This is the strange time of year when only a handful of campuses are not on summer break. Stanford, University of Chicago, Northwestern, UCLA and just a few others are on the quarter system. My students appear to be well aware that it should be summer time. Attendance is down and students seek to have some fun. I'm trying to make some research progress on several projects but I keep hitting speed bumps.
I had intended that this blog post would focus on innovative ways that Facebook could simultaneously make money and further academic research. I thought that I could think of some field experiment designs that Facebook could create. For example, it could randomly choose people to receive different subsidies if they can recruit their friends to give money for a specific charity. For example, Facebook could write me and offer a 40% match on any money raised by my friends to find a cure for baldness. Facebook could then claim some percentage of the total donations raised as a tax deduction to lower their IRS reported income. The research design would simultaneously raise $ for good causes and would tease out which people in the population respond to charity incentives and who can be mobilized to convince their network to step up and give to a good cause.
A second new business for Facebook would be for FB to begin to suggest potential spouses for people using their "likes" correlations. FB could make a number of life suggestions for people such as what they should eat at their next meal. Now I must admit that I'm confused about how FB would be paid for this advice but perhaps they can call McKinsey to provide some advice on how to monetize their advice?
