Working Papers

These papers are working drafts of research which often appear in final form in academic journals. The published versions may differ from the working versions provided here.

SSRN Research Paper Series

The Social Science Research Network’s Research Paper Series includes working papers produced by Stanford GSB the Rock Center.

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Measuring Perceived Slant in Large Language Models Through User Evaluations

Sean J. Westwood, Justin Grinner, Andrew B. Hall
May82025

As LLMs become the default interface for search, news, and everyday problem-solving, they may filter and frame political information before citizens ever confront it. Identifying and mitigating partisan “bias”—output with a systematic slant…

Human + AI in Accounting: Early Evidence from the Field

Jung Ho Choi, Chloe Xie
May72025

This paper provides early evidence on the integration and impact of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) in accounting at the accountant and task levels. Using a multi-method approach, we first identify heterogeneous adoption patterns,…

Reframing Analyst Forecast Efficiency: An Empirical Bayes Perspective

Christopher S. Armstrong, Chongho Kim, Yaniv Konchitchki, Frank Zhou
May62025

We develop a rational, non-behavioral framework in which analysts use empirical Bayesian techniques to construct their forecasts. Our approach assumes that analysts construct a single empirical prior by aggregating information across all of the…

Axiomatic Equilibrium Selection: The Case of Generic Extensive-Form Games

Srihari Govindan, Robert Wilson
May2025

A solution concept that is a refinement of Nash equilibria selects for each finite game a nonempty collection of closed and connected subsets of Nash equilibria as solutions. We impose three axioms for such solution concepts. The axiom of…

Beyond Black-Box: Structuring Multi-Stage Recommender Systems Using Predicted Intents

Yuyan Wang, Cheenar Banerjee, Samer Chucri, Minmin Chen
April192025

Modern recommender systems, which rely on large-scale machine learning (ML) models to predict the next item a consumer will engage with, often lack generalizability and understanding of consumer behaviors due to their black-box nature. To address…

Breaking through the Ethnic Growth Trap

Saumitra Jha
April2025

In this overview piece, I review the literature and identify important directions for how developing societies can break out of such ethnic growth traps and instead leverage the gains that can often be had from ethnic diversity. To do this…

Dollar Upheaval: This Time is Different

Zhengyang Jiang, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Hanno Lustig, Robert Richmond, Chenzi Xu
April2025

What can we learn from the high-frequency responses in bond and currency markets to the recent tariff announcement about the status of the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency? The dollar depreciated by 3.4% after April 4 in spite of rising…

Geoeconomic Pressure

Christopher Clayton, Antonio Coppola, Matteo Maggiori, Jesse Schreger
April2025

Geoeconomic pressure — the use of existing economic relationships by governments to achieve geopolitical or economic ends — has become a prominent feature of global power dynamics. This paper introduces a methodology using large language models (…

Managers’ Risk-Return Trade-offs and Corporate Investment

Christopher S. Armstrong, Oscar Timmermans
April2025

Allocating capital to investment projects is one of a manager’s most critical responsibilities. However, such decisions are shaped by managers’ own beliefs and risk preferences, which can differ from those of diversified shareholders. To study…

A Theory of Disclosure Timing

Seung Y. Lee , Iván Marinovic
April2025

We develop a model of disclosure timing in which the firm can commit to disclose its revenues at a fixed date (a time-based disclosure policy) or after a certain number of transactions have occurred (a news arrival-based disclosure policy). We…

Sustainability and Strategic Differentiation in Unregulated Consumer Goods Markets

Kristina Brecko, Yewon Kim
March2025

Motivated by the disconnect between regulatory discussions and industry reports on voluntary sustainability investments, we examine the market equilibrium for sustainable products in the absence of regulation, focusing on firms’ strategic…

The Blessing of Reasoning: LLM-Based Contrastive Explanations in Black-Box Recommender Systems

Yuyan Wang, Pan Li, Minmin Chen
February232025

Modern recommender systems use machine learning (ML) models to predict consumer preferences based on consumption history. Although these “black-box” models achieve impressive predictive performance, they often suffer from a lack of transparency…

Judicial Proficiency and Contract Design: The Role of Business Courts in Shaping Supply Contracts

Christopher S. Armstrong, Sterling Huang, Yanping Xu
February2025

We examine whether access to specialized business courts that are more proficient in resolving contractual disputes influences the design of firms’ supply contracts. We use the staggered creation of these courts in different states at different…

Rational and Irrational Belief in the Hot Hand: Evidence from “Jeopardy!”

Anthony J. Kukavica, Sridhar Narayanan
December2024

For several decades, researchers and practitioners have wondered whether a
“hot hand” exists in domains with repeated, human-controlled trials. Using a comprehensive play-by-play dataset from the game show “Jeopardy!”, we demonstrate that…

An Equilibrium Model of Deferred Prosecution Agreements

Steven Grenadier, Brian Grenadier
November222024

Deferred prosecution agreements (DPAs) are now a standard tool used by prosecutors to punish corporate crime. Under a DPA, the defendant escapes prosecution by living up to the terms of the contract. However, if the prosecutor declares a breach,…

Effective and Equitable Congestion Pricing: New York City and Beyond

Michael Ostrovsky, Frank Yang
November2024

In this paper, we argue that the New York City congestion pricing plan whose implementation was paused in the summer of 2024 had a major shortcoming: as designed, it would have had a much more severe impact on the drivers of personal vehicles…

The Labor Market Spillovers of Job Destruction

Michael Blank, Omeed Maghzian
November2024

Workers who lose their jobs during recessions face strikingly large and persistent declines in their future earnings. Using individual-level administrative data from the United States, this paper shows that an important driver of these costs is…

Switchback Price Experiments with Forward-Looking Demand

Yifan Wu, Ramesh Johari, Vasilis Syrgkanis, Gabriel Weintraub
October182024

We consider a retailer running a switchback experiment for the price of a single product, with infinite supply. In each period, the seller chooses a price from a set of predefined prices that consist of a reference price and a few discounted…

Veto Players and Policy Development

Alex Hirsch, Ken Shotts
October142024

We analyze the effects of veto players when the set of available policies isn’t exogenously fixed, but rather determined by policy developers who work to craft new high-quality proposals. If veto players are moderate, there is active competition…

When Does Interference Matter? Decision-Making in Platform Experiments

Ramesh Johari, Hannah Li, Anushka Murthy, Gabriel Weintraub
October102024

This paper investigates decision-making in A/B experiments for online platforms and marketplaces. In such settings, due to constraints on inventory, A/B experiments typically lead to biased estimators because of interference; this phenomenon has…