Browsing by Author "Luca, Michael"

Now showing items 1-20 of 21

    • Big Data and Big Cities: The Promises and Limitations of Improved Measures of Urban Life 

      Glaeser, Edward Ludwig; Kominers, Scott Duke; Luca, Michael; Naik, Nikhil (2018-01-01)
      New, “big” data sources allow measurement of city characteristics and outcome variables higher frequencies and finer geographic scales than ever before. However, big data will not solve large urban social science questions ...

    • Complex Disclosure 

      Jin, Ginger Zhe; Luca, Michael; Martin, Daniel (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), 2022-05)
      We present evidence that unnecessarily complex disclosure can result from strategic incentives to shroud information. In our laboratory experiment, senders are required to report their private information truthfully but ...

    • Crowdsourcing City Government: Using Tournaments to Improve Inspection Accuracy 

      Glaeser, Edward Ludwig; Hillis, Andrew Blair; Kominers, Scott Duke; Luca, Michael (American Economic Association, 2016)
      The proliferation of big data makes it possible to better target city services like hygiene inspections, but city governments rarely have the in-house talent needed for developing prediction algorithms. Cities could hire ...

    • Curbing adult student attrition: Evidence from a field experiment 

      Chande, Raj; Luca, Michael; Sanders, Michael; Soon, Xian‐Zhi; Borcan, Oana; Linos, Elizabeth; Linos, Elizabeth; Kirkman, Elspeth; Robinson, Sean (2015-04-06)
      Roughly 20% of adults in the OECD lack basic numeracy and literacy skills. In the UK, many colleges offer fully government subsidized adult education programs to improve these skills. Constructing a unique dataset consisting ...

    • Designing Online Marketplaces: Trust and Reputation Mechanisms 

      Luca, Michael (2017-01-23)
      Online marketplaces have proliferated over the past decade, creating new markets where none existed. By reducing transaction costs, online marketplaces facilitate transactions that otherwise would not have occurred and ...

    • The Effect of Price on Firm Reputation 

      Luca, Michael; Reshef, Oren (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), 2021-07)
      Although a business’s reputation can affect its pricing, prices can also affect its reputation. To explore the effect of prices on reputation, we investigate daily data on menu prices and online ratings from a large rating ...

    • Effectiveness of Paid Search Advertising: Experimental Evidence 

      Dai, Weijia (Daisy); Luca, Michael (2017-01-23)
      Paid search has become an increasingly common form of advertising, comprising about half of all online advertising expenditures. To shed light on the effectiveness of paid search, we design and analyze a large-scale field ...

    • Evolution of land distribution in West Bengal 1967–2004: Role of land reform and demographic changes 

      Bardhan, Pranab; Luca, Michael; Mookherjee, Dilip; Pino, Francisco (Elsevier BV, 2014)
      This paper studies how land reform and population growth affect land inequality and landlessness, focusing particularly on indirect effects owing to their influence on household divisions and land market transactions. ...

    • Fake It Till You Make It: Reputation, Competition, and Yelp Review Fraud 

      Luca, Michael; Zervas, Georgios (INFORMS, 2015-09-29)
      Consumer reviews are now part of everyday decision making. Yet, the credibility of these reviews is fundamentally undermined when businesses commit review fraud, creating fake reviews for themselves or their competitors. ...

    • Handgun waiting periods reduce gun deaths 

      Luca, Michael; Malhotra, Deepak; Poliquin, Christopher William (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2017)
      Handgun waiting periods are laws that impose a delay between the initiation of a purchase and final acquisition of a firearm. We show that waiting periods, which create a “cooling off” period among buyers, significantly ...

    • The Impact of Mass Shootings on Gun Policy 

      Luca, Michael; Malhotra, Deepak; Poliquin, Christopher (Elsevier BV, 2020-01)
      There have been dozens of high-profile mass shootings in recent decades. This paper presents three main findings about the impact of mass shootings on gun policy. First, mass shootings evoke large policy responses. A single ...

    • Is No News (Perceived as) Bad News? An Experimental Investigation of Information Disclosure 

      Jin, Ginger; Luca, Michael; Martin, Daniel (2015-04-14)
      A central prediction of information economics is that market forces can lead businesses to voluntarily provide information about the quality of their products, yet little voluntary disclosure is observed in the field. In ...

    • Product Quality and Entering Through Tying: Experimental Evidence 

      Kim, Hyunjin; Luca, Michael (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), 2019-02)
      Dominant platform businesses often develop products in adjacent markets to complement their core business. One common approach used to gain traction in these adjacent markets has been to pursue a tying strategy. For example, ...

    • Productivity and Selection of Human Capital with Machine Learning 

      Chalfin, Aaron; Danieli, Oren; Hillis, Andrew Blair; Jelveh, Zubin; Luca, Michael; Ludwig, Jens; Mullainathan, Sendhil (2016)
      Economists have become increasingly interested in studying the nature of production functions in social policy applications, with the goal of improving productivity. Traditionally models have assumed workers are homogenous ...

    • Racial Discrimination in the Sharing Economy: Evidence from a Field Experiment 

      Edelman, Benjamin Gordon; Luca, Michael; Svirsky, Daniel Alejandro (American Economic Association, 2017)
      In an experiment on Airbnb, we find that applications from guests with distinctively African-American names are 16% less likely to be accepted relative to identical guests with distinctively White names. Discrimination ...

    • Salience in Quality Disclosure: Evidence from the U.S. News College Rankings 

      Luca, Michael; Smith, Jonathan (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013)
      How do rankings affect demand? This paper investigates the impact of college rankings, and the visibility of those rankings, on students' application decisions. Using natural experiments from U.S. News and World Report ...

    • Strategic Disclosure: The Case of Business School Rankings 

      Luca, Michael; Smith, Jonathan (2014-01-13)
      We empirically analyze disclosure decisions made by 240 MBA programs about which rankings to display on their websites. We present three main findings. First, consistent with theories of countersignaling, top schools are ...

    • Strategies to Grow Network Goods 

      Tang, Tina Y. (2015-09-16)
      A network good is a product or service which becomes inherently more valuable as its adoption increases. The mechanism driving this value varies by context: for example, a software ecosystem produces more software as the ...

    • Survival of the Fittest: The Impact of the Minimum Wage on Firm Exit 

      Luca, Dara Lee; Luca, Michael (2017-06-28)
      We study the impact of the minimum wage on firm exit in the restaurant industry, exploiting recent changes in the minimum wage at the city level. The evidence suggests that higher minimum wages increase overall exit rates ...

    • What Makes a Critic Tick? Connected Authors and the Determinants of Book Reviews 

      Dobrescu, Loretti I.; Luca, Michael; Motta, Alberto (Elsevier, 2013)
      This paper investigates the determinants of expert reviews in the book industry. Reviews are determined not only by the quality of the product, but also by the incentives of the media outlet providing the review. For ...