Saharsh Agarwal

I am a fifth-year Ph.D. student in Information Systems at Carnegie Mellon University (Heinz College).

My research is motivated by important societal issues, and the role that digital technologies and platforms play in shaping them. Some of the largest firms today are technology platforms such as Facebook, Youtube, Amazon and Uber, which have had significant societal impacts beyond the boundaries of their digital properties. For instance, social media platforms are influencing elections, are serving as radicalization pipelines and are contributing to the worsening mental health in society. Excessive usage of platforms like Youtube and Instagram is being linked to anxiety issues and inappropriate sexual behaviour in young children.

While the positive impacts of these platforms have been well documented, growing evidence of such negative externalities is leading to significant policy scrutiny. Regulation of these platforms requires extensive investigations into their various positive and negative societal effects, and I hope to be able to contribute to these discussions through my research. I like working with large-scale, fine-grained datasets to answer my research questions, and employ experimental and econometric methods to make causal claims.