​ The Impact of Price on Firm Reputation​ ​​(with Michael Luca)
Accepted to Management Science

While a business’s reputation can impact its pricing, prices can also impact its reputation. To explore the impact of prices on reputation, we investigate daily data on menu prices and online ratings from a large rating and ordering platform.  We find that a price increase of 1% leads to a decrease of 3%-5% in the average rating. Consistent with this, the overall distribution of ratings for cheaper restaurants is similar to that of more expensive restaurants. Finally, these effects don’t seem to be driven by consumer retaliation against price changes, but by changes in  absolute price levels.

Smaller Slices of a Growing Pie: The Effect of Entry in Platform Markets

Entry of new firms into platforms has ambiguous effects on incumbents firms' profitability; While entry increases competitive pressure on incumbents, supply-side expansion may attract new consumers---effectively increasing total platform size and presumably benefiting all firms. Guided by a simple model, this paper explores how  firm entry affects incumbents’ outcomes in a two-sided market. Specifically, I focus on Yelp Transactions Platform, an online platform that connects consumers with local services.  I study a quasi-exogenous increase in firms on the platform and exploit geographic variation  to employ a difference-in-differences research design. I find that, on average, market expansion favors incumbents, though the average effect masks substantial heterogeneities: high-quality incumbent firms experience a positive effect, whereas low-quality firms perform unambiguously worse. Using a structural model, my analysis finds a non-monotonic relationship between market expansion and firm performance.  Lastly, I use YTP’s granular data  on consumer and incumbent behavior to explore other market outcomes and firms' strategic responses.

 Persistence and the Gender Innovation Gap:  Evidence from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (with Abhay Aneja and Gauri Subramani)

Women are underrepresented in STEM jobs despite making up over half of the college-educated workforce. This lack of representation extends to innovation, where it is well-known that women hold far fewer number of patents than men.  In this study, we provide causal evidence that one contributor to the gender ``innovation gap'' is that women are less likely to persist after an early rejection in the patent process.   To provide causal evidence of a persistence channel, we use exogenous variation in the likelihood of early-stage adverse decisions about patentability claims that arises from the random assignment of applications to patent examiners.  We find that majority-female innovator teams are less likely than majority-male teams to either appeal or amend applications that receive rejections within the patent prosecution process. Roughly 1/2 of the overall gender gap in awarded patents can be accounted for by the differential propensity of women to exit the application process after a rejection of patent claims at the first stage of the prosecution process (an outcome that is overwhelmingly common, even for applications that ultimately result in awarded patents). We also provide evidence that the gender gap in persistence is reduced when women-led applications have the backing of firms, consistent with a potential role for institutional support in mitigating gender disparities. Gender differences in persistence seem to have little to do with examiner identity.

Work in Progress

 ​​Strategic Reaction to Information Simplification: Evidence from Nutritional Choices (With Or Rizi)

Social Norms, Technology Adoption, and Team Productivity (with Laura Boudreau and Sakib Mahmood)