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.
Blending Advertising with Organic Content in E-Commerce: A Virtual Bids Optimization Approach
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 provides a stream…
Modernizing Retailers in an Emerging Market: Investigating Externally-focused and Internally-focused Approaches
Conditionally accepted at Journal of Marketing Research.
This paper studies the impact of business modernization on the sales performance of traditional retailers. We define modernization as adopting tangible structures and…
The Effects of the Affordable Care Act on Agricultural Workers
The Affordable Care Act substantially increased the share of farmworkers with medical insurance, but it had little effect on employer-provided benefits, including health care insurance. Eligible workers with pre-existing health conditions…
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 …
The Impact of Payment Frequency on Subjective Wealth Perceptions and Discretionary Spending
An increasingly popular trend is for consumers to get paid more often, resulting in more frequent, yet smaller paychecks. However, surprisingly little is known about whether and how payment frequency impacts consumer behavior. The current work…
Consumption Vouchers during COVID-19: Evidence from E-Commerce
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 stimulating consumer…
Beyond Myopia: Scarcity and Intertemporal Choice Reversals
It is widely understood that scarcity focuses people on “here and now” problems, causing myopic, impulsive decisions. Our work challenges this basic premise and asks whether scarcity can ever lead to increased patience. We suggest that existing…
Online Inference for Advertising Auctions
Advertisers that engage in real-time bidding (RTB) to display their ads commonly have two goals: learning their optimal bidding policy and estimating the expected effect of exposing users to their ads. Typical strategies to accomplish one of…
Diffusion and Pricing Over the Product Life Cycle
This chapter presents a selective review of a literature in marketing that analyzes diffusion and pricing over the product life-cycle. I primarily focus on empirical work, and on papers that deal with the dynamics of pricing over time. I discuss…
Price Promotions in “Freemium” Settings
The “freemium” model for digital goods involves selling a base version of the product for free, and making premium product features available to users only on payment. The success of the model is predicated on the ability to profitably convert…
Causally Driven Incremental Multi Touch Attribution Using a Recurrent Neural Network
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 approach has…
Making Time Matter: A Review of Research on Time and Meaning
In this conceptual paper, we review three decades of research on time and meaning in consumer research and psychology to identify key themes that have emerged, build frameworks that integrate past research, and reveal areas of potential for…
The Effect of Payment Frequency on Spending Behavior
Abstract coming soon.
It's Not Going to Be That Fun: Negative Experiences Can Add Meaning to Life
People seek to spend time in positive experiences, enjoying and savoring. Yet there is no escaping negative experiences, from the mundane (e.g., arguing) to the massive (e.g., death of a child). Might negative experiences confer a hidden benefit…
A Copycat Penalty: Micro Evidence From an Online Crowdsourcing Platform
Crowdsourced innovation platforms that enable organizations to outsource ideation to parties external to the firm are proliferating. In many cases, the platforms use open contests that allow the free exchange of ideas with the goal of improving…
Coalition Loyalty Program Not Working? Maybe You're Doing It Wrong
In this paper we explore the determinants of profitability for coalition loyalty programs. We consider a setting in which each of two firms competing in one market may form a coalition loyalty program with one of two firms in a different market.…
Cultivating Optimism: How to Frame Your Future During a Health Challenge
Research shows that optimism can positively impact health, but when and why people feel optimistic when confronting health challenges is less clear. Findings from six studies show that the frames people adopt when thinking about health challenges…
The Jilting Effect: Antecedents, Mechanisms, and Consequences for Preference
This research explores how the experience of a jilt — the anticipation and subsequent inaccessibility of a highly desirable, aspirant option — influences preference for incumbent and non-incumbent options. We conceptualize jilting as a multi-…
Big Data and Marketing Analytics in Gaming: Combining Empirical Models and Field Experimentation
Efforts on developing, implementing and evaluating a marketing analytics framework at a real-world company are described. The framework uses individual-level transaction data to fit empirical models of consumer response to marketing efforts, and…
Rethinking Time: Implications for Well-Being
How people think about and use their time has critical implications for happiness and well-being. Extant research on time in the consumer behavior literature reveals a predominantly dichotomized perspective of time between the present and future…