Zoë Hitzig
I am a writer and an economist.
Currently, I am a Research Scientist at OpenAI and a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows (on leave).
I received my PhD in economics from Harvard in 2023.
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Working Papers
How People Use ChatGPT
with Ronnie Chatterji, Tom Cunningham, David Deming, Christopher Ong, Carl Shan, and Kevin Wadman
[Draft: September 2025]
Contextually Private Mechanisms
with Andreas Haupt
R&R at American Economic Review
Extended abstract at EC ‘22
[Draft: May 2025]
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 2023]Opaque Contracts
with Andreas Haupt
[Draft: January 2023]Optimal Defaults, Limited Enforcement and the Regulation of Contracts
with Benjamin Niswonger
[Draft: February 2023]
Published Papers
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 Workshop at ACM EC ‘19
[Paper]Book Chapters and Conference Proceedings
AI’s Use of Knowledge in Society
with Erik Brynjolfsson
Chapter Prepared for the NBER Volume on Transformative AI
[Draft: September 2025]
Contextual Confidence and Generative AI
with Shrey Jain and Pamela Mishkin
IEEE Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning, 2025
[Draft: October 2024] [MSR Podcast] -
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 AntiphonyI also do literary essays, criticism, and interviews:
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] [MSR Podcast] [NBC Boston]
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