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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Paper in preparation.
In many settings, a decision-maker wishes to learn a rule, or policy, that maps from observable characteristics of an individual to an action. Examples include selecting offers, prices, advertisements, or emails to send to…
Two salient features of most online platforms are that they do not dictate the transaction prices, and use commissions/subscriptions for extracting revenues. We consider a platform that charges commission rates and subscription…
We study the dynamic mechanism design problem of a seller that repeatedly auctions independent items over a discrete time horizon to buyers that face a cumulative budget constraint. A driving motivation behind our model is the…
Motivated by recent initiatives to increase transparency in procurement, we study the effects of disclosing information about previous purchases in a setting where an organization delegates its purchasing decisions to its…
Millions of poor smallholder farmers produce global commodities, often through illegal deforestation. Multinational commodity buyers have committed to halt illegal deforestation and improve farmers’ livelihoods in their supply…
Crowd-sourced content in the form of online product reviews or recommendations is an integral feature of most Internet-based service platforms and marketplaces, including Yelp, TripAdvisor, Netflix, and Amazon. Customers may find…
We explore spatial price discrimination in the context of a ride-sharing platform that serves a network of locations. Riders are heterogeneous in terms of their destination preferences and their willingness to pay for receiving…
We study contracting for a three-tier supply chain consisting of a buyer, a supplier, and a sub-supplier where disruptions of random length occur at the sub-supplier. As is common in supply chains, the buyer has a direct…
In a multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem a gambler needs to choose at each round of play one of K arms, each characterized by an unknown reward distribution. Reward realizations are only observed when an arm is selected, and the…
This paper studies multi-tier supply chain networks in the presence of disruption risk. Firms decide how to source their inputs from upstream suppliers so as to maximize their expected profits, and prices of intermediate goods are…
This paper contributes to a recent thrust in the OM literature on how various sorts of transparency influence social and environmental responsibility in a supply chain. In practice, companies are under pressure to publish their…
Given the promise of 3D printing, also known as additive manufacturing, some innovative consumer goods companies have started to experiment with such a technology for on-demand production. However, the potential impact of 3D…
A Health Savings Account (HSA) is a tax-advantaged savings account available only to households with high-deductible health insurance. This paper provides initial answers to two questions related to HSAs: 1) How should a household…
Many scientific and engineering challenges — ranging from personalized medicine to customized marketing recommendations — require an understanding of treatment effect heterogeneity. In this paper, we develop a non-parametric…
We propose generalized random forests, a method for non-parametric statistical estimation based on random forests (Breiman, 2001) that can be used to fit any quantity of interest identified as the solution to a set of local moment…
Two-sided matching platforms, such as those for labor, accommodation, dating, and taxi hailing, can control and optimize over many aspects of the search for partners. To understand how the search for partners should be designed…
The deceased-donor kidney transplant candidates in the US are ranked according to characteristics of both the donor and the recipient. We seek the ranking policy that achieves the best efficiency-equity tradeoff, taking into…
In online advertising markets, advertisers often purchase ad placements through bidding in repeated auctions based on realized viewer information. We study how budget-constrained advertisers may compete in such sequential auctions…