Francisco Castro

I'm an assistant professor at UCLA Anderson School of Management. My work focuses on the operations and design of markets with emphasis on their spatial and incentive aspects. I'm particularly interested in the design of optimal pricing policies and contracts that can be used in digital marketplaces such as ride-hailing platforms and ad exchanges.

Research Interests

  • Revenue Management
  • Operations Management
  • Market Design
  • Mechanism Design
  • Pricing
  • Auctions
  • Ride-hailing platforms

Working Papers

Optimal Design of Default Donations. [SSRN]

  • Scott Rodilitz
  • Conference Version: Proceedings of the 25th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC), 2024.

Electric Vehicle Fleet and Charging Infrastructure Planning. [SSRN]

  • Sushil Mahavir Varma and Siva Theja Maguluri
  • R&R, Management Science
  • TSL Best Student Paper Award - Finalist 2023

Autonomous Vehicles in Ride-Hailing and the Threat of Spatial Inequalities. [SSRN]

  • with Jian Gao and Sébastien Martin
  • Under Review

Power-of-d Choices Load Balancing in the Sub-Halfin Whitt Regime. [arXiv]

  • with Sushil Mahavir Varma and Siva Theja Maguluri
  • Conference Version: Abstract Proceedings of the 2023 ACM SIGMETRICS
  • Minor Revision, Stochastic Systems

Dynamic Pricing and Matching for Two-Sided Markets with Strategic Servers. [arXiv]

  • with Sushil Mahavir Varma and Siva Theja Maguluri
  • Conference Version: Abstract Proceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGMETRICS

Matching Queues, Flexibility and Incentives. [arXiv]

  • with Peter Frazier, Hongyao Ma, Hamid Nazerzadeh and Chiwei Yan
  • Major Revision, MSOM

Optimal Timing of a Multi-Stage Project Under Market Uncertainty. [Link]

  • with René Caldentey, Rafael Epstein and Denis Sauré
  • Working paper

Published Papers

Getting Out of Your Own Way: Introducing Autonomous Vehicles on a Ride-Hailing Platform. [SSRN]

Matching Queues with Reneging: a Product Form Solution. [arXiv]

  • with Hamid Nazerzadeh and Chiwei Yan
  • Queueing Systems

The Scope of Sequential Screening with Ex-post Participation Constraints. [SSRN]

  • with Dirk Bergemann and Gabriel Weintraub
  • Conference Version: Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC), 2017.
  • Journal of Economic Theory

Spatial Capacity Planning. [Informs]

  • with Omar Besbes and Ilan Lobel
  • Conference Version: Proceedings of the 20th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC), 2019.
  • Operations Research

Fellowships and Awards

  • 2021 M&SOM Meritorious Service Award
  • Deming Doctoral Research Fellowship, The W. Edwards Deming Center, Columbia University, Graduate School of Business, 2018
  • Doctoral Fellowship, Columbia University, Graduate School of Business, 2014–2019
  • Outstanding Student Award, School of Engineering Sciences, Universidad de Chile, 2008, and 2012. Award conferred to the best 10 % students of every year

Contact Me

You can reach me at: francisco.castro At anderson.ucla.edu