- Article
Want Your Company to Get Better at Experimentation?: Learn Fast By Democratizing Testing
By: Iavor Bojinov, David Holtz, Ramesh Johari, Sven Schmit and Martin Tingley
For years, online experimentation has fueled the innovations of leading tech companies, enabling them to rapidly test and refine new ideas, optimize product features, personalize user experiences, and maintain a competitive edge. The widespread availability and lower... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Advice and the Bayesian Entrepreneur
By: Susan Cohen and Rembrand Koning
Bayesian entrepreneurship starts from the premise that entrepreneurs’ beliefs guide their theorizing, experimentation, and choices (Agrawal et al., n.d.). Since each entrepreneur has unique beliefs based on their own set of past experiences, cognitive ability, and... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Lessons from an App Update at Replika AI: Identity Discontinuity in Human-AI Relationships
By: Julian De Freitas, Noah Castelo, Ahmet Uğuralp and Zeliha Uğuralp
Can consumers form deep emotional bonds with AI and be vested in AI identities over time? We
leverage a natural app-update event at Replika AI, a popular US-based AI companion, to shed
light on these questions. We find that customers feel closer to their AI companion... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Bounded Solidarity: The Role of Migrants in Shaping Entrepreneurial Ventures
By: Astrid Marinoni and Prithwiraj Choudhury
We explore a previously unexamined aspect of migrants’ contributions to local entrepreneurial
ecosystems: the value created by cooperative interactions between migrants and locals in entrepreneurial
ventures. Specifically, we analyze whether mixed teams composed of... View Details
- September 2024
- Article
Investing in the Next Generation: The Long-Run Impacts of a Liquidity Shock
By: Patrick Agte, Arielle Bernhardt, Erica M. Field, Rohini Pande and Natalia Rigol
How do poor entrepreneurs trade off investments in business enterprises versus children's human capital, and how do these choices influence intergenerational socio-economic mobility? To examine this, we exploit experimental variation in household income resulting from... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
How Real Is Hypothetical?: A High-Stakes Test of the Allais Paradox
By: Uri Gneezy, Yoram Halevy, Brian Hall, Theo Offerman and Jeroen van de Ven
Researchers in behavioral and experimental economics often argue that only
incentive-compatible mechanisms can elicit effort and truthful responses from participants.
Others argue that participants make less-biased decisions when the stakes
are sufficiently high.... View Details
- 2024
- Article
Neyman Meets Causal Machine Learning: Experimental Evaluation of Individualized Treatment Rules
By: Michael Lingzhi Li and Kosuke Imai
A century ago, Neyman showed how to evaluate the efficacy of treatment using a randomized experiment under a minimal set of assumptions. This classical repeated sampling framework serves as a basis of routine experimental analyses conducted by today’s scientists across... View Details
- August 20, 2024
- Article
Sexual Assault Victims Face a Penalty for Adjacent Consent
By: Jillian J. Jordan and Roseanna Sommers
Across 11 experimental studies (n = 12,257), we show that female victims of sexual assault are blamed more and seen as less morally virtuous if their assault follows voluntary sexual intimacy, a factor we term “adjacent consent”. Moreover, we illuminate a... View Details
- Working Paper
The Returns to Skills During the Pandemic: Experimental Evidence from Uganda
By: Livia Alfonsi, Vittorio Bassi, Imran Rasul and Elena Spadini
The Covid-19 pandemic represents one of the most significant labor market shocks to the world economy in recent times. We present evidence from a field experiment to understand whether and why skilled and unskilled workers were differentially impacted by the shock, in... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Webmunk: A New Tool for Studying Online Behavior and Digital Platforms
By: Chiara Farronato, Audrey Fradkin and Chris Karr
Understanding the behavior of users online is important for researchers, policymakers, and private companies alike. But observing online behavior and conducting experiments is difficult without direct access to the user base and software of technology companies. We... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Don’t Expect Juniors to Teach Senior Professionals to Use Generative AI: Emerging Technology Risks and Novice AI Risk Mitigation Tactics
By: Katherine C. Kellogg, Hila Lifshitz-Assaf, Steven Randazzo, Ethan Mollick, Fabrizio Dell'Acqua, Edward McFowland III, François Candelon and Karim R. Lakhani
The literature on communities of practice demonstrates that a proven way for senior professionals to upskill
themselves in the use of new technologies that undermine existing expertise is to learn from junior
professionals. It notes that juniors may be better able... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Winner Take All: Exploiting Asymmetry in Factorial Designs
By: Matthew DosSantos DiSorbo, Iavor I. Bojinov and Fiammetta Menchetti
Researchers and practitioners have embraced factorial experiments to simultaneously test multiple treatments, each with different levels. With the rise of technologies like Generative AI, factorial experimentation has become even more accessible: it is easier than ever... View Details
- June 2024
- Case
Building Innovation at VINCI
By: Dennis Campbell, Aluna Wang and Carlota Moniz
This case study explores how the VINCI Group, a French multinational operating in concessions, energy, and construction, bolstered awareness and adoption rates of new technologies within the organization. Through its separate innovation hub, Leonard, VINCI aimed to... View Details
Keywords: Business Model; Business Organization; Decisions; Business Earnings; Business Strategy; Competition; Energy; Corporate Entrepreneurship; Values and Beliefs; Global Range; Global Strategy; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues; Multinational Firms and Management; Globalized Markets and Industries; Corporate Accountability; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Disruptive Innovation; Innovation and Management; Innovation Strategy; Technological Innovation; Knowledge Sharing; Organizational Culture; Technology Adoption; Innovation Leadership; Organizational Structure; Construction Industry; Energy Industry; Technology Industry; France; Europe
- May 2024
- Article
Relational Attributions for One’s Own Resilience Predict Compassion for Others
By: Rachel Ruttan, Ting Zhang, Sivahn Barli and Katherine DeCelles
Existing work on attribution theory distinguishes between external and internal attributions (i.e., “I overcame adversity due to luck” vs. “my own effort”). We introduce the construct of relational resilience attributions (i.e., “due to help from other people”) as a... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Business Experiments as Persuasion
By: Orie Shelef, Rebecca Karp and Robert Wuebker
Much of the prior work on experimentation rests upon the assumption that entrepreneurs and managers use—or should optimally adopt—a "scientific approach" to test possible decisions before making them. This paper offers an alternative view of experimental strategy,... View Details
- April 2024
- Article
Pay-As-You-Go Insurance: Experimental Evidence on Consumer Demand and Behavior
By: Raymond Kluender
Pay-as-you-go contracts reduce minimum purchase requirements which may increase market participation. We randomize the introduction and price(s) of a novel pay-as-you-go contract to the California auto insurance market where 17 percent of drivers are uninsured. The... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
An Experimental Design for Anytime-Valid Causal Inference on Multi-Armed Bandits
By: Biyonka Liang and Iavor I. Bojinov
Typically, multi-armed bandit (MAB) experiments are analyzed at the end of the study and thus require the analyst to specify a fixed sample size in advance. However, in many online learning applications, it is advantageous to continuously produce inference on the... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Design of Panel Experiments with Spatial and Temporal Interference
By: Tu Ni, Iavor Bojinov and Jinglong Zhao
One of the main practical challenges companies face when running experiments (or A/B tests) over a panel is interference, the setting where one experimental unit's treatment assignment at one time period impacts another's outcomes, possibly at the following time... View Details
Keywords: Research
- 2021
- Working Paper
Quantifying the Value of Iterative Experimentation
By: Iavor I Bojinov and Jialiang Mao
Over the past decade, most technology companies and a growing number of conventional firms have adopted online experimentation (or A/B testing) into their product development process. Initially, A/B testing was deployed as a static procedure in which an experiment was... View Details