Credit: David Sprague
Zoë Hitzig
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.
SELECTED Research
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: December 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 2025]
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