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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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Decisions take time, and the time taken to reach a decision is likely to be informative about the cost of more precise judgments. We formalize this insight using a dynamic model of optimal evidence accumulation. We provide…
Modern digital advertising platforms allow ads to be targeted in a variety of ways, and generally aim to match the ad being shown with either the user or the content being shown. In this study, we examine the effect of matching in…
How does a failure in a retailer’s mobile app impact shoppers’ purchases in its online (website and app) and offline (brick-and-mortar store) channels? Our main hypothesis is that an app failure has a negative effect on offline…
For individuals who take on the responsibility of caring for another person due to illness, disability, or declining abilities, it can often be challenging, lonely, costly, and exhausting. As the U.S. continues to address the…
We revisit the classic result on the (non-)existence of pure-strategy Nash equilibria in the Generalized First-Price Auction for sponsored search advertising and show that the conclusion may be reversed when ads are ranked based…
This study finds that voluntary non-earnings disclosures substitute for redacted proprietary contract information. When firms redact contract information, they provide more voluntary disclosures and have higher information…
In this study, we causally examine complementarity in usage across a set of related software products from a multi-product firm. Digital contexts are characterized by little price variation, bundled pricing plans, and infrequent…
How can we assess whether macro-prudential regulations are having their intended effects? If these regulations are optimal, their marginal benefit of addressing externalities should equal their marginal cost of distorting risk-…
We analyze non-fundamental volatility and efficiency in large games featuring strategic interaction and endogenous information acquisition. We adopt the rational inattention approach to information acquisition but generalize to a…
We examine whether the proprietary costs of economically linked peers influence focal firms’ merger and acquisition (M&A) decisions, which often involve extensive transfers of proprietary information across merging entities. Using…
We study an economy with traders whose payoffs are quasilinear and their private signals are informative about an unobserved state parameter. The limit economy has infinitely many traders partitioned into a finite set of symmetry…
We consider the problem of a rational, Bayesian agent receiving signals over time for the purpose of taking an action. The agent chooses when to stop and take an action based on her current beliefs, and prefers (all else equal) to…
We propose a new adaptive empirical Bayes framework, the Bag-Of-Null-Statistics (BONuS) procedure, for multiple testing where each hypothesis testing problem is itself multivariate or nonparametric. BONuS is an adaptive and…
Despite great falls in global poverty, civil and ethnic conflict remains tragically common. In this chapter, I examine the patterns of persistence and change in conflict around the world through the lens of historical political…
The Federal Reserve’s “balance-sheet normalization,” which reduced aggregate reserves between 2017 and September 2019, increased repo rate distortions, the severity of rate spikes, and intraday payment timing stresses, culminating…
Social networks rely on sharing engaging content for their users. Since continued production of user-generated content is critical to their success, they have constructed a variety of tools to motivate new content creation, to…
We document regime change in the U.S. Treasury market post-Global Financial Crisis (GFC): dealers switched from a net short to a net long position in the Treasury market. We first derive bounds on Treasury yields that account for…
We study how tax policies that lower the cost of capital impact investment and labor demand. Difference-in-differences estimates using confidential Census Data on manufacturing establishments show that tax policies increased both…
Profit shifting by multinational corporations is thought to reduce tax revenue around the world. We analyze the introduction of standard regulations aimed at limiting profit shifting. Using administrative tax and customs data from…
An extensive literature examines whether senior executives’ contractual incentives influence their financial reporting decisions. However, little is known about whether — and how — the incentives of lower-level (or “rank-and-file”…