A randomized controlled trial with an education technology application shows that personalization increases engagement. Benefits are larger for users that gain access after the system has scaled to more users, from Keshav Agrawal, @Susan_Athey, Ayush Kanodia, @ShanjuktaN, and @EmilPalikot nber.org/papers/w34950

Studying what facilitates career transitions across sectors through a field experiment analyzing two programs. Tech jobs increase by 15 percentage points with mentoring and by 11 percentage points when workers create portfolios, from @Susan_Athey and Emil Palikot nber.org/papers/w34750

Economist and @StanfordGSB Professor Donald John Roberts passed away last Thursday 2026/01/22. He was 80 years old. I considered him a mentor and a friend. He was always interesting and funny and had a really positive disposition. It was a pleasure to chat with him. Together with his long term coauthor Paul Milgrom, John was a key person in changing how economists think about firms as organizations. He always remembered fondly the years he spent at Northwestern's Kellogg School from 1971 to 1980, where he joined a fantastic group that included Roger Myerson, Bengt Holmström, Nancy Stokey, Robert Weber, Mark Satterthwaite and Paul Milgrom. They all used used game theory and information economics to study of many problems across economics: he mainly in industrial organization (notably his work on limit pricing with Milgrom and his work with Milgrom Kreps and Roberts on repeated Prisoner's dilemma with incomplete information), but the group made path breathtaking work in auctions, financial markets, mechanism design. He later worked on complementarities and organizations, with key papers on supermodular games and monotone comparative statics. He showed firm performance resulted from the interplay of information, incentives, and complementarities. This work is crucial to understand technology adoption and strategy. He also studied, with @I_Am_NickBloom management practices empirically in India, by running an experiment where consulting advice was randomized, and in China on WFH also with Nick. He wrote with Milgrom a book for MBAs that bombed for MBAs (too dense, too many ideas) but that Econ profs and PhDs (me at the time!) loved: Economics, Organization and Management (1992). It had a massive impact (15K cites, astonishing for an MBA textbook), and it is still a book I read. It was the first textbook to apply modern contract theory and incentive economics to management problems. He extended this work in his 2004 book The Modern Firm, which was named best business book of the year by The Economist, and which analyzed how organizational design, competitive strategy, and business environment must fit together for firms to perform well. I always think of firms in terms of his frameworks. (He summarized the way he thought about Firm capabilities by PARC- People, Architecture, Routines, Culture-he liked to say his Stanford students teased him by reading his acronym backwards). In all his work he asked how economic reasoning could illuminate the organization of productive activity. He believed that economic theory should connect to real decisions, and that the study of organizations deserved the same rigor applied to markets. I loved John and learned a lot from him. R.I.P.

Check out @Susan_Athey’s interview on how AI-powered after-the-fact quality checks boost driver performance at Uber—and what it means when AI can track compliance. Insights via @StanfordGSB. gsb.stanford.edu/insights/ho…

Listen to Raj Chetty talk about how surrogate indices make it possible to make decisions more quickly using multiple short-term outcomes to predict long-term effects with @nberpubs. nber.org/research/videos/202…

New paper: Triply Robust Panel Estimators (TROP) by @Susan_Athey @guido_imbens Zhanonan Qu @VivianoDavide. TROP estimates causal effects in panel models by combining a flexible outcome model (regularized low-rank factors FE), unit weights, time weights arxiv.org/pdf/2508.21536

Does human task performance decrease when teammates are machines, and why? In the July issue, by Fabrizio Dell'Acqua, Bruce Kogut, (@brucekogut), Patryk Perkowski, (@patrykkyrtap) zurl.co/gHpNJ