Saharsh Agarwal is an Assistant Professor at the Indian School of Business. His research uses field experiments to measure how platform design decisions affect publisher and user behavior online. He collaborated with Ananya Sen (Carnegie Mellon) on the controlled study of AI Overviews and publisher traffic, one of the first field experiments to isolate the click-reduction effect of generative search summaries under randomized assignment.
Operating themes
- Field experiment methodology Agarwal uses randomized assignment and browser-extension instrumentation to isolate causal effects in platform economics.
- Publisher traffic economics His AI Overviews research measures both the traffic substitution effect and the user experience effect independently, separating what AI summaries take from publishers and what they give to users.
Cards
- AI Overviews reduce outbound clicks by 40% with no corresponding improvement in user satisfaction, AI Overviews reduce outbound clicks by 40% with no corresponding improvement in user satisfaction [Tier B] (co-operator with Ananya Sen)