Benedikt J. Koch

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Statistics at Harvard University, advised by Kosuke Imai. My research is in causal inference, with a focus on counterfactual decision theory. I study decisions that are evaluated not only by their outcomes, but also by how those outcomes compare to what would have happened under a different decision. This allows me to ask whether a decision made a difference, or whether the same outcome would have occurred anyway.

I have an ongoing research collaboration with Netflix on experimentation, treatment-effect extrapolation, and semiparametric policy learning with high-dimensional model embeddings. I interned at Netflix in the summer of 2025 in the Experimentation & Causal Inference group and will return in the summer of 2026 as an intern in the Machine Learning and Inference Research group.

Before joining Harvard, I earned degrees from the University of Oxford (MSc in Statistical Science), ETH Zurich (MSc in Applied Mathematics), and the University of Vienna (BSc in Mathematics). I also worked full-time as a Data Scientist at QuantCo, focusing on statistical machine learning and pricing. Prior to my academic journey, I served in the Austrian Armed Forces, where I trained to become an army officer.