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.
This Is Why I Leave: Race and Voluntary Departure
Taking seriously the notion that race influences how proximate or distant groups are from resources, this paper develops a theory about how voluntary departure from the workplace reflects race as a structural position, meaning it shapes the…
Heroes and Villains: The Effects of Combat Heroism on Autocratic Values and Nazi Collaboration in France
Can heroes legitimize strongly-proscribed and repugnant political behaviors? We exploit the purposefully arbitrary rotation of French regiments to measure the legitimizing effects of heroic credentials. 53% of French line regiments happened…
Insurance without Commitment: Evidence from the ACA Marketplaces
We study the dynamics of participation and health care consumption in the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance marketplaces. Unlike other health insurance contexts, we find individuals commonly drop coverage midyear — roughly 30% of…
Asymptotically Optimal Control of a Centralized Dynamic Matching Market with General Utilities
We consider a matching market where buyers and sellers arrive according to independent Poisson processes at the same rate and independently abandon the market if not matched after an exponential amount of time with the same mean. In this…
Behavioral Targeting, Machine Learning and Regression Discontinuity Designs
The availability of behavioral and other data on customers and advances in machine learning methods have enabled targeting of customers in a variety of domains, including pricing, advertising, recommendation systems and personal selling contexts…
Effects of Attention and Recognition on Engagement, Content Creation and Sharing: Experimental Evidence from an Image Sharing Social Network
In this study, we examine the impacts of attention and recognition received by a user’s content on a social network on that user’s subsequent engagement on the network, content creation and content sharing. The study of the impact of attention…
Regulation of Charlatans in High-Skill Professions
We study a market for a skill that is in short supply and high demand, where the presence of charlatans (professionals who sell a service that they do not deliver on) is an equilibrium outcome. We use this model to evaluate the belief that…
Why is Intermediating Houses so Difficult? Evidence from iBuyers
We study the frictions in dealer-intermediation in residential real estate through the lens of “iBuyers,” technology entrants, who purchase and sell residential real estate through online platforms. iBuyers supply liquidity to households by…
Not Just for Investors: The Role of Earnings Announcements in Guiding Job Seekers
This paper examines whether, when, and why job seekers use firms’ financial information in the job search process. We find first evidence of financial information’s relevance to job seekers by documenting a substantial increase in job search…
Complexity and the Reform Process
Decision makers called to evaluate and approve a reform, proposed by an interest group, a politician, or a bureaucracy, suffer from a double asymmetric information problem: about the competence of the proposer and the consequences of the proposal…
Board Diversity and Shareholder Voting
The lack of board diversity is one of the most controversial topics in corporate board governance. We investigate one important influence on diversity by studying whether shareholders value diversity on corporate boards in director elections.…
Choice Screen Auctions
Choice screen auctions have been recently deployed in 31 European countries, allowing consumers to choose their preferred search engine on Google’s Android platform instead of automatically defaulting them to Google’s own search engine. I show…
Forging a Non-Violent Mass Movement: Economic Shocks and Organizational Innovations in India’s Struggle for Democracy
We provide the first systematic empirical evidence on factors that successfully mobilized one of the world’s first non-violent mass movements in favor of democratic self-government, using novel data from an unlikely venue for such collective…
Race and Economic Well-Being in the United States
We construct a measure of consumption-equivalent welfare for Black and White Americans. Our statistic incorporates life expectancy, consumption, leisure, and inequality. Based on this incomplete list of factors, welfare for Black Americans was 43…
Tractable Contextual Bandits Beyond Realizability
Tractable contextual bandit algorithms often rely on the realizability assumption — i.e., that the true expected reward model belongs to a known class, such as linear functions. We investigate issues that arise in the absence of realizability and…
An Experiment in Candidate Selection
Are ordinary citizens or political party leaders better positioned to select candidates? While the direct vote primary system in the United States lets citizens choose, it is exceptional, as the vast majority of democracies rely instead on…
Optimal Policies to Battle the Coronavirus “Infodemic” Among Social Media Users in Sub-Saharan Africa: Pre-analysis Plan
Alongside the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, an “infodemic” of myths and hoax cures is spreading over online media outlets and social media platforms. Building on the literature on combating fake news, we evaluate experimental interventions…
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 …
A How-To Guide for Conducting Retrospective Analyses: Example COVID-19 Study
In the urgent setting of the COVID-19 pandemic, treatment hypotheses abound, each of which requires careful evaluation. A randomized controlled trial generally provides the strongest possible evaluation of a treatment, but the efficiency and…
Improving Match Rates in Dating Markets Through Assortment Optimization
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…