Andrea Blasco

Andrea Blasco

Economist, data scientist, and researcher of the digital economy

Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard

Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard

Biography

I work at the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard and at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where I investigate the impact of digital transformation on science and the way firms innovate. I lead several crowdsourcing projects to see whether one can use online competitions to advance science (see this paper for example). The most exciting of which was this data-science competition, where we solicited deep learning algorithms to study how human cells respond to drug treatments in vitro.

As a social scientist, my research interests focus on understanding how people respond to incentives in such competitive environments. My favorite research strategy is to use field experiments to test behavioral hypotheses in the real world. For example, see this paper on a field experiment run at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston to see why people contribute ideas to improve their organization.

Download my resumé.

Interests
  • Digital economy
  • Data science
  • Crowdsourcing and open innovation
  • Field experiments
Education

  • PhD in Economics

    University of Bologna

  • Master in Economics and Statistics

    Toulouse School of Economics

  • BSc in Economics

    University of Naples "Federico II"

Projects

Mechanisms of Action Prediction Challenge
We run a computational challenge to solicit solutions to the automatic classification of drugs based on their biological activity in human cells. Over 4,000 people joined the competition by submitting hundreds of computational approaches.
Mechanisms of Action Prediction Challenge
The Ether Dome Challenge
We helped the Healthcare Transformation Lab at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) running an internal ideation challenge called the Ether Dome Challenge (EDC). This initiative sought solutions from frontline workers to improve the organization and healthcare delivery at MGH.
The Ether Dome Challenge

Recent Publications

Advancing computational biology and bioinformatics research through open innovation competitions
Open data science and algorithm development competitions offer a unique avenue for rapid discovery of better computational strategies. We highlight three examples in computational biology and bioinformatics research in which the use of competitions has yielded significant performance gains over established algorithms.
Andrea Blasco, Michael G. Endres, Rinat A. Sargeev, Anup Jonchhe, N. J. Max Macaluso, Rajiv Narayan, Ted Natoli, Jin H. Paik, Bryan Briney, Chunlei Wu, Andrew I. Su, Aravind Subramanian, Karim R. Lakhani
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Incentives for public goods inside organizations: Field experimental evidence
We run a field experiment at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston to see why people contribute ideas to improve their organization.
Andrea Blasco, Olivia Jung, Karim R. Lakhani, Michael Menietti
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Paying positive to go negative: Advertisers׳ competition and media reports
This paper analyzes a two-sided market for news where two rival advertisers may pay a media outlet to conceal negative information about the quality of their own product (paying positive to avoid negative) and/or to disclose negative information about the quality of their competitor׳s product (paying positive to go negative). We show that competition in the product market does not necessarily prevent the emergence of commercial media bias.
Andrea Blasco, Paolo Pin, Francesco Sobbrio
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Skills

R

90%

Statistics

100%

Photography

10%

Popular Topics

Academic Advertising Competition in media markets Computational biology Contests Crowdsourcing Deep Learning Drugs Free rider problem Healthcare Innovation contests Media bias Open innovation Organizational improvement plot R Markdown regression Relative incentives Social incentives Social learning

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