Working Papers

Problem definition: We study how online platforms can leverage the behavioral considerations of their users to improve their assortment decisions. Motivated by our collaboration with a dating company, we study how a platform…

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 example, policies…

We compare the revenue of the optimal third-degree price discrimination policy against a uniform pricing policy. A uniform pricing policy offers the same price to all segments of the market. Our main result establishes that for a broad class of…

The standard solution concept for stochastic games is Markov perfect equilibrium (MPE); however, its computation becomes intractable as the number of players increases. Instead, we consider mean field equilibrium (MFE) that has been popularized…

While information design has gained significant attention in the recent literature as a tool for shaping consumers’ purchase behavior, little is known about its use and implications in two-sided marketplaces, where both supply and demand…

Adaptive experiment designs can dramatically improve statistical efficiency in randomized trials, but they also complicate statistical inference. For example, it is now well known that the sample mean is biased in adaptive trials. Inferential…

Platforms can obtain sizable returns by operationally managing their market thickness, i.e., the availability of supply-side inventory. Using data from a natural experiment on a major B2B auction platform specializing in the $424 billion…

Part of thesis finalist of 2015 INFORMS George Dantzig Dissertation Award. Second place 2015 M&SOM Student Paper Competition

Problem definition: We consider the problem faced by a procurement agency that runs…

Many learning algorithms require categorical data to be transformed into real vectors before it can be used as input. Often, categorical variables are encoded as one-hot (or dummy) vectors. However, this mode of representation can be…

We study the classic sequential screening problem in the presence of ex-post participation constraints. We establish necessary and sufficient conditions that determine exhaustively when the optimal selling mechanism is either static or sequential…

Submitted to Operations Research

Motivated by drug design, we consider the best-arm identification problem in generalized linear bandits. More specifically, we assume each arm has a vector of covariates, there is an unknown vector…

We present a new perspective on the Synthetic Control (SC) method as a weighted least squares regression estimator with time fixed effects and unit weights. This perspective suggests a generalization with two way (both unit and time) fixed…

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 consumers, as well as…

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 fees to sellers…

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 emergence of real-…

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 employees. When…

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 chains. We propose…

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 such information…

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 service. Drivers…

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 relationship with the…