Davide Proserpio
McAlister Associate Professor in Business Administration | Associate Professor of Marketing, USC Marshall

I am the McAlister Associate Professor in Business Administration and Associate Professor of Marketing at University of Southern California Marshall School of Business, where I study problems related to digital platforms and markets. Some of the topics I work on include the sharing economy, online trust and reputation, and advertising.

Prior to joining Marshall, I obtained my PhD in Computer Science at Boston University under the supervision of Sharon Goldberg, John Byers, and Georgios Zervas (from Questrom School of Business). More information about me can be found in my CV, and you can find my papers on Google Scholar and SSRN.

From January 2023 to November 2025, I worked for Amazon as an Amazon Scholar, first in the Ads organization and then in the Climate Pledge Friendly organization. In November 2025, I joined Airbnb as an Housing Scholar working on housing-related projects.

Since 2023, I organize an annual conference on platforms, Workshop on Platform Analytics, with Ken Wilbur and Minkyung Kim. Recently, I started a newsletter with Marco Giacoletti, R.E.A.L. (Real Estate Analytics Lab), which provides insights, grounded in rigorous data analysis, on the current state of real estate markets.

News
Recent Publications (all)

  • The impact of sustainability programs on consumer purchase behavior: Evidence from Amazon SSRN

    Davide Proserpio, Ali goli, Tyler Mangini, Ken Lau, and Daniela Yu
    Forthcoming at IJRM

    A shorter version of this paper has been accepted at the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) 2025, Social Science and Sociophysics Track (without conference proceedings).

  • Using Traditional Text Analysis and Large Language Models in Service Failure and Recovery SSRN

    Francisco Villarroel Ordenes, Grant Packard, Jochen Hartmann, and Davide Proserpio
    Journal of Service Research, 2025

  • Online Reviews: A Literature Review and Roadmap for Future Research SSRN

    Martina Pocchiari, Davide Proserpio, and Yaniv Dover
    International journal of research in marketing, 42(2):275–297

  • Words Meet Photos: When and Why Visual Content Increases Review Helpfulness SSRN

    Gizem Cylean, Kristin Diehl, and Davide Proserpio
    Journal of Marketing Research 61 (1), 5-26
Working Papers

  • Race, Politics, and Digital Expression: Exploring Identity Signals through Emoji Use SSRN

    Francesca Valsesia, Verena Schoenmueller, Davide Proserpio, Jennifer D'Angelo

  • The Financial Consequences of Legalized Sports Gambling SSRN

    Brett Hollenbeck, Poet Larsen, and Davide Proserpio
    Minor revision at Management Science

    Abstract in proceedings of the 26st ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC'25).

    Selected media coverage

    The Economist (12/05/24)
    New York Times (08/21/24)
    Bloomberg (07/26/24)
    Business Insider (08/01/24)

  • Information Signals in Sponsored Search: Evidence from Google's BERT SSRN

    Poet Larsen and Davide Proserpio

  • Algorithm failures and consumers response: Evidence from Zillow SSRN

    Isamar Troncoso, Runshan Fu, Nikhil Malik, and Davide Proserpio
R.I.P. Papers (papers I am not actively working on)

  • Product2Vec: Leveraging representation learning to model consumer product choice in large assortments SSRN

    Fanglin Chen, Xiao Liu, Davide Proserpio, and Isamar Troncoso

    A shorter version of this paper titled Studying Product Competition Using Representation Learning appears in the proceedings of the 43rd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR2020), Xian, China.

  • Estimating the impact of Airbnb on the local economy: Evidence from the restaurant industry SSRN

    Suman Basuroy, Yongseok Kim, and Davide Proserpio

    A shorter version of this paper has been accepted at the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) 2021, Social Science and Sociophysics Track (without conference proceedings).

  • Baring the Sharing Economy: Concepts, Classification, Findings, and Future Directions SSRN

    Davide Proserpio and Gerard J. Tellis
Students

Here is a list of students I am currently working or worked with:

  • Poet Larsen (dissertation committee chair). Placement: Postdoc, Harvard Business School
  • Yanyan Li (dissertation committee member). Placement: Assistant Professor, University of Houston
  • Isamar Troncoso (dissertation committee co-chair). Placement: Assistant Professor, Harvard Business School
  • Fanglin Chen (dissertation committee member). Placement: Assistant Professor, University of Miami Herbert Business School
  • Yongseok Kim (dissertation committee member). Placement: Assistant Professor, University of San Diego
  • Gizem Celyan (dissertation committee member). Placement: Postdoc, Yale University
  • Shomik Jain (USC Viterbi School of Engineering undergrad). Shomik will spend a year at Palantir Technologies before joining a PhD program at MIT in Fall 2022
  • Siddhartha Sharma (dissertation committee member). Placement: Assistant Professor, Kelley School of Business (IU Bloomington)
Recent Talks (all)
  • PhD Seminar, University of Oklahoma, November, 2025
    The Market for Fake Reviews
  • PhD Seminar, Boston University, October, 2025
    The impact of sustainability programs on consumer purchase behavior: Evidence from Amazon
  • Where Minds Meet Models Conference, June, 2025
    The Financial Consequences of Legalized Sports Gambling
  • EMAC, June, 2025
    The impact of sustainability programs on consumer purchase behavior: Evidence from Amazon
  • IE, June, 2025
    The impact of sustainability programs on consumer purchase behavior: Evidence from Amazon
  • UC3M, June, 2025
    The impact of sustainability programs on consumer purchase behavior: Evidence from Amazon
  • WU Vienna, March, 2025
    The Financial Consequences of Legalized Sports Gambling
  • University of Las Vegas, February, 2025
    The Financial Consequences of Legalized Sports Gambling
  • Virtual Quant Markeing Seminary, September, December 2024
    The Financial Consequences of Legalized Sports Gambling
  • IESEG, September 2024
    The Financial Consequences of Legalized Sports Gambling
  • INSEAD, May 2024
    Algorithm failures and consumers response: Evidence from Zillow
  • Winter AMA, February 2024
    Lesson learned from Quant-CB collaborations
  • University of Maryland, September 2023
    Algorithm failures and consumers response: Evidence from Zillow
  • Bologna University, Marketing Department, July 2023
    Algorithm failures and consumers response: Evidence from Zillow
  • Third Conference on Customer Journeys 2023, June 2023
    Algorithm failures and consumers response: Evidence from Zillow
  • Third Conference on Customer Journeys 2023, June 2023
    Algorithm failures and consumers response: Evidence from Zillow
  • University of Miami, March 2023
    The Market for Fake Reviews
  • University of Arizona, February 2023
    The Market for Fake Reviews
Recent Rejections

Life isn't all beer and skittles, so in my academic life I also get tons of rejections. Here is a non-exhaustive list of recent rejections:

  • 2025 - Marketing Science, EC25 (2x), PNAS (2x), JMR (2x), AER Insights, EMAC, QME Conference (3x)
  • 2024 - Marketing Science (2x), UTD Bass Conference, EC24 (2x), PNAS (2x), Management Science (desk rejected), Nature (desk rejected), Winter AMA
  • 2023 - Journal of Urban Economics, USC Lusk research grant, Platfrom Strategy Research Symposium (BU), Marketing Science
  • 2022 - NBER Economic Analysis of Regulation Conference, WISE, AEJ: Policy
  • 2021 - Marketing Science, FTC Micro Conference, QJE, QME Conference, CIST, USC Lusk Center Grant, JMR
  • 2020 - ICWSM, WISE, NSF Postdoc scholarship, EC20 (two papers), Google Faculty Research Award, Amazon Research Awards, Management Science, Bass FORMS Conference (2 papers)
Teaching