November 2025 – Working Paper 34488
Anxiety about falling behind can drive people to embrace emerging technologies with uncertain consequences. We study how social forces shape demand for AI-based learning tools early in the education pipeline. In incentivized experiments with parentskey gatekeepers for childrens AI adoptionwe elicit…
June 2025 – Working Paper 33920
Social desirability bias (SDB) is a pervasive threat to the validity of survey and experimental data. Respondents might often misreport sensitive attitudes and behaviors to appear more socially acceptable. We begin by synthesizing empirical evidence on the prevalence and magnitude of SDB across…
June 2025 – Working Paper 33920
Market definition is essential for antitrust analysis, but challenging in settings with network effects, where substitution patterns depend on changes in network size. To address this challenge, we conduct an incentivized experiment to measure substitution patterns for TikTok, a popular social media…
April 2025 – Working Paper 33642
Firms can increase the demand for their products and consolidate their market power not only by increasing user utility but also by decreasing non-user utility. In this paper, we examine this mechanism by considering the case of smartphones. In particular, Apple has faced criticism for allegedly…
June 2024 – Working Paper 32569
We explore the mechanics of empathy. We show that information about an outgroup can potentially activate and magnify empathy when presented in conjunction with an experience simulating their struggles. This response increases the willingness to help the struggling group, but it is only activated…
October 2023 – Working Paper 31771
Individuals might experience negative utility from not consuming a popular product. With such externalities to non-users, standard consumer surplus measures, which take aggregate consumption as given, fail to appropriately capture consumer welfare. We propose an approach to account for these…
March 2023 – Working Paper 31049
Actual and perceived gender norms are key to understanding gender inequality in society. In this paper, using newly collected nationally representative datasets from 60 countries that cover over 80% of the world population, we study gender norms on two distinct policy issues: 1) basic freedom,…
July 2022 – Working Paper 30214
Politicizing policies designed to address market failures can diminish their effectiveness. We document a pattern of political adverse selection in the health insurance exchanges established under the Affordable Care Act (ACA; Obamacare in political debates): Republicans enrolled at lower rates than…
Leonardo Bursztyn is the Saieh Family Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago. He is also an Editor of the Journal of Political Economy, the co-director of the Becker Friedman Institute Political Economics Initiative, and the founder and director of the Normal Lab.
Amymarie Anderson — amymarie@uchicago.edu
Copyright © 2025 Leonardo Bursztyn, All rights reserved.