Publications
Contextually Private Mechanisms
with Andreas Haupt
‍ ‍Forthcoming in American Economic Review, 2026
‍ ‍Extended abstract at EC, 2022
[Draft: December 2025]

The Consistency Trap in LLMs: Generator-Evaluator Agreement and Vulnerability to Mistakes
with Marina Mancoridis
‍ ‍Forthcoming at ICML, 2026

AI’s Use of Knowledge in Society
with Erik Brynjolfsson
‍ ‍Forthcoming in NBER Volume on Transformative AI, 2026
[Draft: September 2025]

Contextual Confidence and Generative AI
with Shrey Jain and Pamela Mishkin
‍ ‍IEEE SaTML, 2025
[Draft: October 2024] [MSR Podcast]

A Flexible Design for Funding Public Goods
with Vitalik Buterin and Glen Weyl
‍ ‍Management Science Vol. 65 (11), July 2019
‍ ‍[Paper] [Publisher's Version] [Marginal Revolution] [WIRED] [TED]

The Normative Gap: Mechanism Design and Ideal Theories of Justice
‍ ‍Economics & Philosophy, Vol. 36 (3), November 2020
‍ ‍Best paper award at MD4SG at EC ‘19
[Paper]

Working Papers
How People Use ChatGPT
with Ronnie Chatterji, Tom Cunningham, David Deming,
Christopher Ong, Carl Shan, and Kevin Wadman
‍ ‍[Draft: September 2025] [Washington Post] [The Verge]

Platform Growth is Hard: Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Evidence from a Carpooling Platform
with Abhijit Banerjee and Rema Hanna
‍ ‍Reject and Resubmit at Management Science
[Draft: October 2025]

Opaque Contracts
with Andreas Haupt
[Draft: January 2023]

Optimal Defaults, Limited Enforcement and the Regulation of Contracts
with Benjamin Niswonger
[Draft: February 2023]

Research Reports
Agentic Coding and Persistent Returns to Expertise
with Maxim Massenkoff, Eva Lyubich, Ryan Heller and Peter McCrory
‍ ‍Anthropic Economic Research, June 2026

CoVal: Learning Values-aware Rubrics from the Crowd
with Tyna Eloundou, Mitchell Gordon, Sandhini Agarwal and Adam Kalai
‍ ‍OpenAI Alignment Blog, January 2026

My first book of nonfiction will be published by Crown in the US in late 2027 and Hamish Hamilton in the UK in early 2028. It is a reckoning with how, as we make ourselves more legible to machines, we are eroding the unknowability that is essential to personal growth, love, friendship, and a functioning economy. It will also appear in German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Danish and Korean.

I am the author of two books of poetry:

• Not Us Now, winner of the Changes Book Prize (judged by Louise Glück), published by Changes in 2024.

• Mezzanine, published by Ecco/Harpercollins in 2020.

I currently serve as poetry editor of The Drift.

Some of my poems are online: Paris Review The New Yorker Poetry Harpers New Statesman London Review of Books New York Review of Books Granta.

Selected features, reviews and interviews are also online: The New Yorker Poetry Podcast Colloquy The White Review Poetry Foundation McSweeney’s Chicago Review of Books Cleveland Review of Books Adroit Antiphony

And here is some other prose:
On why I left my last job
On how we surveil the people we love
On art made by DALL-E
On Rachel Kushner
On Ryan Ruby
On Ben Lerner
On Ocean Vuong

Personhood Credentials: Artificial intelligence and the Value of Privacy-Preserving Tools to Distinguish Who is Real Online
with Steven Adler, Shrey Jain and many others
‍ ‍2025 Privacy Papers for Policymakers Award
‍ ‍from the Future of Privacy Forum
[Draft: August 2024] [Washington Post] [MIT Tech Review] [NBC]

Economic Democracy and Market Power
with Michelle Meagher, André Veiga and Glen Weyl
‍ ‍Competition Policy International Antitrust Chronicle, 2020
[Paper]

The Technological Politics of Mechanism Design
with Lily Hu and Salomé Viljoen
‍ ‍University of Chicago Law Review, 2019
[Paper]

Email
zhitzig@g.harvard.edu

Literary agent
Alice Whitwham at the Cheney Agency