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.
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…
Mostly Exploration-Free Algorithms for Contextual Bandits
The contextual bandit literature has traditionally focused on algorithms that address the exploration-exploitation tradeoff. In particular, greedy algorithms that exploit current estimates without any exploration may be sub-optimal in…
Framework Agreements in Procurement: An Auction Model and Design Recommendations
Framework agreements (FAs) are procurement mechanisms commonly used by buying agencies around the world to satisfy demand that arises over a certain time horizon. This paper is one of the first in the literature that provides a formal…
Adaptive Concentration of Regression Trees, with Application to Random Forests
We study the convergence of the predictive surface of regression trees and forests. To support our analysis we introduce a notion of adaptive concentration for regression trees. This approach breaks tree training into a model selection phase in…
A Framework for Dynamic Oligopoly in Concentrated Industries
In this paper we introduce a new computationally tractable framework for Ericson and Pakes (1995)- style dynamic oligopoly models that overcomes the computational complexity involved in computing Markov perfect equilibrium (MPE). First, we define…
Allocating Emissions Among Co-Products: Implications for Procurement and Climate Policy
A state with climate policy may impose a tax on imported products for greenhouse gas emissions that occur in production and transportation to its border (a so-called border adjustment). A buyer may voluntarily commit to …
Evidence of Strategic Upcoding in Medicare Claims Data
Recent Medicare legislation has been directed at improving patient care quality by stopping reimbursement of hospital-acquired conditions (HACs). However, this policy may be undermined if some providers respond by upcoding, a practice…
Dynamic Learning of Patient Response Types: An Application to Treating Chronic Diseases
Currently available medication for treating many chronic diseases is often effective only for a subgroup of patients, and biomarkers accurately assessing whether an individual belongs to this subgroup do not exist. In such settings, physicians…
Disruption Risk and Optimal Sourcing in Multi-tier Supply Networks
We study sourcing in a supply chain with three levels: a manufacturer, Tier 1 suppliers, and Tier 2 suppliers prone to disruption from, e.g., natural disasters like earthquakes or floods. The manufacturer may not directly dictate which Tier 2…