I am a fourth-year Economics PhD student at Columbia University in New York. My research interests primarily lie in industrial organization and applied microeconomic theory, with a particular focus on topics relevant to digital economics.

Before my PhD I was a software engineer. Most of the engineering work I did was focused around distributed data processing, backend web development, and product experimentation. I wrote and still maintain several open-source software libraries focused on enabling product experimentation.

Publications

• The Perils of Exploration under Competition: A Computational Modeling Approach (w/ Kevin Liu, Alex Slivkins, Steven Wu)
  • Proceedings of the 20th ACM conference on Economics and Computation (EC'19)
  • arXiv     publisher DOI     talk
  • Short Abstract: Many online platforms learn from interactions with users, and explore: make potentially suboptimal choices for the sake of acquiring new information. We study the interplay between exploration and competition for users. We run extensive numerical experiments in a stylized duopoly model, asking whether/when competition incentivizes better algorithms for exploration.

Working Papers

• The Economic Consequences of Data Privacy Regulation: Empirical Evidence from GDPR (w/ Yeon-Koo Che, William Nelson, Tobias Salz)
  • Paper      SSRN
  • Short Abstract: We empirically study the effects of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) on the ability of firms to collect consumer data, identify consumers over time, accrue revenue via online advertising, and predict their behavior.
• Recommenders' Originals: Integrated Recommender Systems and Vertical Foreclosure (w/ Duarte Goncalves)
  • Paper
  • Short Abstract: We study a model of strategic interaction between producers and a monopolist platform that employs a recommendation system. We characterize the consumer welfare implications of the platform’s entry into the production market and ask whether/when such entry is welfare decreasing.

Other

• Training Data Poisoning in Imperfect Information Games (w/ Jisha Jacob, Natania Wolansky, Iddo Drori)
  • Presented at 2019 New York Academy of Sciences Annual Machine Learning Symposium
  • Poster

At Columbia University, I was a teaching assistant for:

• "Data TA" - help seminar and honors thesis students with programming and econometrics (Spring 2018, Spring 2020)
• Introduction to Econometrics for Simon Lee (Spring 2019)
• Economic Growth and Development for Xavier Sala-i-martin (Fall 2017)

Open Source Software

• Front-end Product Experimentation Tools around PlanOut
• Blog Post
• PlanOut.js - A JavaScript port of Facebook's PlanOut Experimentation Framework
• react-experiments - React components for implementing UI experiments
• Scientist4J - A port of Github's refactoring tool in Java (~6000 downloads/month)

Industry Projects

• Previous companies / products I worked on:
• Nutonian
• HubSpot Workflows
• Co-founded businesses:
• RequestNow
• Press: Boston Globe

• g.aridor_at_columbia.edu
• Department of Economics, 420 West 118th St., New York, NY 10027