Charities often send annual “thank you letters” to express gratitude to donors, but seek to defray these costs by inviting additional donations or engagement. However, the additional asks may backfire if potential donors see the thank you message as “insincere” or “manipulative.” We...

A critical element of word of mouth (WOM) or buzz marketing is to identify seeds, often central actors with high degree in the social network. Seed identification typically requires data on the full network structure, which is often unavailable. We therefore examine the impact of WOM seeding...

The Hodrick-Prescott (HP) filter is one of the most widely used econometric methods in applied macroeconomic research. The technique is nonparametric and seeks to decompose a time series into a trend and a cyclical component unaided by economic theory or prior trend specification. Like all...

Marketers routinely use timing as a segmentation device through sequential product releases. While there has been much theoretical research on the optimal introduction strategy of sequential releases, there is little empirical research on this problem. This paper develops an econometric model to...

Since the 1972 U.S. Clean Water Act, government and industry have invested over $1 trillion to abate water pollution, or $100 per person-year. Over half of U.S. stream and river miles, however, still violate pollution standards. We use the most comprehensive set of files ever compiled on water...

We study market entry decisions when firms have private information about their profitability. We generalize current models by allowing general forms of market competition and heterogeneous firms that self-select when entering the market. Post-entry profits depend on market structure, and on the...

In order to induce farmers to adopt a productive new agricultural technology, we apply simple and complex contagion diffusion models on rich social network data from 200 villages in Malawi to identify seed farmers to target and train on the new technology. A randomized controlled trial compares...

We consider the problem of constructing honest confidence intervals (CIs) for a scalar parameter of interest, such as the regression discontinuity parameter, in nonparametric regression based on kernel or local polynomial estimators. To ensure that our CIs are honest, we derive novel critical...

In vertical markets, eliminating double marginalization with a two-part tariff may not be possible due to downstream firms' risk aversion. When demand is uncertain, contracts with large fixed fees expose the downstream rm to more risk than contracts that are more reliant on variable fees. In...

We propose a model for word of mouth (WoM) management where a firm has two tools at hand: referral rewards and offering a free contract. Current customers' incentives to engage in WoM can affect the contracting problem of a firm in the presence of positive externalities of users. Formally, we...