Guy Aridor


About Me

I am an Assistant Professor of Marketing at Northwestern Kellogg School of Management. I am mainly interested in understanding the "attention economy" and most of my work studies the firm, policy, and societal implications of digital technologies that compete for consumer's limited attention. 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.

Links: CV, Google Scholar, Github
Working Papers
  1. The Value of Personalized Recommendations: Evidence from Netflix. Joint work with Kevin Zielnicki, Aurelien Bibaut, Allen Tran, Winston Chou, Nathan Kallus.
  2. Digital News Consumption: Evidence from Smartphone Content in the 2024 US Elections. Joint work with Tevel Dekel, Rafael Jimenez-Duran, Ro'ee Levy, Lena Song.
    • Full Paper: SSRN, CESifo; Last Updated: November 2025
    • Coverage: ProMarket, Kellogg Insight
    • Award: Econometric Society AMES-CSW Best Paper Award
    • Selected Presentations: QME, NBER Summer Institute (Digital Economics and AI) -- Flash Talk, Ofcom
  3. The Informational Role of Online Recommendations: Evidence from a Field Experiment on MovieLens. Joint work with Duarte Goncalves, Ruoyan Kong, Daniel Kluver, Joseph Konstan.
    • Conference Version: Extended Abstract at EC '23, Publisher Version
    • Full Paper: PDF, Last Updated: January 2026
    • Selected Presentations: NBER Digital Economics
  4. Guided Creativity: AI Intermediation for Enhancing Originality and Quality in Visual Design. Joint work with Xuekang Wu (first author), Artem Timoshenko.
    • Full Paper: PDF, Last Updated: March 2026
Publications
  1. 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
    • Selected Presentations: ICML Workshop on Participatory Approaches to Machine Learning
  2. Recommenders' Originals: The Welfare Effects of the Dual Role of Platforms as Producers and Recommender Systems. Joint work with Duarte Goncalves.
  3. The Effect of Privacy Regulation on the Data Industry: Empirical Evidence from GDPR. Joint work with Yeon-Koo Che, Tobias Salz.
  4. The Economics of Social Media. Joint work with Rafael Jimenez-Duran, Ro'ee Levy, Lena Song.
  5. The MovieLens Beliefs Dataset: Collecting Pre-Choice Data for Online Recommender Systems. Joint work with Duarte Goncalves, Ruoyan Kong, Daniel Kluver, Joseph Konstan.
    • Award: 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
  6. 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
    • Selected Presentations: NeurIPS Workshop on Information-Theoretic Principles in Cognitive Systems
  7. Competing Bandits: The Perils of Exploration under Competition. Joint work with Yishay Mansour, Alex Slivkins, Steven Wu.
  8. Measuring Substitution Patterns in the Attention Economy: An Experimental Approach.
    • RAND Journal of Economics (2025)
    • Conference Version: Extended Abstract at EC '23, Publisher Version
    • Full Paper: Publisher Version
    • Coverage: Kellogg Insight
    • Selected Presentations: QME, NBER Summer Institute (Digitization), TSE Economics of Platforms Seminar, FTC, DOJ, UK CMA
  9. 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.
Work in Progress
  1. What is Online Privacy Worth? Evidence from an Information Provision Experiment. Joint work with Sam Goldberg and Jialong Li.
  2. Semiparametric Manski Inference and Optimal Experimental Design in Demand Modeling. Joint work with Aurelien Bibaut, Nathan Kallus, Antoine Scheid , Jia Wan.
Book Chapters
  1. Experiments on Social Media. Joint work with Rafael Jimenez-Duran, Ro'ee Levy, Lena Song.
    • Full paper: PDF, SSRN
    • Handbook of Experimental Methods in the Social Sciences (2026)
Other Writings
  1. Targeted advertising after Apple's app tracking transparency: firm-level evidence and policy implications. Joint with Brett Hollenbeck and Daniel McCarthy. CPI TechReg Chronicle (2025)
Software
Press, Blogs, and Other Mentions
Miscellaneous