Tobias Konitzer | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

Media Measurement and the Assisted Own Goal: Attribution, Marketing-Mix Models, and Individual-Level Incrementality

We use the assisted own goal hypothesis as a lens into media measurement. A demand-generating (upper-funnel) advertising platform such as a short-video social network can cause an incremental purchase, yet see that purchase booked on -- and credited to -- a downstream trusted marketplace, because consumers who discover a product on the platform complete the transaction elsewhere, for example because of distrust of the generating platform as a psychological mechanism. Under attribution-based return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) measurement, the diverted conversions are invisible to the originating platform. Marketing-mix models (MMMs) do not know which channel to credit with the outcome, and channel-by-week aggregation denies the audience-level granularity that budget decisions require. We develop an incrementality-based measurement model with two ingredients: ambient audience-level randomization -- each activated audience carries its own intent-to-treat (ITT) experiment -- and an individual-level extension of Predicted Incrementality by Experimentation (PIE), which learns a mapping from individual features to experiment-identified incremental outcomes. Because ITT contrasts are computed on channel-complete outcomes, the estimator is unbiased and the own goal disappears

econ.EM↗

arXiv2021

Blocks as geographic discontinuities: The effect of polling place assignment on voting

A potential voter must incur a number of costs in order to successfully cast an in-person ballot, including the costs associated with identifying and traveling to a polling place. In order to investigate how these costs affect voting behavior, we introduce two quasi-experimental designs that can be used to study how the political participation of registered voters is affected by differences in the relative distance that registrants must travel to their assigned Election Day polling place and whether their polling place remains at the same location as in a previous election. Our designs make comparisons of registrants who live on the same residential block, but are assigned to vote at different polling places. We find that living farther from a polling place and being assigned to a new polling place reduce in-person Election Day voting, but that registrants largely offset for this by casting more early in-person and mail ballots.

stat.AP↗