Research

Job market paper

Speaking the Customer's Language: Dyadic Linguistic Alignment and Conversational Outcomes

With Nick Lee and Iman Ahmadi. Draft of 3 October 2026; being finalized for submission to the Journal of Marketing Research.

I study how closely the two sides of a conversation align in the way they use language, and whether this alignment predicts how the conversation turns out. Using 5,427 customer-service chats from a UK financial institution and 191,216 question-and-answer pairs from Stack Exchange, I show that dyadic linguistic alignment predicts customer satisfaction and community-rated answer quality.

Job market paper (PDF)

Working paper

Demand Estimation with Negative Control Outcomes

With Marco Gregori. Sales of unrelated products serve as negative control outcomes to address unobserved confounding in demand estimation, with validity conditions that can be tested. Illustrated with Nielsen scanner data.

Extended abstract (PDF)

Publication

Motahhar, V. K., Gruca, T. S., & Tavakoli, M. H. (2025). Emotions and the status quo: The anti-incumbency bias in political prediction markets. International Journal of Forecasting, 41(2), 571-579.

Publisher page (DOI)