Credit: David Sprague
Zoë Hitzig
I am a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows (on leave) and a Research Scientist at OpenAI.
My research in microeconomic theory and market design centers on privacy and transparency in markets, contracts and algorithms. I received a PhD in economics from Harvard in 2023.
ECONOMICS
Working Papers
Contextually Private Mechanisms
with Andreas Haupt
R&R at American Economic Review
Extended abstract at EC ‘22
[Draft: May 2025]
Opaque Contracts
with Andreas Haupt
[Draft: January 2023]
Optimal Defaults, Limited Enforcement and the Regulation of Contracts
with Benjamin Niswonger
[Draft: February 2023]
Platform Growth is Hard: Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Evidence from a Carpooling Platform
with Abhijit Banerjee and Rema Hanna
[Draft: October 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]
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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]
Published Papers
Contextual Confidence and Generative AI
with Shrey Jain and Pamela Mishkin
IEEE Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning, 2025
[Draft: October 2024] [MSR Podcast]
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]Truth from the Machine: Artificial Intelligence and the Materialization of Identity
with Os Keyes and Mwenza Blell
Interdisciplinary Science Reviews Vol. 46 (1), March 2021
[Paper]The Technological Politics of Mechanism Design
with Lily Hu and Salomé Viljoen
University of Chicago Law Review, 2019
[Paper]The Problem of New Evidence: P-hacking and Pre-Analysis Plans
with Jacob Stegenga
Diametros Vol. 17 (66), March 2020
[Paper] -
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: The New Yorker Poetry Podcast Colloquy The White Review Poetry Foundation McSweeney’s Chicago Review of Books Cleveland Review of Books Adroit Antiphony
Email: zhitzig@g.harvard.edu