Research
2. Saharsh Agarwal, Deepa Mani and Rahul Telang. The Impact of Ride-Hailing Services on Congestion: Evidence from Indian Cities.
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management (May 2023)
Early research has documented significant growth in ride-hailing services world-wide and allied benefits. However, growing evidence of their negative externalities is leading to significant policy scrutiny. Despite demonstrated socioeconomic benefits and consumer surplus worth billions of dollars, cities are choosing to curb these services in a bid to mitigate first order urban mobility problems. Existing studies on the congestion effects of ride-hailing are limited, report mixed evidence and exclusively focus on the United States, where the supply consists primarily of part-time drivers. We study how the absence of ride-hailing services affects congestion levels in three major cities in India, a market where most ride-hailing drivers participate full time. Using rich real-time traffic and route trajectory data from Google Maps, we show that in all the three cities, periods of ride-hailing unavailability due to driver strikes see a discernible drop in travel time. The effects are largest for the most congested regions during the busiest hours, which see 10.1 - 14.8 percent reduction in travel times. Additionally, we provide suggestive evidence for some of the mechanisms behind the observed effects, including deadheading elimination, substitution with public transit and opening up of shorter alternative routes. These results suggest that despite their paltry modal share, ride-hailing vehicles are substituting more sustainable means of transport and are contributing significantly to congestion in the cities studied. The reported effect sizes quantify the maximum travel time gains that can be expected on curbing them
Media: Fortune
1. Saharsh Agarwal and Ananya Sen. Antiracist Curriculum and Digital Platforms: Evidence from Black Lives Matter.
Management Science (Apr 2022)
(Also featured in the virtual special issue on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion)
In this paper, we examine the impact of racially charged events on the demand for anti-racist classroom resources in US public schools. We use book requests made by teachers on DonorsChoose.org, the largest crowdfunding platform for public school teachers, as a measure of intent to address race-related topics in the classroom. We use the precise timing of high-profile police brutality and other racially charged events in the US (2010-2020) to identify their effect on anti-racism requests relative to a control group. We find a significant increase in anti-racism requests following the killing of George Floyd in 2020, and a null effect for all other events in the decade. We also find an increase in requests for books featuring Latinx, Asian, Muslim, and Jewish cultures, suggesting that a focus on equality for one group can spill over and yield culturally aware dialogues for other groups as well. Event studies suggest that local protests played a role in motivating some of the teachers to post these requests. In just four months following George Floyd’s death, $3.4 million worth of books featuring authors and characters from marginalized communities were successfully funded, reaching over half a million students. Text analysis of impact notes posted by teachers suggests that hundreds of thousands of young students are being engaged in discussions about positive affirmation and cross-cultural acceptance.
Working Papers
2. Saharsh Agarwal, Uttara Ananthakrishnan and Catherine Tucker. Content Moderation at the Infrastructure Layer: Evidence from Parler
Major revision, Information Systems Research
Moderation of problematic individuals and communities—–particularly those rife with misinformation—– has become a significant policy challenge in recent times. Social media platforms wield significant editorial control over their users’ content, but do not always have the incentives or technological capabilities to moderate harmful content. Yet these platforms rely on third-party technology infrastructure providers, who are increasingly intervening in content moderation decisions by withdrawing support to platforms that fail to self-regulate. Despite the rise in these initiatives, little is known about their spillover effects outside the focal platform. In January 2021, Parler, a social media platform, was taken offline by its web and app hosting services for its purported role in fomenting the Capitol riots. Using detailed user-level mobile usage data, we demonstrate that following the intervention, a section of Parler users migrated to Telegram, an alternative ’free-speech’ platform. Many other fringe platforms saw momentary surges that could not be sustained over time, and a large fraction of Parler users did not migrate to alternative platforms. The migration was driven predominantly by highly engaged Parler users with high partisan media consumption prior to January 2021. We also demonstrate the unintended consequences of the Parler deplatforming—when Parler users moved to Telegram, their exposure to misinformation and partisan content increased. Our results also serve as the first long-run evidence of cross-category platform substitution, which can guide competition policy for social media applications.
(Pre-PhD) Saharsh Agarwal, Deepa Mani and Anand Nandkumar. The Growing Dominance of ICT Inventors in Production of Impactful Knowledge.
This study uses data on about 1.5 million US patents granted between 1981 and 2006 to demonstrate that inventors, whose experience is grounded in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), increasingly dominate the production of knowledge across diverse industries and technology classes. On average, the percentage of "ICT inventors" affiliated with a patent has grown steadily each year and more than quadrupled from 8% in 1981 to 34% in 2006. Patents with greater percentage of ICT inventors are also more likely to be breakthrough inventions, general-purpose and highly cited. These dimensions of patent quality vary with the percentage of ICT inventors on the patent. Relative access to technology talent across different geographies in the US introduces exogenous variation in the percentage of ICT inventors affiliated with the sample patents, underscoring the importance of acquisition of technology talent to competitiveness in modern innovation and new product development.
In Progress
1. Saharsh Agarwal and Uttara Ananthakrishnan. Impact of TikTok on Screen-Time and Sleep Patterns
1. Saharsh Agarwal, Uttara Ananthakrishnan and Ronak Vishnoi. Impact of Daylight Savings on Sleep Timings and Duration