BIDS Faculty Affiliate David Holtz chairs the Technical Program Committee for the 2022 Conference on Digital Experimentation @ MIT (CoDE@MIT), which is being hosted the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy on October 20-21.
2022 Conference on Digital Experimentation @ MIT (CoDE@MIT)
Dates: October 20-21, 2022
Time: 8:00 am - 7:30 pm EDT
Location: Cambridge, MA
Registration: Early registration ends September 30. Conference registration closes on October 19.
Call for Abstracts: Paper abstracts will be accepted through September 9, and accepted authors will then be notified by September 23.
The newly emerging capability to rapidly deploy and iterate micro-level, in-vivo, randomized experiments in complex social and economic settings at population scale is, in our view, one of the most significant innovations in modern social science. As more and more social interactions, behaviors, decisions, opinions and transactions are digitized and mediated by online platforms, our ability to quickly answer nuanced causal questions about the role of social behavior in population-level outcomes such as health, voting, political mobilization, consumer demand, information sharing, product rating and opinion aggregation is becoming unprecedented. This new toolkit portends a sea-change in our scientific understanding of human behavior and dramatic improvements in social and business policy as a result. When appropriately theorized and rigorously applied, randomized experiments are the gold standard of causal inference and a cornerstone of effective policy. But the scale and complexity of these experiments also create scientific and statistical challenges for design and inference. Different disciplines are approaching causal inference in contrasting, complementary ways. The purpose of CoDE is to bring together leading researchers conducting and analyzing large scale randomized experiments in digitally mediated social and economic environments – in various scientific disciplines including economics, computer science and sociology – in order to lay the foundation for ongoing relationships and to build a lasting multidisciplinary research community.
Speaker(s)
David Holtz
David Holtz is an assistant professor in the Management of Organizations (MORS) and Entrepreneurship and Innovation groups at the Haas School of Business. He earned his PhD at the MIT Sloan School of Management, in the Information Technology (IT) group. He also holds an MA in Physics and Astronomy from Johns Hopkins University, and a BA in Physics from Princeton University.
Holtz studies the design of online marketplaces and platforms using large-scale online field experiments and novel digital trace data. His research agenda focuses on online trust and reputation system design, the business and societal impacts of personalized recommendations, and the design and analysis of field experiments in online marketplaces. His work has appeared in a number of journals and conferences, including The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science and the ACM Conference on Economics and Computation, and has been covered by popular news outlets, such as MSNBC, The Washington Post, and the Boston Globe. Before returning to academia, Holtz spent time in the Bay Area working as a data scientist and product manager at a number of technology firms, including Airbnb (where he was one of the founding members of the company’s algorithmic pricing team) and TrialPay (acquired by Visa). In carrying out his research agenda, he continues to work closely with many leading firms in the tech sector, including Airbnb, Facebook, Spotify, Microsoft, and Etsy.