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…
Interference and Decision-Making in Marketplace Experimentation
Work in Progress
Leveraging Consensus Effect to Optimize Ranking in Online Discussion Boards
Online discussion platforms (often referred to as discussion boards) are designed for facilitating remote discussions between users. To stimulate engagement (e.g., participation in the discussion), these platforms offer arriving users a ranked…
On the Management of Premade Foods
This paper examines a grocery retailer’s management of a premade food product. The retailer’s goal is to maximize a weighted sum of direct profit and customer welfare. Multiple items of the product are produced in batches and displayed for sale.…
Pay-as-Bid Procurement Mechanisms for Differentiated Products
Problem definition: We consider the mechanism design problem of finding an optimal pay-as-bid mechanism in which the platform chooses an assortment of suppliers that balances the tradeoff between two objectives: providing enough…
Psychological Ownership as an Intervention: Improving the Government Benefit Participation Gap
SCP Annual Conference Best Competitive Paper Award, Runner Up, 2021
Quality Selection in Two-Sided Markets: A Constrained Price Discrimination Approach
Online platforms collect rich information about participants, and then share this information back with participants to improve market outcomes. In this paper we study the following information disclosure problem of a two-sided market: how much…
Robust Bounds for Welfare Analysis
Economists routinely make functional form assumptions about consumer demand to obtain welfare estimates — often for convenience, tractability, or both. How sensitive are welfare estimates to these assumptions? In this paper, we answer this…
Creditor Control Rights and Executive Bonus Plans
We study whether and how creditors exercise their control rights to shape their borrowers’ executive compensation plans. Highly levered borrowers often face incentives to underinvest due to agency conflicts driven by differences in time horizon…
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…
Where is Standard of Living the Highest? Local Prices and the Geography of Consumption
Income differences across US cities are well documented, but little is known about the level of standard of living in each city — defined as the amount of market-based consumption that residents are able to afford. In this paper we provide…
Quality Transparency and Healthcare Competition
Transparency of quality in the healthcare sector primarily aims to facilitate patients’ care decisions, however, it also provides useful information to competing healthcare providers. We study how competitors respond to increased transparency…
Computationally Tractable Choice
I incorporate computational constraints into decision theory in order to capture how cognitive limitations affect behavior. I impose an axiom of computational tractability that only rules out behaviors that are thought to be fundamentally hard. I…
Consistency of Spectral Clustering on Hierarchical Stochastic Block Models
We study the hierarchy of communities in real-world networks under a generic stochastic block model, in which the connection probabilities are structured in a binary tree. Under such model, a standard recursive bi-partitioning algorithm is…
Corporate Carbon Reduction Pledges: An Effective Tool to Mitigate Climate Change?
In this article we first summarize the specific plans articulated by seven major corporations for reducing their Corporate Carbon Footprints (abbreviated as CCF from hereon). Our sample is not intended to be representative of the broader…
Estimating Experienced Racial Segregation in U.S. Cities Using Large-Scale GPS Data
We estimate a measure of segregation, experienced isolation, that captures individuals’ exposure to diverse others in the places they visit over the course of their days. Using Global Positioning System (GPS) data collected from smartphones, we…
Mechanism Design with a Common Dataset
I propose a new approach to mechanism design: rather than assume a common prior belief, assume access to a common dataset. I restrict attention to incomplete information games where a designer commits to a policy and a single agent responds. I…
Organizational Structure and Decision-Making in Corporate Venture Capital
This paper studies corporate venture capital (CVC) units of large US corporations to learn how they make decisions across several areas: internal organization of CVC units, relationships with parent companies, CVC unit objectives, investment…
Where the Blame Lies: Unpacking Groups Shifts Judgments of Blame in Intergroup Conflict
Whom do individuals blame for intergroup conflict? Do people attribute responsibility for intergroup conflict to the in-group or the out-group? Theoretically integrating the literatures on intergroup relations, moral psychology, and judgment and…
The Evolution of Empirical Methods in Accounting Research and the Growth of Quasi-Experiments
This paper reviews the empirical methods used in the accounting literature to draw causal inferences. Similar to other social science disciplines, recent years have seen a burgeoning growth in the use of methods that seek to provide as-if random…