Assistant Professor
Entrepreneurship & Innovation | Management of Organizations
Expert on the design of online marketplaces and platforms
About
David Holtz is an assistant professor in the Management of Organizations (MORS) and Entrepreneurship and Innovation groups at the Haas School of Business. He earned his PhD at the MIT Sloan School of Management, in the Information Technology (IT) group. He also holds an MA in Physics and Astronomy from Johns Hopkins University, and a BA in Physics from Princeton University. Read More
Holtz studies the design of online marketplaces and platforms using large-scale online field experiments and novel digital trace data. His research agenda focuses on online trust and reputation system design, the business and societal impacts of personalized recommendations, and the design and analysis of field experiments in online marketplaces. His work has appeared in a number of journals and conferences, including The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science and the ACM Conference on Economics and Computation, and has been covered by popular news outlets, such as MSNBC, The Washington Post, and the Boston Globe. Before returning to academia, Holtz spent time in the Bay Area working as a data scientist and product manager at a number of technology firms, including Airbnb (where he was one of the founding members of the company’s algorithmic pricing team) and TrialPay (acquired by Visa). In carrying out his research agenda, he continues to work closely with many leading firms in the tech sector, including Airbnb, Facebook, Spotify, Microsoft, and Etsy.
Expertise and Research Interests
- Online Marketplaces & Platforms
- Computational Social Science
- Field Experiements
- Causal Inference
- Data Science
- Andrey Fradkin, Elena Grewal, David Holtz. Reciprocity and Unveiling in Two-sided Reputation Systems: Evidence from an Experiment on Airbnb (opens in a new tab). Marketing Science.
October 2021 - Longqi Yang, David Holtz, Sonia Jaffe, Siddharth Suri, et al.. The Effects of Remote Work on Collaboration Among Information Workers (opens in a new tab). Nature Human Behaviour.
September 2021 - Michael Zhao, David Holtz, Sinan Aral. Interdependent Program Evaluation: Geographic and Social Spillovers in COVID-19 Closures and Reopenings in the U.S. (opens in a new tab). Science Advances.
July 2021 - David Holtz, Michael Zhao, Seth G. Benzell, Cathy Y. Cao, M. Amin Rahimian, Jeremy Yang, Jennifer Allen, Avinash Collis, Alex Moehring, Tara Sowrirajan, Dipayan Ghosh, Yunhao Zhang, Paramveer S. Dhillon, Christos Nicolaides, Dean Eckles, Sinan Aral. Interdependence and the cost of uncoordinated responses to COVID-19 (opens in a new tab). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
2020
- Limiting Bias from Test-Control Interference in Online Marketplace Experiments
David Holtz, Sinan Aral
2020 - Reducing Interference Bias in Online Marketplace Pricing Experiments
David Holtz, Ruben Lobel, Inessa Liskovich, Sinan Aral
2020 - The Engagement-Diversity Connection: Evidence from a Field Experiment on Spotify
David Holtz, Ben Carterette, Praveen Chandar, Zahra Nazari, Henriette Cramer, Sinan Aral
2020
At Haas since 2021
July 2021 – present, Assistant Professor, Management of Organizations Group, Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley
July 2021 – present, Faculty Affiliate, Berkeley Institute for Data Science
Non-Academic Experience
2020, PhD Research Intern, Microsoft Research
2019, PhD Research Intern, Spotify Tech Research
2016 & 2017, PhD Research Intern, Facebook Core Data Science
2014 – 2015, Data Scientist, Airbnb
2013, Data Science Engineer, Yub (acquired by Coupons.com)
2012 – 2013, Product Manager / Data Scientist, TrialPay (acquired by Visa)
- Digital Fellow, MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy (2021-2022)
INFORMS ISS Nunamaker-Chen Dissertation Award
2021
Best Dissertation Award, Workshop on Information Technologies and Systems
“Essays on the Design of Online Marketplaces and Platforms”
2020
Duwayne J. Peterson, Jr. Doctoral Fellowship, MIT Sloan School of Management
2015 – 2021
Research Funding in Business Analytics
Fisher Center for Business Analytics
2021
Summer Institute in Computational Social Science
Russell Sage, & Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
2018
(with Sanaz Mobasseri, Janet Xu, Lily Fesler and Zanele Munyikwa)
Boston University Center for Antiracist Research
Grant for research on technical phone screen interviews
2020
(with Sanaz Mobasseri, Janet Xu, and Zanele Munyikwa)
- Remote-first work is taking over the rich world (opens in a new tab), The Economist, 11/17/2021
- Reshaping American cities (opens in a new tab), The Weeds Podcast, 11/17/2021
- Microsoft has found we’re working longer and collaborating less during COVID-19 (opens in a new tab), World Economic Forum, 10/06/2021
- How Remote Work Affects Our Communication and Collaboration (opens in a new tab), Greater Good Magazine, 09/21/2021
- Did the pandemic make work weeks longer? (opens in a new tab), The View, 09/20/2021
- Hard Work Isn’t the Point of the Office (opens in a new tab), The Atlantic, 09/18/2021
- Microsoft Analyzed Data on Its Newly Remote Workforce (opens in a new tab), Harvard Business Review, 09/15/2021
- A study of 61,000 Microsoft employees suggests remote work is bad for communication between different teams (opens in a new tab), Business Insider, 09/14/2021
- Happy to work hybrid? Staying home comes with a cost to you and your boss, new study finds (opens in a new tab), Financial Post, 09/09/2021
- Coronavirus threat rises across U.S.: ‘We just have to assume the monster is everywhere’ (opens in a new tab), The Washington Post, 08/01/2020
- The deadly cost of uncoordinated reopening of our states (opens in a new tab), The Hill, 05/27/2020
- Study: There will be a “devastating cost of failure” if economic re-openings are not coordinated (opens in a new tab), TechRepublic, 05/27/2020
- MIT Study shows ‘devastating’ cost of states reopening without coordination amid COVID-19 (opens in a new tab), Yahoo! Money, 05/22/2020
- MIT study: ‘Chaotic and uncoordinated’ reopening of states takes ‘devastating toll’ (opens in a new tab), MSNBC, 05/21/2020
- Lack of coordination in reopenings could lead to more coronavirus spread, spillover between states (opens in a new tab), The Boston Globe, 05/21/2020