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.
Offline Multi-Action Policy Learning: Generalization and Optimization
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…
Optimal Commissions and Subscriptions in Networked Markets
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…
Dynamic Mechanism Design with Budget Constrained Buyers Under Limited Commitment
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-…
Increased Transparency in Procurement: The Role of Peer-Effects
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…
Sustaining Rainforests and Smallholders by Eliminating Payment Delay in a Commodity Supply Chain—It takes a Village
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…
Inducing Exploration in Service Platforms
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…
Spatial Pricing in Ride-Sharing Networks
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…
Multi-Tiered Supply Chain Risk Management
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…
Optimal Exploration-Exploitation in a Multi-Armed-Bandit Problem with Non-stationary Rewards
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 gambler’s objective…
Supply Disruptions and Optimal Network Structures
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 set so that…
Reveal the Supplier List? A Trade-Off in Capacity vs. Responsibility
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 supplier lists and…
Retailing with 3D Printing
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 printing on retail…
Health Savings Accounts: Consumer Contribution Strategies & Policy Implications
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 determine its…
Estimation and Inference of Heterogeneous Treatment Effects using Random Forests
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 causal forest for…
Generalized Random Forests
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 equations.…
Facilitating the Search for Partners on Matching Platforms: Restricting Agents’ Actions
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, we consider a…
KDPI-Dependent Ranking Policies: Shaping the Allocation of Deceased-Donor Kidneys in the New Era
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 account patients’…
Learning in Repeated Auctions with Budgets: Regret Minimization and Equilibrium
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 in the presence…
Matrix Completion Methods for Causal Panel Data Models
In this paper we develop new methods for estimating causal effects in settings with panel data, where a subset of units are exposed to a treatment during a subset of periods, and the goal is estimating counterfactual (untreated) outcomes for the…