Optimism - Publications - Faculty & Research

13 Oct 2017
HBS Seminar

Geoffrey Jones, Harvard Business School

June 1983
Article

A Comparison of Tournaments and Contracts

By: Jerry R. Green and Nancy Stokey

Tournaments, reward structures based on rank order, are compared with individual contracts in a model with one risk-neutral principal and many risk-averse agents. Each agent's output is a stochastic function of his effort level plus an additive shock term that is... View Details

Keywords: Tournaments; Contracts

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Article

Orienteering for Electioneering

By: Jonah Kallenbach, Robert Kleinberg and Scott Duke Kominers

In this paper, we introduce a combinatorial optimization problem that models the investment decision a political candidate faces when treating his or her opponents’ campaign plans as given. Our formulation accounts for both the time cost of traveling between districts... View Details

Keywords: Political Elections; Resource Allocation; Time Management; Analysis

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18 Apr 2016
Working Paper Summaries

Popular Acceptance of Morally Arbitrary Luck and Widespread Support for Classical Benefit-Based Taxation

Keywords: by Matthew C. Weinzierl

06 Sep 2005
Research & Ideas

The Best Place for Retirement Funds

and Harold Zhang, set out to derive rules for optimal asset location behavior for investors with these individually managed retirement accounts. Two results came out of this work: First, the optimal strategy... View Details

Keywords: by Ann Cullen

July 2005
Exercise

Pricing for Profit: Multi-Part Pricing in the U.K. Credit Card Industry

Examines the optimal pricing mechanism for credit cards. View Details

Keywords: Credit Cards; Price

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08 Mar 2016
Video

Educating Global Leaders in China

01 Mar 2016
News

Faculty Q&A: Price Check

2009
Case

Blaine Kitchenware, Inc.: Capital Structure: Brief Case No. 4040.

By: Timothy A. Luehrman and Joel L. Heilprin

A diversified mid-sized manufacturer of kitchen tools contemplates a stock repurchase in response to an unsolicited takeover. The company must analyze its debt capacity and optimal capital structure,while considering associated changes in firm value and stock price.... View Details

Keywords: Capital Structure; Financial Strategy; Interest Rates; Taxation; Stocks; Consumer Products Industry

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January 1990 (Revised November 1992)
Case

Competition and Product Variety

Examines the choice of optimal product positioning in a differentiated goods market. View Details

Keywords: Product Positioning; Competition

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Switchback experiments, where a firm sequentially exposes an experimental unit to random treatments, are among the most prevalent designs used in the technology sector, with applications ranging from ride-hailing platforms to online marketplaces. Although... View Details

23 Jun 2015
News

Upgrading School with a Startup Mentality

2022
Working Paper

Slowly Varying Regression under Sparsity

By: Dimitris Bertsimas, Vassilis Digalakis Jr, Michael Lingzhi Li and Omar Skali Lami

We consider the problem of parameter estimation in slowly varying regression models with sparsity constraints. We formulate the problem as a mixed integer optimization problem and demonstrate that it can be reformulated exactly as a binary convex optimization problem... View Details

Keywords: Mathematical Methods

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March 2022
Article

Where to Locate COVID-19 Mass Vaccination Facilities?

By: Dimitris Bertsimas, Vassilis Digalakis Jr, Alexander Jacquillat, Michael Lingzhi Li and Alessandro Previero

The outbreak of COVID-19 led to a record-breaking race to develop a vaccine. However, the limited vaccine capacity creates another massive challenge: how to distribute vaccines to mitigate the near-end impact of the pandemic? In the United States in particular, the new... View Details

Keywords: Vaccines; COVID-19; Health Care and Treatment; Health Pandemics; Performance Effectiveness; Analytics and Data Science; Mathematical Methods

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05 Dec 2019
Blog Post

Addressing Unmet Needs in Health Care Using an MBA

still so many unmet needs that can be addressed through innovation. There are unmet needs in clinical outcomes, care delivery, patient engagement and cost optimization that makes health care an exciting field to be in. In my day job, I... View Details

Research Summary

'Optimal Incentive Contracts under Inequity Aversion' (with Achim Wambach) ), 2005

We analyze the Moral Hazard problem, assuming that the agent is inequity averse. Our results differ from conventional contract theory and are more in line with empirical findings than these standard results. Our key findings are: Inequity aversion alters the structure... View Details

Career Coach

Michele Biamonte

Michele (HGSE, Adult Development '05) combines her professional experience in finance, talent management and higher ed admin to help students and alumni optimize their self-assessment, career exploration and personal branding process. She... View Details

Keywords: Education; Commercial Banking; Financial Services (All); Investment Banking; Financial Services (All); Investment Management; Financial Services (All)

November 2018 (Revised May 2019)
Case

California Closets: Organizing the Customer Experience

By: Boris Groysberg and Annelena Lobb

California Closets had used robust net promoter score (NPS) data, surveyed across its locations, to create a more consistent and satisfying customer experience. CEO Bill Barton wanted to further optimize the customer experience around best practices. He also wanted to... View Details

Keywords: Net Promoter Score; Customer Relationship Management; Customer Satisfaction; Customers; Acquisition; Demographics; Strategy

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