David Rothschild
David Rothschild is an economist and Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research in New York. He is first author, with Neil Malhotra, of the 2014 Research & Politics experiment asking whether public opinion polls are self-fulfilling prophecies, the national experiment on poll information and attitudes cited in the article on the bandwagon effect.
Who they are
His CV lists him as an economist at Microsoft Research in New York since 2012, after a post-doctoral year at Yahoo! Research (2011 to 2012). His PhD is in Applied Economics, with a Business and Public Policy concentration, from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania (2006 to 2011). He has held fellowships at Columbia University's Applied Statistics Center and the University of Pennsylvania's Program on Opinion Research and Election Studies, and is a principal investigator at the University of Pennsylvania's PennMap project.
His listed research focus includes prediction markets and information aggregation, survey and market measurement methodology, behavioural economics and decision-making, and misinformation and digital media ecosystems.
Key papers
Rothschild, D., & Malhotra, N. (2014), Are Public Opinion Polls Self-Fulfilling Prophecies? Research & Politics, 1(2), doi:10.1177/2053168014547667. The abstract describes the starting problem as the possibility that polls, and newer information such as published probabilities derived from prediction market prices and aggregated polling summaries, produce a bandwagon effect in which majorities grow in a cascading manner. The authors state that the existing empirical literature on the bandwagon effects of polls is surprisingly limited. They conducted an experiment on a diverse national sample, randomly assigning people to receive information about different levels of support for three public policies, and find that public opinion as expressed through polls affects individual-level attitudes, although the size of the effect depends on issue characteristics.
Key ideas
The paper's central move is to treat the bandwagon question as an experiment on information exposure and not as an inference from survey trends. Random assignment to different reported levels of support lets the authors attribute attitude differences to the information.
The finding the article uses is its qualified one: poll information shifts attitudes, and the size of the shift varies with the issue. The abstract gives no single size, and none is stated on this site.
Sources
- Rothschild, D., & Malhotra, N. (2014), Research & Politics, 1(2), doi:10.1177/2053168014547667.
- David Rothschild, curriculum vitae, https://researchdmr.com/cv/.