Jennifer Allen

Biography

Jennifer Allen joined New York University Stern School of Business as an Assistant Professor of Technology, Operations, and Statistics in July 2025.

Allen’s research focuses on how the digital media environment influences people’s attitudes, decisions, and behavior, and how we can devise scalable solutions to improve online platforms by leveraging collective intelligence and large language models. She draws on theories in psychology and communication, using a diverse methodological toolkit that includes behavioral experiments, crowdsourcing, and large-scale data analysis. One part of her research agenda focuses on understanding the problems perpetuated by social media by devising a framework for understanding the magnitude and mechanisms of the harm caused by misinformation and other persuasive content online. The second part is devoted to finding solutions. To that end, she examines how crowdsourcing – for example, X’s Community Notes – can offer scalable solutions for content moderation online.

Before joining NYU Stern, Allen was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania in the Computational Social Science Lab. Prior to her PhD, she worked at Microsoft Research, New York in the Computational Social Science group. She was also a software engineer on the News and Civic Teams at Meta and a research engineer at ACRONYM, a digital political advertising agency. Her work has been published in top journals such as Science, PNAS, Nature Human Behavior, and Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

She received her BA in Computer Science and Psychology from Yale University, her Master’s in Management Research from the MIT Sloan School of Management, and her PhD in Management Science (Marketing Group) from the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Research Interests

• Computational Social Science
• Digital Persuasion
• Crowdsourcing
• Social Data Analysis

Courses Taught

• Information Technology in Business & Society

Academic Background

PhD, Management Science
MIT Sloan School of Management

MS, Management Research
MIT Sloan School of Management

BA, Computer Science and Psychology
Yale University