Guy Aridor


About Me

I am an Assistant Professor of Marketing at Northwestern Kellogg School of Management. I am mainly interested in understanding competition and regulatory issues in the digital economy as well as more broadly the societal impacts of digital technologies. My research uses tools from empirical industrial organization, experimental methodologies, and applied microeconomic theory in order to shed light on these questions. I am also affiliated with the CESifo Research Network.

Previously, I got my PhD in Economics at Columbia University and a B.A. in computer science, pure/applied mathematics, and economics from Boston University. Before my PhD I spent a couple of years as a software engineer at HubSpot where I worked on a bunch of fun stuff, including product experimentation tools and scaling products.

EC Tutorial: Lena Song and I will be presenting a tutorial at EC 2025 on the economics of social media. Please go here for additional information and slides on the tutorial.

Links: CV, Google Scholar, Github
Working Papers
  1. The Informational Role of Online Recommendations: Evidence from a Field Experiment on MovieLens. Joint work with Duarte Goncalves, Ruoyan Kong, Daniel Kluver, Joseph Konstan.
    • Revision Requested, Marketing Science
    • Full Paper: PDF, arXiv, CESifo, Last Updated: December 2024
Journal Publications
  1. Recommenders' Originals: The Welfare Effects of the Dual Role of Platforms as Producers and Recommender Systems. Joint work with Duarte Goncalves.
  2. The Effect of Privacy Regulation on the Data Industry: Empirical Evidence from GDPR. Joint work with Yeon-Koo Che, Tobias Salz.
  3. The Economics of Social Media. Joint work with Rafael Jimenez-Duran, Ro'ee Levy, Lena Song.
  4. Information-Constrained Coordination of Economic Behavior. Joint work with Rava Azeredo da Silveira, Michael Woodford.
    • Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control (2025, Special Issue)
    • Full paper: Publisher Version
  5. Competing Bandits: The Perils of Exploration under Competition. Joint work with Yishay Mansour, Alex Slivkins, Steven Wu.
  6. Measuring Substitution Patterns in the Attention Economy: An Experimental Approach.
    • RAND Journal of Economics (Forthcoming)
    • Full paper: PDF
  7. Evaluating the Impact of Privacy Regulation on E-Commerce Firms: Evidence from Apple's App Tracking Transparency. Joint work with Yeon-Koo Che, Brett Hollenbeck, Maximilian Kaiser, Daniel McCarthy.
    • Management Science (Accepted)
    • Full Paper: PDF, SSRN, CESifo, Last Updated: April 2025
Peer-Reviewed Conference Proceedings If noted as extended abstract, then see above for publication status of the extended journal version.
  1. The Perils of Exploration Under Competition: A Computational Modeling Approach. Joint work with Kevin Liu, Alex Slivkins, Steven Wu.
    • Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC '19)
    • Extended Abstract: Publisher Version
  2. Deconstructing the Filter Bubble: User Decision-Making and Recommender Systems. Joint work with Duarte Goncalves, Shan Sikdar.
    • Proceedings of the 14th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys '20)
    • Full Paper: Publisher Version
  3. The Effect of Privacy Regulation on the Data Industry: Empirical Evidence from GDPR. Joint work with Yeon-Koo Che, Tobias Salz.
    • Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC '21)
    • Extended Abstract: Publisher Version
  4. Drivers of Digital Attention: Evidence from a Social Media Experiment.
    • Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC '23)
    • Extended Abstract: Publisher Version
  5. The Economics of Recommender Systems: Evidence from a Field Experiment on MovieLens. Joint work with Duarte Goncalves, Ruoyan Kong, Daniel Kluver, Joseph Konstan.
    • Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC '23)
    • Extended Abstract: Publisher Version
  6. The MovieLens Beliefs Dataset: Collecting Pre-Choice Data for Online Recommender Systems. Joint work with Duarte Goncalves, Ruoyan Kong, Daniel Kluver, Joseph Konstan.
    • Best Short Paper at RecSys '24, Invited to Special Issue of ACM Transactions on Recommender Systems (declined)
    • Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys '24)
    • Full Paper: Publisher Version
Work in Progress
  1. Does Transparency Matter in Opaque Product Markets? Insights from Privacy. Joint work with Sam Goldberg.
  2. (Dis)engagement with Politics: Evidence from Smartphone Content in the 2024 Elections. Joint work with Rafael Jimenez-Duran, Ro'ee Levy, Lena Song.
  3. Dynamic Assortment Optimization via Optimal Experimental Design. Joint work with Aurelien Bibaut, Nathan Kallus.
Book Chapters
  1. Experiments on Social Media. Joint work with Rafael Jimenez-Duran, Ro'ee Levy, Lena Song.
    • Full paper: PDF, SSRN
    • Prepared for Handbook of Experimental Methods in the Social Sciences
Software
Press, Blogs, and Other Mentions
Miscellaneous