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.
You may search for authors and topics and download copies of the work there.
Axiomatic Equilibrium Selection: The Case of Generic Extensive-Form Games
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…
Effective and Equitable Congestion Pricing: New York City and Beyond
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…
Federated Offline Policy Learning
We consider the problem of learning personalized decision policies from observational bandit feedback data across multiple heterogeneous data sources. In our approach, we introduce a novel regret analysis that establishes finite-sample upper…
Qini Curves for Multi-Armed Treatment Rules
Qini curves have emerged as an attractive and popular approach for evaluating the benefit of data-driven targeting rules for treatment allocation. We propose a generalization of the Qini curve to multiple costly treatment arms that quantifies the…
Robust Offline Policy Learning with Observational Data from Multiple Sources
We consider the problem of using observational bandit feedback data from multiple heterogeneous data sources to learn a personalized decision policy that robustly generalizes across diverse target settings. To achieve this, we propose a minimax…
Service Quality on Online Platforms: Empirical Evidence about Driving Quality at Uber
Forthcoming in Management Science
Online marketplaces have adopted new quality control mechanisms that can accommodate a flexible pool of providers. In the context of ride-hailing, we measure the effectiveness of these mechanisms…
Estimating Wage Disparities Using Foundation Models
One thread of empirical work in social science focuses on decomposing group differences in outcomes into unexplained components and components explained by observable factors. In this paper, we study gender wage decompositions, which require…
Service Quality in the Gig Economy: Empirical Evidence about Driving Quality at Uber
The rise of marketplaces for goods and services has led to changes in the mechanisms used to ensure high quality. We analyze this phenomenon in the Uber market, where the system of pre-screening that prevailed in the taxi industry has been…
Trends in Competition in the United States: What Does the Evidence Show?
Has the United States economy become less competitive in recent decades? One might think so based on a body of research that has rapidly become influential for antitrust policy. We explain that the empirical evidence relating to concentration…
LABOR-LLM: Language-Based Occupational Representations with Large Language Models
Many empirical studies of labor market questions rely on estimating relatively simple predictive models using small, carefully constructed longitudinal survey datasets based on hand-engineered features. Large Language Models (LLMs), trained on…
Data-driven Error Estimation: Upper Bounding Multiple Errors with No Technical Debt
We formulate the problem of constructing multiple simultaneously valid confidence intervals (CIs) as estimating a high probability upper bound on the maximum error for a class/set of estimate-estimand-error tuples, and refer to this as the error…
The A.I. Dilemma: Growth versus Existential Risk
Advances in artificial intelligence (A.I.) are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they may increase economic growth as A.I. augments our ability to innovate. On the other hand, many experts worry that these advances entail existential risk:…
The Heterogeneous Impact of Changes in Default Gift Amounts on Fundraising
When choosing whether and how much to donate, potential donors often observe a set of default donation amounts known as an “ask string.” In an experiment with more than 400,000 PayPal users, we replace a relatively unused donation amount ($75) on…
The Value of Non-traditional Credentials in the Labor Market
This study investigates the labor market value of credentials obtained from Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and shared on business networking platforms. We conducted a randomized experiment involving more than 800,000 learners, primarily from…
Digital Interventions and Habit Formation in Educational Technology
We evaluate a contest-based intervention intended to increase the usage of an educational app that helps children in India learn to read English. The evaluation included approximately 10,000 children, of whom about half were randomly selected to…
Who Becomes a Successful Entrepreneur? The Role of Early Industry Exposure
We consider the role of parental influence on the industry choice of entrepreneurs and the success of their ventures. Almost 75% of male entrepreneurs start a firm in an industry that is the same or closely related to their fathers’ industry of…
GDP-B: A New Well-Being Metric in the Era of the Digital Economy
Gross Domestic Product (GDP), though often used as a proxy for economic well-being, was not designed for this purpose and is inadequate. In our current research, we are building new metrics for measuring changes in consumer well-being that…
Impact Matters for Giving at Checkout
We conducted two experiments on PayPal’s Give at Checkout feature to learn about the effect of 1) information about charity outcomes on donations, and 2) exposure to these point-of-sale microgiving requests on subsequent giving. In this “…
Market Design for Surface Water
Many proposed surface water transfers undergo a series of regulatory reviews designed to mitigate hydrological and economic externalities. While these reviews help limit externalities, they impose substantial transaction costs that also limit…
Proportional Response: Contextual Bandits for Simple and Cumulative Regret Minimization
In many applications, e.g. in healthcare and e-commerce, the goal of a contextual bandit may be to learn an optimal treatment assignment policy at the end of the experiment. That is, to minimize simple regret. However, this objective remains…