I am an Economic Researcher at Microsoft Research in our New York City research lab, alongside distinguished social science researchers such as Duncan Watts and David Pennock. I came to Microsoft following a two year stint with Yahoo! Research in Silicon Valley. I completed my Ph.D. in economics in 2010 at UC San Diego under the capable guidance of Jim Andreoni.
Disclaimer The views expressed herein represent my own and not those of the Microsoft Corporation, however, Jennifer Chayes has committed to agree with at least 47%. An informative snapshot of the Microsoft org charg can be seen here.
Contact Information
Justin M. Rao
Microsoft Research
justin.rao@microsoft.com
Areas of Research
Behavioral Economics, Business Economics, Economics of Digitization, Communication, Information and Inference, Digital Advertising, Personnel Economics, Medium Data
Working Papers and Paper Under Review
On the Near Impossibility of Measuring the Returns to Advertising joint with Randall Lewis. New version 4/23/13. (somewhat dated) slides available here (very dated) video available under Talk Videos.
Importing Preferences: Asymmeteric Mispercpetion of Risk by Experienced Agents Posted 4/11/13. joint with Matt Goldman.
How Pressure Impacts Performance and Can Confound Preference Inference joint with Matt Goldman.
The Economics of Faith: Using an Apocalyptic Prophecy to Elicit Religious Beliefs in the Field : joint with Ned Augenblick, Jesse Cunha and Ernesto Dal Bo.
NBER Working Paper 18641 Slides available here
Avoiding the Ask: A Field Experiment on Altruism, Empathy and Charitable Giving: joint with James Andreoni and Hannah Trachtman.
NBER Working Paper 17648 Video available under Talk Videos. Tick-tock Shot Clock: Optimal Stopping in the NBA. New version coming soon. Joint with Matt Goldman) This paper has gone under heavy revision including the addition of a very talented co-author and a new dataset. Experts' Perceptions
of Autocorrelation: The Hot Hand Fallacy Among Professional Basketball
Players Forthcoming Papers Measuring the Effects of Advertising: The Digital Frontier
joint with Randall Lewis and David Reiley. Forthcoming in the NBER's The Economics of Digitization Comments welcome, final version not yet set.
Slides available here Published Papers The Economics of Spam (with David Reiley). Journal of Economic Perspectives Volume 26, No. 3, Summer 2012. The Good News-Bad News
Effect: Asymmetric Processing of Objective Information about Yourself (local copy)
(joint with David Eil AEJ Microeconomics July 2011 The Power of Asking: How Communication Affects Selfishness, Empathy and Altruism
(joint with James Andreoni Journal of Public EconomicsJune 2011 (local copy)
Here, There and Everywhere: Correlated Online Behaviors Can Lead to Overestimates of the Effects of Advertising (local copy) (joint with Randall Lewis and David Reiley). Proceedings of World Wide Web Conference 2011 Research Papers
The Impact of Spam Exposure on User Behavior (joint with Anirban Dasgupta, Kunal Punera and Xuanhui Wang) Proceedings of USENIX Security Conference 2012
Using Gaze Patterns to Measure and Detect Distraction-induced Struggles While Reading (local copy) (joint with Vidhya Navalpakkam and Malcolm Slaney) Proceedings of SIGCHI Conference 2011 Extended Abstracts
Sports Oriented Publications
Effort vs. Concentration: The Asymmetric Impact of Pressure on NBA Performance (joint with Matt Goldman ) Proceedings of MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference 2012 Video available under Talk Videos
Press Coverage Wall Street Journal (Weekend Edition 3/17/2012), Business Week, ESPN.com, ESPN The Magazine (Paper awared "ESPN Fan Choice" for best paper in the conference), Co-hosted ESPN "NBA Today" PodcastAllocative and Dynamic Efficiency in NBA Decision Making (local copy) (joint with Matt Goldman) Proceedings of MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference 2011 This is a shortened version of ``Tick-tock Shot Clock".
Press Coverage: Wall Street Journal , ESPN>.com, Slate