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.
Including Corporate Social Responsibility, Environmental Sustainability, and Ethics in Calibrating MBA Job Preferences
Our research studies 759 MBAs graduating from eleven business schools to gain insight into what MBAs in the 21st Century care about during their job searches. We update the MBA job preference literature by using adaptive conjoint analysis to…
Psychological Ownership as an Intervention: Improving the Government Benefit Participation Gap
SCP Annual Conference Best Competitive Paper Award, Runner Up, 2021
The Economic Value of Norm Conformity and Menu-Opt-out Costs
This paper theoretically and empirically analyzes the trade-offs between consumption versus norm conformity and choosing from a menu of default (pre-selected) options versus opting to compute a preferred non-menu choice. In the theoretical model…
Machine Learning, Behavioral Targeting and Regression Discontinuity Designs
The availability of behavioral data on customers and advances in machine learning methods have enabled scoring and targeting of customers in a variety of domains, including pricing, advertising, recommendation and personal selling. Typically,…
Automated Bidding and Budget Optimization for Performance Advertising Campaigns
We present an approach to automate the bidding and budgeting of multi-unit digital advertising campaigns. Such campaigns typically involve groups of ad-units that span multiple user segments, ad-delivery channels and media that together are meant…
Advertising as Information for Ranking E-Commerce Search Listings
New products are the lifeblood of many sellers, who increasingly reach consumers via e-commerce platforms. Yet, search engines and e-commerce platforms have substantial difficulty exposing new products to their users on account of an information…
The Impact of Mobile App Failures on Online and Offline Purchases
Over half of all shopping journeys start with the mobile channel. In particular, the presence of a branded mobile app significantly influences shopping across channels. However, a majority of app users decrease app usage or even abandon an app,…
Blending Advertising with Organic Content in E-Commerce: A Virtual Bids Optimization Approach
In e-commerce platforms, sponsored and non-sponsored content are jointly displayed to users and both may interactively influence their engagement behavior. The former content helps advertisers achieve their marketing goals and provides a stream…
Modernizing Retailers in an Emerging Market: Investigating Externally-focused and Internally-focused Approaches
Conditionally accepted at Journal of Marketing Research.
This paper studies the impact of business modernization on the sales performance of traditional retailers. We define modernization as adopting tangible structures and…
The Effects of the Affordable Care Act on Agricultural Workers
The Affordable Care Act substantially increased the share of farmworkers with medical insurance, but it had little effect on employer-provided benefits, including health care insurance. Eligible workers with pre-existing health conditions…
Comparison Lift: Bandit-based Experimentation System for Online Advertising
Comparison Lift is an experimentation-as-a-service (EaaS) application for testing online advertising audiences and creatives at JD.com. Unlike many other EaaS tools that focus primarily on fixed sample A/B testing, Comparison …
The Impact of Payment Frequency on Subjective Wealth Perceptions and Discretionary Spending
An increasingly popular trend is for consumers to get paid more often, resulting in more frequent, yet smaller paychecks. However, surprisingly little is known about whether and how payment frequency impacts consumer behavior. The current work…
Consumption Vouchers during COVID-19: Evidence from E-Commerce
As households reduce discretionary spending in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, concerns are high that a resulting fall in aggregate demand can lead to a lasting recession post-COVID-19. Consequently, policies aimed at stimulating consumer…
Beyond Myopia: Scarcity and Intertemporal Choice Reversals
It is widely understood that scarcity focuses people on “here and now” problems, causing myopic, impulsive decisions. Our work challenges this basic premise and asks whether scarcity can ever lead to increased patience. We suggest that existing…
Online Inference for Advertising Auctions
Advertisers that engage in real-time bidding (RTB) to display their ads commonly have two goals: learning their optimal bidding policy and estimating the expected effect of exposing users to their ads. Typical strategies to accomplish one of…
Diffusion and Pricing Over the Product Life Cycle
This chapter presents a selective review of a literature in marketing that analyzes diffusion and pricing over the product life-cycle. I primarily focus on empirical work, and on papers that deal with the dynamics of pricing over time. I discuss…
Parallel Experimentation in a Competitive Advertising Marketplace
When multiple firms are simultaneously running experiments on a platform, the treatment effects for one firm may depend on the experimentation policies of others. This paper presents a set of causal estimands that are relevant to such an…
Price Promotions in “Freemium” Settings
The “freemium” model for digital goods involves selling a base version of the product for free, and making premium product features available to users only on payment. The success of the model is predicated on the ability to profitably convert…
Causally Driven Incremental Multi Touch Attribution Using a Recurrent Neural Network
This paper describes a practical system for Multi Touch Attribution (MTA) for use by a publisher of digital ads. We developed this system for JD.com, an eCommerce company, which is also a publisher of digital ads in China. The approach has…
Making Time Matter: A Review of Research on Time and Meaning
In this conceptual paper, we review three decades of research on time and meaning in consumer research and psychology to identify key themes that have emerged, build frameworks that integrate past research, and reveal areas of potential for…