About

Hunt Volney Allcott is a Professor of Environmental Social Sciences at Stanford University. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and a faculty member at the Precourt Institute for Energy. Additionally, he holds a courtesy appointment as a Professor of Economics. His roles indicate a focus on environmental issues, economic policy, and energy, contributing to interdisciplinary research and education in these areas.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Law
• Psychology
• Social psychology
• Economics
• Medicine
• Internet privacy
• Demography
• Development economics
• Business
• Advertising
• Social Science
• Demographic economics
• Mathematics
• Virology
• Chemistry
• Algorithm
• Market economy
• Media studies
• Communication
• World Wide Web

Selected publications

• The Effects of Regulating Greenwashing: Evidence from Europe’s Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR)

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Effects of Regulating Greenwashing: Evidence from Europe’s Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR)

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• How deceptive online networks reached millions in the US 2020 elections

  Nature Human Behaviour · 2026-04-06

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Digital Media Mergers: Theory and Application to Facebook-Instagram

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• The Effect of Deactivating Facebook and Instagram on Users’ Emotional State

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-04-01 · 5 citations

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  We estimate the effect of social media deactivation on users' emotional state in two large randomized experiments before the 2020 U.S. election.People who deactivated Facebook for the six weeks before the election reported a 0.060 standard deviation improvement in an index of happiness, depression, and anxiety, relative to controls who deactivated for just the first of those six weeks.People who deactivated Instagram for those six weeks reported a 0.041 standard deviation improvement relative to controls.Exploratory analysis suggests the Facebook effect is driven by people over 35, while the Instagram effect is driven by women under 25.

  PublisherDOI

• Reshares on social media amplify political news but do not detectably affect beliefs or opinions

  UNC Libraries · 2025-03-19

  articleOpen access

  We studied the effects of exposure to reshared content on Facebook during the 2020 US election by assigning a random set of consenting, US-based users to feeds that did not contain any reshares over a 3-month period. We find that removing reshared content substantially decreases the amount of political news, including content from untrustworthy sources, to which users are exposed; decreases overall clicks and reactions; and reduces partisan news clicks. Further, we observe that removing reshared content produces clear decreases in news knowledge within the sample, although there is some uncertainty about how this would generalize to all users. Contrary to expectations, the treatment does not significantly affect political polarization or any measure of individual-level political attitudes.

  PublisherDOI

• The Effects of Facebook and Instagram on Political Outcomes for the Average User

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01 · 2 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Sources of Market Power in Web Search: Evidence from a Field Experiment

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• When Do Nudges Increase Welfare?

  American Economic Review · 2025-05-01 · 13 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  We use public finance sufficient statistic approaches to characterize the welfare effects of “nudges,” such as simplified information and warning labels, in markets with taxes and endogenous prices. While many studies focus on average effects, we show that welfare also depends on how the nudge affects the variance of choice distortions, and average effects become irrelevant with zero pass-through or optimal taxes. We implement the framework with experiments evaluating automotive fuel economy labels and sugary drink health labels. Labels decrease purchases of low-fuel economy cars and sugary drinks but may decrease welfare because they increase the variance of choice distortions. (JEL D18, D62, D83, D91, H21, L62, L66)

  PublisherDOI

• How do social media feed algorithms affect attitudes and behavior in an election campaign?

  UNC Libraries · 2025-03-19 · 10 citations

  articleOpen access

  We investigated the effects of Facebook's and Instagram's feed algorithms during the 2020 US election. We assigned a sample of consenting users to reverse-chronologically-ordered feeds instead of the default algorithms. Moving users out of algorithmic feeds substantially decreased the time they spent on the platforms and their activity. The chronological feed also affected exposure to content: The amount of political and untrustworthy content they saw increased on both platforms, the amount of content classified as uncivil or containing slur words they saw decreased on Facebook, and the amount of content from moderate friends and sources with ideologically mixed audiences they saw increased on Facebook. Despite these substantial changes in users' on-platform experience, the chronological feed did not significantly alter levels of issue polarization, affective polarization, political knowledge, or other key attitudes during the 3-month study period.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Dmitry Taubinsky

  University of California, Berkeley

  127 shared

• Benjamin Lockwood

  University of Pennsylvania

  108 shared

• Matthew Gentzkow

  92 shared

• Luca Braghieri

  56 shared

• Sarah Eichmeyer

  53 shared

• Afras Sial

  University of California, Berkeley

  50 shared

• Daniel Keniston

  Louisiana State University

  38 shared

• Michael Greenstone

  University of Chicago

  29 shared

Labs

• Vice Provost for Student AffairsPI