Papers by david rothschild
All three articles in my dissertation gather information from individuals, analyze it, and aggreg... more All three articles in my dissertation gather information from individuals, analyze it, and aggregate that information into forecasts of upcoming events. The motivation is to make forecasts more efficient (accurate and timely), more versatile (provide the most useful information for each stakeholder), and more economically efficient (equally or more efficient and versatile for less time and/or money). The first article looks at prediction markets and polls and concludes that prediction market-based forecasts are more efficient. The two methods, polling versus prediction markets, vary in four key ways: sample selection (a random sample of representative group versus a self-selected group), question type (intention versus expectation), aggregation method (average versus weighted by money, a proxy for confidence), and incentive (not incentive compatible versus incentive compatible). The second article isolates the second aspect of that list by comparing the efficiency of forecasts created by polling the respondents on their expectations versus intentions. Expectation-based forecasts are more efficient, even using non-random samples for the expectation. Asking the expectation question to one respondent is the equivalent of asking several respondents the intention question. Further, the expectation question helps adjust the sample to be more representative of the target group. The third article tests a new interactive web-based interface that captures both "best estimate" point-estimates and probability distributions from non-experts. In contrast to standard methods of directly asking respondents to state their confidence, using my method, which induces the respondents to reveal confidence, there is a sizable and statically significant positive relationship between confidence and the accuracy of individual-level expectations. This positive correlation between confidence and accuracy can be utilized to create confidence-weighted aggregated forecasts that are more efficient than the standard "consensus forecasts." Degree Type Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Graduate Group
Companion of the The Web Conference 2018 on The Web Conference 2018 - WWW '18
Although consumer behavior in response to search engine marketing has been studied extensively, f... more Although consumer behavior in response to search engine marketing has been studied extensively, few efforts have been made to understand how consumers search and respond to ads post purchase. Advertising to existing customers the same way as to prospective customers inevitably leads to wasteful and inefficient marketing. Employing a unique dataset that combines both search query and purchase data, we examine consumers' searching behavior and response to search engine marketing after purchase. We study large advertising campaigns for two popular technology products. We find that over half of the branded keyword searches come from consumers who already purchased the products, and that advertising response varies based on whether searchers are pre-or postpurchase. In general, post-purchase searchers are less likely to click on focal brand ads (i.e., they are less responsive to ads for products they already own). However, post-purchase searchers are still responsive to advertising and much more likely to click on ads for complementary products (i.e., they are more responsive to ads for relevant products other than the focal product).
Political Analysis
A potential voter must incur a number of costs in order to successfully cast an in-person ballot,... more A potential voter must incur a number of costs in order to successfully cast an in-person ballot, including the costs associated with identifying and traveling to a polling place. In order to investigate how these costs affect voter turnout, we introduce two quasi-experimental designs that can be used to study how the political participation of registered voters is affected by differences in the relative distance that registrants must travel to their assigned Election Day polling place and whether their polling place remains at the same location as in a previous election. Our designs make comparisons of registrants who live on the same residential block, but are assigned to vote at different polling places. We find that living farther from a polling place and being assigned to a new polling place reduce in-person Election Day voting, but that registrants largely offset for this by casting more early in-person and mail ballots.
Replication data for: Economic Expectations, Voting, and Economic Decisions around Elections
Survey respondents who associate themselves with the "winning team" in an election, sub... more Survey respondents who associate themselves with the "winning team" in an election, substantially increase their expectations for their stock market, but only modestly increase their expected household economic well-being. The impact of the election outcome on the "losing team" is comparatively muted. Yet, the dramatic shifts in survey responses from "winning team" respondents do not manifest themselves in their actual behavior as revealed by their online search behavior, in contrast to members of the "losing team," whose decline in durable goods purchases correlate with their stated economic expectations. Combining novel survey data and search, this study provides a uniquely meaningful comparison of stated attitudes with actual behaviors.
npj Digital Medicine, 2021
Encouraging people to vaccinate is a challenging endeavor, but one which has tremendous public he... more Encouraging people to vaccinate is a challenging endeavor, but one which has tremendous public health benefits. Doing so requires overcoming barriers of awareness, availability, and (sometimes) vaccine hesitancy. Here we focus on nudging people to vaccinate through online advertising. We conducted a pre-registered online ads campaign encouraging people to vaccinate against three diseases: influenza, human papillomavirus, and herpes zoster. Ads were shown to ~69,000 people and were compared to similar ads shown to 8.6 million people. Outcome measures were clicks on ads and future searches for relevant terms. We find that ads have two main effects: First, a congruence effect whereby ads increase the likelihood of clicks and future searches by up to 116% in people who express an interest in the disease or the vaccine. Most commercial vaccine advertising is aimed entirely at this population. Second, we observed a priming effect, where ads shown to people who were searching for terms unr...
ArXiv, 2020
Although it is understudied relative to other social media platforms, YouTube is arguably the lar... more Although it is understudied relative to other social media platforms, YouTube is arguably the largest and most engaging online media consumption platform in the world. Recently, YouTube's outsize influence has sparked concerns that its recommendation algorithm systematically directs users to radical right-wing content. Here we investigate these concerns with large scale longitudinal data of individuals' browsing behavior spanning January 2016 through December 2019. Consistent with previous work, we find that political news content accounts for a relatively small fraction (11%) of consumption on YouTube, and is dominated by mainstream and largely centrist sources. However, we also find evidence for a small but growing "echo chamber" of far-right content consumption. Users in this community show higher engagement and greater "stickiness" than users who consume any other category of content. Moreover, YouTube accounts for an increasing fraction of these user...
Data from Twitter have been employed in prior research to study the impact of events. Historicall... more Data from Twitter have been employed in prior research to study the impact of events. Historically, researchers have relied on keyword-based samples of tweets to create a panel of Twitter users that mention event-related keywords during and/or after an event. There are limitations to the keyword-based panel approach. First, the technique suffers from selection bias since users who discuss an event are already more likely to discuss event-related topics beforehand; it is unclear whether observed impacts are merely driven by a set of users who are intrinsically more interested in events. Second, there are no viable groups for comparison to a keyword-based sample of tweeters. We propose an alternative sampling approach to studying response to events on Twitter that addresses the aforementioned two issues. We construct panels of users defined by their geolocation. These panels are exogenous to the keywords in users’ tweets, resulting in less selection bias than the keyword-based panel m...
Public Opinion Quarterly, 2021
Surveys are a vital tool for understanding public opinion and knowledge, but they can also yield ... more Surveys are a vital tool for understanding public opinion and knowledge, but they can also yield biased estimates of behavior. Here we explore a popular and important behavior that is frequently measured in public opinion surveys: news consumption. Previous studies have shown that television news consumption is consistently overreported in surveys relative to passively collected behavioral data. We validate these earlier findings, showing that they continue to hold despite large shifts in news consumption habits over time, while also adding some new nuance regarding question wording. We extend these findings to survey reports of online and social media news consumption, with respect to both levels and trends. Third, we demonstrate the usefulness of passively collected data for measuring a quantity such as “consuming news” for which different researchers might reasonably choose different definitions. Finally, recognizing that passively collected data suffers from its own limitations,...
American Political Science Review, 2020
Beliefs about the incidence of voter fraud inform how people view the trade-off between electoral... more Beliefs about the incidence of voter fraud inform how people view the trade-off between electoral integrity and voter accessibility. To better inform such beliefs about the rate of double voting, we develop and apply a method to estimate how many people voted twice in the 2012 presidential election. We estimate that about one in 4,000 voters cast two ballots, although an audit suggests that the true rate may be lower due to small errors in electronic vote records. We corroborate our estimates and extend our analysis using data from a subset of states that share social security numbers, making it easier to quantify who may have voted twice. For this subset of states, we find that one suggested strategy to reduce double voting—removing the registration with an earlier registration date when two share the same name and birthdate—could impede approximately 300 legitimate votes for each double vote prevented.
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2019
Fake news," broadly defined as false or misleading information masquerading as legitimate news, i... more Fake news," broadly defined as false or misleading information masquerading as legitimate news, is frequently asserted to be pervasive online with serious consequences for democracy. Using a unique multimode dataset that comprises a nationally representative sample of mobile, desktop, and television consumption, we refute this conventional wisdom on three levels. First, news consumption of any sort is heavily outweighed by other forms of media consumption, comprising at most 14.2% of Americans' daily media diets. Second, to the extent that Americans do consume news, it is overwhelmingly from television, which accounts for roughly five times as much as news consumption as online. Third, fake news comprises only 0.15% of Americans' daily media diet. Our results suggest that the origins of public misinformedness and polarization are more likely to lie in the content of ordinary news or the avoidance of news altogether as they are in overt fakery.
SAGE Open, 2019
In the aftermath of the 2016 election, many Democrats reported significant increases in stress, d... more In the aftermath of the 2016 election, many Democrats reported significant increases in stress, depression, and anxiety. Were these increases real, or the product of expressive reporting? Using a unique data set of searches by more than 1 million Bing users before and after the election, we examine the changes in mental-health-related searches among Democrats and Republicans. We then compare these changes to shifts in searches among Spanish-speaking Latinos in the United States. We find that while Democrats may report greater increases in post-election mental distress, their mental health search behavior did not change after the election. On the other hand, Spanish-speaking Latinos had clear, significant, and sustained increases in searches for “depression,” “anxiety,” “therapy,” and antidepressant medications. This suggests that for many Democrats, expressing mental distress after the election was a form of partisan cheerleading.
Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 2016
Cross-sectional surveys conducted during the 2012 U.S. presidential campaign showed large swings ... more Cross-sectional surveys conducted during the 2012 U.S. presidential campaign showed large swings in support for the Democratic and Republican candidates, especially before and after the first presidential debate. Using a unique (in terms of scale, frequency, and source) panel survey, we find that daily sample composition varied more in response to campaign events than did vote intentions. Multi-level regression and post-stratification (MRP) is used to correct for selection bias. Demographic post-stratification, similar to that used in most academic and media polls, is inadequate, but the addition of attitudinal variables (party identification, ideological self-placement, and past vote) appear to make selection ignorable in our data. We conclude that vote swings in 2012 were mostly sample artifacts and that real swings were quite small. While this account is at variance with most contemporaneous analyses, it better corresponds with our understanding of partisan polarization in modern American politics.
The Journal of Prediction Markets, 2013
Markets are a strong instrument for aggregating dispersed information, yet there are flaws. Marke... more Markets are a strong instrument for aggregating dispersed information, yet there are flaws. Markets are too complex for some users, they fail to capture massive amounts of their users’ relevant information, and they suffer from some individual-level biases. Based on recent research in polling environments, we design a new market interface that captures both a participant’s point estimate and confidence. The new interface lowers the barrier to entry, asks market’s implicit question more directly, and helps reduce known biases. We further utilize a novel market rule that supplements the interface with its simplicity. Thus, we find that market participants using our new interface: provide meaningful information and are more likely to submit profitable orders than using a standard market interface.
Group Decision and Negotiation, 2017
Conditional decision markets concurrently predict the future and decide on it. These markets pric... more Conditional decision markets concurrently predict the future and decide on it. These markets price the impact of decisions, conditional on them being executed. After the markets close, a principal decides which decisions are executed based on the prices in the markets. As some decisions are not executed, the respective outcome cannot be observed, and the markets predicting the impact of non-executed decisions are void. This allows ex-post costless manipulation of such markets. We conduct two versions of an online experiment to explore scenarios in which a principal runs conditional decision markets to inform her choice among a set of a risky alternatives. We find that the level of manipulation depends on the simplicity of the market setting. When a trader is alone, has the power to move prices far enough, and the decision is deterministically tied to market prices or a very high correlation between prices and decision is implied, only then manipulation occurs. As soon as another trader is present to add risk to manipulation, manipulation is eliminated. Our results contrast theoretical work on conditional decision markets in two ways: First, our results suggest Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (
Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, 2012
In this article I test a new graphical, interactive interface that captures both "best estimate" ... more In this article I test a new graphical, interactive interface that captures both "best estimate" point-estimates and probability distributions from nonexperts. As in the previous literature, respondents are overconfident. My innovation is to show that in contrast to the standard method of directly asking respondents to state their confidence, using my method, which induces the respondents to reveal confidence, there is a sizable and statically significant positive relationship between the respondents' confidence and the accuracy of their individual-level expectations. This positive correlation between confidence and accuracy can be utilized to create confidence-weighted aggregated forecasts that are more accurate than the standard "consensus forecasts". The payment of financial incentives does not affect these findings.
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Papers by david rothschild