Dr. Sagit Bar-Gill

Sagit Bar-Gill is an assistant professor of Technology Management and Information Systems at the Coller School of Management in Tel Aviv University, and a Digital Fellow at MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy.

Dr. Bar-Gill studies online markets from both the firm-level and consumer-level perspectives in various online settings. From the firm-level perspective, she is interested in questions related to market structure, firm strategies, and the impact of analytics on small businesses. From the consumer-level perspective, she is interested in questions related to consumer behavior in the online-to-offline purchase funnel, in online media markets, and, recently, in chatbot interactions. Methodologically, her research combines economic modeling, econometric analysis, and online experiments.
Bar-Gill grounds her research in real-world settings by collaborating with and addressing challenges faced by online-only firms (e.g., eBay), as well as firms that operate in both digital and physical markets (e.g., BMW, leading news publishers).

Dr. Bar-Gill’s recent projects include collaborations with eBay studying the firm side of the eBay market, specifically examining the impact of data-driven decision making on firm performance (forthcoming in Management Science), and the evolution of firm size distribution on eBay. In other work, with a consumer-behavior focus, she studies the impact of awareness of social media influence on content consumption and sharing, and the impacts of content popularity signals on content exploration and choice patterns of influencers vs. non-influencers. In another consumer-centric project, she studies optimal chatbot design based on customers’ sentiment. In recently published work, she collaborated with BMW to examine the impact of online engagement on offline car sales (published in MISQ), and with the CS-Monitor to study the effect of referral sources on online news consumption (published in Management Science).