Are consumers aware of their future inertia? We run a field experiment that offers over a million readers of a European newspaper auto-renewing or auto-canceling contracts.

New working paper out with the Marketing Science Institute: "Engagement vs. Commitment: The Economic Trade-Offs of Polarizing News Content" (with Shunyao Yan). The puzzle: partisan content reliably drives engagement — more clicks, more time on site. So why not lean into it?

𝐄𝐱𝐜𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐞 𝐚𝐭 𝐄𝐌𝐀𝐂 2026 this week! Together with @micherossi.bsky.social (HEC Paris), I'm co-organizing two special sessions on Marketing & Public Policy both on Wednesday June 3. If you work on digital platforms, privacy, sustainability, or polarization, please come join us.

Our research on the value of cookies & Privacy Sandbox for online publishers with Zhengrong Gu, & @sjkobayashi.bsky.social is now published in PNAS 🎉🎉. Check out this thread for an overview 👇

Garrett Johnson @garjoh.bsky.social · last yr.

🧵1/ Google’s Privacy Sandbox promises to replace third-party cookies with privacy-preserving tech. But does it preserve publisher revenue? We partnered with @weareraptive to analyze 200M+ ad impressions across 5,000+ sites in the CMA-Google field experiment. Here's what we found 👇

𝐍𝐞𝐰 𝐢𝐧 𝐇𝐚𝐫𝐯𝐚𝐫𝐝 𝐁𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐑𝐞𝐯𝐢𝐞𝐰 with John Zhang (The Wharton School): Most subscription businesses default to auto-renewal. The logic seems obvious, if customers have to actively cancel, many won't. #SubscriptionEconomy #Strategy #Marketing #FieldExperiments

New working paper with Shunyao Yan Polarizing news content is great at capturing attention. But does it help publishers where it matters most: subscriptions? #mediaecon #polarization #subscriptions #digitalmarketing