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.
We consider the problem of a rational, Bayesian agent receiving signals over time for the purpose of taking an action. The agent chooses when to stop and take an action based on her current beliefs, and prefers (all else equal) to…
Sequential experiments are deployed in a variety of practices, including for optimizing product recommendations and pricing in online platforms. Such experiments are often characterized by an exploration-exploitation tradeoff that…
New products are the lifeblood of many sellers, who increasingly reach consumers via e-commerce platforms. Yet, search engines and e-commerce platforms have substantial difficulty exposing new products to their users on account of…
In e-commerce platforms, sponsored and non-sponsored content are jointly displayed to users and both may interactively influence their engagement behavior. The former content helps advertisers achieve their marketing goals and…
As households reduce discretionary spending in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, concerns are high that a resulting fall in aggregate demand can lead to a lasting recession post-COVID-19. Consequently, policies aimed at…
This paper describes a practical system for Multi Touch Attribution (MTA) for use by a publisher of digital ads. We developed this system for JD.com, an eCommerce company, which is also a publisher of digital ads in China. The…
How does cultural heterogeneity in an organization relate to its underlying capacity for execution and innovation? Existing literature often understands cultural diversity as presenting a trade-off…
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…
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 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)…
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…
Big data has enabled decision-makers to tailor decisions at the individual-level in a variety of domains such as personalized medicine and online advertising. This involves learning a model of decision rewards conditional on…