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.
Contextual bandit algorithms often estimate reward models to inform decision-making. However, true rewards can contain action-independent redundancies that are not relevant for decision-making. We show it is more data-efficient to…
The problem of how to genetically modify cells in order to maximize a certain cellular phenotype has taken center stage in drug development over the last few years (with, for example, genetically edited CAR-T, CAR-NK, and CAR-NKT…
During a global pandemic, how can we best prompt social media users to demonstrate discernment in sharing information online? We ran a contextual adaptive experiment on Facebook Messenger with users in Kenya and Nigeria and tested…
Obesity and excess weight are major global health challenges. A number of technological solutions, including mobile apps, have been developed to help people lose weight. Many such applications provide access to human coaches who…
Using cross-border holding data from all custodians in China’s Stock Connect, we provide evidence that Chinese mainland insiders tend to evade the see-through surveillance by round-tripping via the Stock Connect program. After the…
This paper provides a dynamic theory of the effects of organizational capacity on public policy. Consistent with prevailing accounts, a bureaucratic organization with higher capacity, i.e., a better ability to get things done, is…
Consumer inertia, the tendency to remain inactive, is a robust and well-documented phenomenon. However, if consumers are aware of their future inertia they can act to mitigate its effects on their outcomes. Using a large-scale…
Why do people withdraw the dignity of humanity from others? Sociologists have focused on the roles of institutional processes through which blatantly dehumanizing norms and narratives diffuse through a population, whereas social…
Shifting attachments to social groups are a constant in the modern era. What accounts for variation in the strength of group identification? Whereas prior work has emphasized group-level properties and individual differences, this…
Work in Progress
Recommender systems play a vital role in driving the long-term value for online platforms. However, developing recommender systems for multi-sided platforms faces two prominent challenges. First, different sides have different and…
Descriptive norms — the behavior of other individuals in one’s reference group — play a key role in shaping individual decisions. When characterizing the behavior of others, a standard approach in the literature is to focus on…
Corporate credit lines are drawn more heavily when funding markets are more stressed. This covariance elevates expected bank funding costs. We show that credit supply is inefficiently dampened by the associated debt-overhang cost…
We study the impact of personalized content recommendations on the usage of an educational app for children. In a randomized controlled trial, we show that the introduction of personalized recommendations increases the consumption…
We characterize the contribution of immigrants to U.S. innovation, both through their direct productivity as well as through their indirect spillover effects on their native collaborators. To do so, we link patent records to a…
We describe the design, implementation, and evaluation of a low-cost and scalable program that supports women in Poland in transitioning into jobs in the information technology sector. This program, called “ Challenges ,” helps…
A core assumption in the impression management literature is that organizations voluntarily disclose information about their positive social and environmental activities, policies, and performance in order to improve or maintain…
We explore the welfare implications of data-tracking technologies that enable firms to collect consumer data and use it for price discrimination. The model we develop centers around two features: competition between firms and…
Measured as yield spreads against AAA corporate bonds, the convenience premium for agency MBS averaged 47 basis points between 1995 and 2021, about half of the long-term Treasury convenience premium. Both the MBS convenience…
We design and implement an adaptive experiment (a “contextual bandit”) to learn a targeted treatment assignment policy, where the goal is to use a participant’s survey responses to determine which charity to expose them to in a…