Working Papers

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 estimate any…

For individuals who take on the responsibility of caring for another person due to illness, disability, or declining abilities, it can often be challenging, lonely, costly, and exhausting. As the United States continues to address the…

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 cells entering…

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 40 combinations…

[Submitted to Management Science.]

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…

We attempt here to make some progress on developing a fuller understanding of the relationship between organizational size and culture. In doing so, we report on a survey we administered to a sample of full-time workers (men and women) in the US…

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 regulatory…

Do stock price run-ups predictably revert? We develop a model of financial markets with two types of investors: rational investors and “oversensitive” investors who react excessively to salient public news. The model yields a summary statistic…

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 more likely to…

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 randomized field…

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 psychologists…

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 article instead…

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 average behavior.…

This paper studies the importance of idiosyncratic endowment shocks for aggregate asset prices in a generalized continuous-time framework that accommodates both jumps and recursive preferences. I show that, regardless of the presence of jumps,…

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 to bank…

Executive compensation contracts use information from markets and accounting to elicit efficient incentives. We structurally estimate the contribution of each performance to quantify the relative importance of price versus accounting. For…

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 of content in…

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 database containing…

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 their reputation…