Working Papers

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.

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Rational and Irrational Belief in the Hot Hand: Evidence from “Jeopardy!”

Anthony J. Kukavica, Sridhar Narayanan
December2024

For several decades, researchers and practitioners have wondered whether a
“hot hand” exists in domains with repeated, human-controlled trials. Using a comprehensive play-by-play dataset from the game show “Jeopardy!”, we demonstrate that…

An Equilibrium Model of Deferred Prosecution Agreements

Steven Grenadier, Brian Grenadier
November222024

Effective and Equitable Congestion Pricing: New York City and Beyond

Michael Ostrovsky, Frank Yang
November2024

In this paper, we argue that the New York City congestion pricing plan whose implementation was paused in the summer of 2024 had a major shortcoming: as designed, it would have had a much more severe impact on the drivers of personal vehicles…

The Labor Market Spillovers of Job Destruction

Michael Blank, Omeed Maghzian
November2024

Workers who lose their jobs during recessions face strikingly large and persistent declines in their future earnings. Using individual-level administrative data from the United States, this paper shows that an important driver of these costs is…

Switchback Price Experiments with Forward-Looking Demand

Yifan Wu, Ramesh Johari, Vasilis Syrgkanis, Gabriel Weintraub
October182024

We consider a retailer running a switchback experiment for the price of a single product, with infinite supply. In each period, the seller chooses a price from a set of predefined prices that consist of a reference price and a few discounted…

Veto Players and Policy Development

Alex Hirsch, Ken Shotts
October142024

We analyze the effects of veto players when the set of available policies isn’t exogenously fixed, but rather determined by policy developers who work to craft new high-quality proposals. If veto players are moderate, there is active competition…

When Does Interference Matter? Decision-Making in Platform Experiments

Ramesh Johari, Hannah Li, Anushka Murthy, Gabriel Weintraub
October102024

This paper investigates decision-making in A/B experiments for online platforms and marketplaces. In such settings, due to constraints on inventory, A/B experiments typically lead to biased estimators because of interference; this phenomenon has…

Decoding Social Disclosure Decisions: A Field Experiment with Workforce Diversity Data

Jung Ho Choi, Maureen McNichols, Maximilian Muhn
October2024

In recent years, U.S. public companies have increasingly begun to voluntarily disclose official workforce diversity data (i.e., EEO-1 reports), which they previously only confidentially filed with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission…

Federated Offline Policy Learning

Aldo Gael Carranza, Susan Athey
October2024

We consider the problem of learning personalized decision policies from observational bandit feedback data across multiple heterogeneous data sources. In our approach, we introduce a novel regret analysis that establishes finite-sample upper…

Human Capital Disclosure and Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from Regulation S-K

Jung Ho Choi, Dan Li , Daniele Macciocchi
October2024

We examine the labor market consequences of the 2020 Regulation S-K requiring human capital disclosure in 10K filings. Using large-sample job-level data, we observe that public firms subject to the regulation increase their disclosure of…

Qini Curves for Multi-Armed Treatment Rules

Erik Sverdrup, Han Wu, Susan Athey, Stefan Wager
October2024

Qini curves have emerged as an attractive and popular approach for evaluating the benefit of data-driven targeting rules for treatment allocation. We propose a generalization of the Qini curve to multiple costly treatment arms that quantifies the…

What Happens When Anyone Can Be Your Representative? Studying the Use of Liquid Democracy for High-Stakes Decisions in Online Platforms

Andrew B. Hall, Sho Miyazaki
October2024

Since the 19th century, political reformers have proposed broadening civic and corporate governance by allowing voters to delegate to any other voter — sometimes known as liquid democracy. Today, systems like liquid democracy have become an…

Estimating Wage Disparities Using Foundation Models

Keyon Vafa, Susan Athey, David Blei
September2024

One thread of empirical work in social science focuses on decomposing group differences in outcomes into unexplained components and components explained by observable factors. In this paper, we study gender wage decompositions, which require…

Interest Rate Risk in Banking

Arvind Krishnamurthy, Peter M. DeMarzo, Stefan Nagel
September2024

We develop a theoretical and empirical framework to estimate bank franchise value. In contrast to regulatory guidance and some existing models, we show that sticky deposits combined with low deposit rate betas do not imply a negative duration for…

Media Consolidation

Gregory J. Martin, Arianna Ornaghi, Nicola Mastrorocco, Joshua McCrain
September2024

Recent decades have seen major changes to the local media environment in the United States, with the absorption of many formerly independent local TV stations into conglomerates. Using a comprehensive dataset of acquisitions, we examine the…

Predicting Expert Evaluations in Software Code Reviews

Yegor Denisov-Blanch, Igor Ciobanu, Simon Obstbaum, Michal Kosinski
September2024

Manual code reviews are an essential but time-consuming part of software development, often leading reviewers to prioritize technical issues while skipping valuable assessments. This paper presents an algorithmic model that automates aspects of…

Price Experimentation and Interference

Wassim Dhaouadi, Ramesh Johari, Orrie B. Page, Gabriel Weintraub
September2024

In this paper, we examine biases arising in A/B tests where firms modify a continuous parameter, such as price, to estimate the global treatment effect of a given performance metric, such as profit. These biases emerge in canonical experimental…

Service Quality in the Gig Economy: Empirical Evidence about Driving Quality at Uber

Susan Athey, Juan Camilo Castillo, Bharat Chandar
September2024

The rise of marketplaces for goods and services has led to changes in the mechanisms used to ensure high quality. We analyze this phenomenon in the Uber market, where the system of pre-screening that prevailed in the taxi industry has been…

The Spiderweb of Partnership Tax Structures

Ryan Hess, Emily Black, Zaynah Javed, Jonathan Hennessy, Rebecca Lester, Jacob Goldin, Daniel E. Ho, Annette Portz
September2024

U.S. partnerships control more than $40 trillion in assets, vastly outnumber U.S. public firms, and contribute significantly to the U.S. tax non-compliance of pass-through entities, which is larger than the non-compliance of publicly traded…

Going Beyond Black-Box Models by Leveraging Behavioral Insights: an Intent-Based Recommendation Framework

Yuyan Wang, Cheenar Banerjee, Samer Chucri, Minmin Chen
August192024

Modern recommender systems, which rely on large-scale machine learning (ML) models to predict the next item a consumer will engage with, often lack generalizability and understanding of consumer behaviors due to their black-box nature. To address…