David M. Rothschild

David M. Rothschild

Economist, Senior Principal Researcher
Fields: Political Science (public opinion, predictions), Marketing (paid media), Communications (earned media), Behavioral Economics & Finance (judgement & decision making and market design).
Data: Generative Models, Markets, Surveys, Behavioral, Administrative, Social Media, Online Telemetry.

CV

David M. Rothschild, PhD

ResearchDMR.com | David@ResearchDMR.com | Download PDF Version

Senior Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research — New York, NY | 2012–Present
Principal Investigator, PennMap (CSS Lab), University of Pennsylvania — 2021–Present

PhD, Applied Economics (Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania)
Sc.B., Civil Engineering | B.A., History (Brown University, magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa)

Designing the Economic Systems of the AI Era

I am an economist and research leader focused on the economic systems emerging around AI: how agents, platforms, firms, and users interact, and how those interactions should be designed to create efficient, trustworthy, equitable, and durable markets.

At Microsoft Research, I operate at the intersection of research, product, and strategy. I translate frontier academic work into deployable systems, product direction, and organizational decision-making: particularly in domains where incentives, discovery, trust, and measurement determine outcomes. My core areas of research and impact are: agentic markets, information ecosystems, survey and market design, along with general behavioral economics and decision making. I regularly brief senior leadership on high-stakes strategic questions, grounding recommendations in economic theory, empirical evidence, and large-scale data.

My work operates at scale, informing systems and decisions that affect millions of users, markets, and organizations. It is guided by a core insight: AI is not just a technological shift—it is a market design problem. The systems we build today will determine how value is created, distributed, and sustained in agentic environments. We are not just skating to the puck, but directing the puck toward a good place for society.

Core Leadership Functions and Impact

  • Designing AI Economic Systems: Leading the design of agentic markets, discovery platforms, and incentive systems that govern how AI agents, firms, and users interact at scale (e.g., the team released synthetic agentic markets in the fall, with the next iteration forthcoming).

  • Research → Technology → Product: Translating frontier research into deployable systems, product frameworks, and strategic capabilities (e.g., led the development of PredictWise’s market intelligence platform, which scaled to millions of users).

  • Executive Strategy and Advisory: Briefing and advising senior leadership on high-stakes decisions related to AI deployment, platform strategy, and market design (details confidential).

  • Information Ecosystems and Trust: Leading work on misinformation, media systems, and trust in digital and AI-driven environments (e.g., the team released online dashboards that shifted key stakeholders’ understanding of news and information flows).

  • Measurement and Decision Systems: Developing large-scale experimentation, survey, and forecasting systems to support decision-making under uncertainty (e.g., led foundational work on modeling non-probability data that is now industry standard, and currently leading foundational work on how AI affects survey research workflows).

Research and Publications

I have published extensively at the intersection of economics, AI, and computational social science, with work appearing in leading journals including:

  • Science
  • Nature
  • Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)
  • Management Science
  • Journal of the American Statistical Association (JASA)
  • American Political Science Review (APSR)
  • Science Advances, Public Opinion Quarterly, ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC), Nature Human Behaviour, among others.

My research has been cited more than 14,000 times (h-index: 32), reflecting broad impact across academia, industry, and policy.

Key areas of contribution include:

  • Market design for digital and AI-driven environments
  • Misinformation and digital media ecosystems
  • Survey and market measurement methodology
  • Behavioral economics and decision-making
  • Prediction markets and information aggregation

👉 Full publication list: ResearchDMR.com/Academic

Professional Leadership and Engagement

I maintain an active role across academia and industry:

  • Co-Chair, AAPOR Task Force on Responsible AI Integration in Survey Research (2025–2026) — leading the development of new disclosure and transparency guidelines for industry and academic studies.
  • Referee for leading journals across economics, political science, communications, and computer science
  • Frequent speaker at universities, research labs, and conferences, including MIT, Cornell, Penn, Columbia, National Academy of Sciences, AEA, NBER, AAPOR, EC, and IC2S2
  • Advisor and collaborator on large-scale data partnerships, including TargetSmart, Catalist, Pollfish, 605, Nielsen, and TVEyes
  • Contributor to public discourse through major media outlets, including PredictWise, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, MSNBC, and others

Short Executive Bio

David M. Rothschild is a Senior Principal Researcher and Economist at Microsoft Research in New York City. His work spans polling, prediction markets, social media and online data, large-scale behavioral and administrative datasets, and large language models. He focuses on practical and policy-relevant questions, including how public opinion evolves, how markets for news and information function, the effects of advertising, and how AI is reshaping productivity and economic systems. David currently co-chairs AAPOR’s Task Force on Responsible AI Integration in Survey Research and leads research on the emerging agentic economy.