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IDE Publications

At the IDE, research and data-based evidence underlie all that we do. Explore the IDE’s publications archives, including cutting-edge academic papers, featured in leading publications around the globe.

 

Publication Types

Working Papers Economics of Human and AI Collaboration: When is Partial Automation More Attractive than Full Automation?

Mar 2026

Wensu Li | Postdoctoral Associate

Neil Thompson | Research Scientist, MIT Sloan School of Management and CSAIL

Martin Fleming | Research Scientist, IDE

Atin Aboutorabi

Harry Lyu

Kaizhi Qian

Brian C. Goehring

 

This paper develops a unified framework for evaluating the optimal degree of task automation. Moving beyond binary automate-or-not assessments, we model automation intensity as a continuous choice in which firms minimize costs by selecting an AI accuracy level, from no automation through partial human-AI collaboration to full automation.

Working Papers Ray of Hope? China and the Rise of Solar Energy

Mar 2026

John Van Reenen | Professor, London School of Economics

Ignacio Banares-Sanchez

Robin Burgess

David Laszlo,

Pol Simpson

Yifan Wang

Do industrial policies that promote clean energy offer a “ray of hope”, increasing a country’s growth and welfare, whilst simultaneously reducing carbon emissions? This paper examines whether the impact of Chinese solar subsidies whose implementation by city-regions went alongside massive expansion of the sector and a dramatic fall in global solar prices.

Research Papers Beyond Search: LLM Adoption and Web Traffic Concentration

Feb 2026

Alessandro Acquisti | T. Wilson (1953) Professor in Management and Professor of Information Technology, MIT Sloan

Samira Gholami | Stanford University – Department of Economics

Cristiana Firullo | Cornell University – Cornell University, College of Computing and Information Science (CIS), Department of Information Science, Students

Cristobal Cheyre | Cornell University, Ithaca, New York

 

This paper examines whether LLM adoption displaces traditional web navigation or instead restructures how users discover and consume information.