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.
We study the problem of model selection for contextual bandits, in which the algorithm must balance the bias-variance trade-off for model estimation while also balancing the exploration-exploitation trade-off. In this paper, we…
It has become increasingly common for data to be collected adaptively, for example using contextual bandits. Historical data of this type can be used to evaluate other treatment assignment policies to guide future innovation or…
Learning optimal policies from historical data enables the gains from personalization to be realized in a wide variety of applications. The growing policy learning literature focuses on a setting where the treatment assignment…
COVID-19 drove a mass social experiment in working from home. We survey more than 30,000 Americans over multiple waves to investigate whether WFH will stick, and why. Our data say that 20 percent of full workdays will be supplied…
Computationally efficient contextual bandits are often based on estimating a predictive model of rewards given contexts and arms using past data. However, when the reward model is not well-specified, the bandit algorithm may incur…
In medicine, randomized clinical trials are the gold standard for informing treatment decisions. Observational comparative effectiveness research is often plagued by selection bias, and expert-selected covariates may not be…
Vaccinating the world’s population quickly in a pandemic has enormous health and economic benefits. We analyze the problem faced by governments in determining the scale and structure of procurement for vaccines. We analyze…
We study how fathers’ access to workplace flexibility affects maternal postpartum health. We use variation from a Swedish reform that granted new fathers more flexibility to take intermittent parental leave during the postpartum…
When the government commits to a debt policy, the future value of government primary surpluses at all horizons is dictated by the debt dynamics under the risk-neutral measure. We compare the present discounted value of future…
The health care system commonly relies on information about family medical history in the allocation of screenings and in diagnostic processes. At the same time, an emerging literature documents that treatment for “marginally…
We study the dynamics of participation and health care consumption in the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance marketplaces. Unlike other health insurance contexts, we find individuals commonly drop coverage midyear — roughly 30…
Choice screen auctions have been recently deployed in 31 European countries, allowing consumers to choose their preferred search engine on Google’s Android platform instead of automatically defaulting them to Google’s own search…
Tractable contextual bandit algorithms often rely on the realizability assumption — i.e., that the true expected reward model belongs to a known class, such as linear functions. We investigate issues that arise in the absence of…
Alongside the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, an “infodemic” of myths and hoax cures is spreading over online media outlets and social media platforms. Building on the literature on combating fake news, we evaluate experimental…
In the urgent setting of the COVID-19 pandemic, treatment hypotheses abound, each of which requires careful evaluation. A randomized controlled trial generally provides the strongest possible evaluation of a treatment, but the…
In many areas, practitioners seek to use observational data to learn a treatment assignment policy that satisfies application-specific constraints, such as budget, fairness, simplicity, or other functional form constraints. For…
In severe viral pneumonia, including Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), the viral replication phase is often followed by hyperinflammation (‘cytokine storm syndrome’), which can lead to acute respiratory distress syndrome, multi…
There has been an increase in interest in experimental evaluations to estimate causal effects, partly because their internal validity tends to be high. At the same time, as part of the big data revolution, large, detailed, and…
We characterize optimal asset management contracts in a classic portfolio-investment setting. When the agent has access to hidden savings, his incentives to misbehave depend on his precautionary saving motive. The contract…
We develop a heterogeneous-agents network-based model to analyze alternative policies during a pandemic outbreak, accounting for health and economic trade-offs within the same empirical framework. We leverage a variety of data…