Stanford University Institute for Human-Centered AI

Position Title/Short Description

Full Text of JOE Listing:

The Stanford Digital Economy Lab seeks a Postdoctoral Associate:
The position will have a priority project, led by Professor Brynjolfsson, as well as the opportunity to work with other faculty and PIs on additional topics. This position is co-supervised by Dr David Nguyen and will focus on measurement of consumer welfare using massive online choice experiments.
(https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/research/gdp-b-a-new-well-being-metric-in-the-era-of-the-digital-economy/).
The digital economy creates both challenges and opportunities for economic measurement. The key challenge associated with it is that many of the digital goods have zero price and are hence excluded from GDP and productivity measures. This project is directly measuring consumer welfare and the digital economy using massive online choice experiments. Extensions also cover improving the measurement of household production, health, and environmental factors that impact people’s lives.

This work has already had a significant policy impact and interest in the popular press. It has been covered in all major news outlets worldwide, including the New York Times, Economist, WSJ, Financial Times, BBC, Washington Post, Bloomberg, NPR, and the Guardian. It has also been cited in policy reports by the US White House, Federal Reserve, Senate, and UK Treasury. The research team has also presented this work at BEA, IMF, Bank of England, OECD, and European Commission, among other places. Furthermore, opportunities to collaborate with public and private sector partners are abundant.

In addition to the priority project, the post-doctoral associate will have the opportunity to work with other researchers at Stanford. High-level topic areas include: the effects of technology on skills and wages, mega-scale digital experimentation, platform business model economics and governance, behavioral economics, social prediction, and others. Our research projects balance rigor and relevance, aiming to produce papers for top academic journals while also informing policy and practice through other contributions.

Requirements:
Highly motivated postdoctoral researcher with extensive experience in (1) designing & running economic experiments (preferably by applying stated preference methods);
(2) good knowledge about behavioral economics;
(3) familiarity with and interest in the literature on economics of digitization, innovation, organizational economics, and/or business strategy; (4) extensive experience in data processing, data analysis, and econometrics.

Must be able to work well with academics and industry executives alike. English language skills (verbal and written) must be strong. PhD in a Management Science or Economics field with the Doctorate conferred prior to start date.