Publications
Publications
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- Faculty Publications (462)
Optimism
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- January 2013
- Article
Preference Heterogeneity and Optimal Capital Income Taxation
By: Mikhail Golosov, Maxim Troshkin, Aleh Tsyvinski and Matthew Weinzierl
We examine a prominent justification for capital income taxation: goods preferred by those with high ability ought to be taxed. In an environment where commodity taxes are allowed to be nonlinear functions of income and consumption, we derive an analytical expression... View Details
Keywords: Taxation
- Article
Assent-maximizing Social Choice
By: Katherine A. Baldiga and Jerry R. Green
We take a decision theoretic approach to the classic social choice problem, using data on the frequency of choice problems to compute social choice functions. We define a family of social choice rules that depend on the population's preferences and on the probability... View Details
- 2012
- Chapter
When Identities, Interests, and Information Collide: How Subgroups Create Hidden Profiles in Teams
By: Jeffrey T. Polzer, Lisa Kwan and Lisa B. Kwan
Purpose—We review how team members' identities and interests affect team functioning, paying special attention to subgroup dynamics triggered by fault lines and coalitions. This review sets the stage for describing novel pathways through which identities and... View Details
- October 2012
- Case
Hill Country Snack Foods Co.
By: W. Carl Kester and Craig Stephenson
Hill Country Snack Foods, located in Austin, Texas, manufactures, markets, and distributes snack foods and frozen treats. The CEO is passionate about maximizing shareholder value and believes in keeping tight control over costs and operating the business as efficiently... View Details
- September 2012 (Revised September 2015)
- Case
Doing Business in India
By: Andy Zelleke, Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Saloni Chaturvedi
The case is set in August 2012—a time when India was undergoing policy stasis as several key reforms were stalled and the government faced allegations of misallocation of coal production licenses. The first part of the case provides a brief background on India's... View Details
- June 2012 (Revised December 2017)
- Technical Note
Strategy and Strategic Decisions
This note introduces a framework for formulating strategy that helps a manager identify which decisions are strategic—and thus which decisions to focus on (both when developing strategy and when executing it)—and that provides a practical test for whether a particular... View Details
- 2012
- Article
Hiring Cheerleaders: Board Appointments of 'Independent' Directors
By: Lauren Cohen, Andrea Frazzini and Christopher Malloy
We provide evidence that firms appoint independent directors who are overly sympathetic to management, while still technically independent according to regulatory definitions. We explore a subset of independent directors for whom we have detailed, micro-level data on... View Details
- 2012
- Working Paper
No News Is Good News: CSR Strategy and Newspaper Coverage of Negative Firm Events
By: Jiao Luo, Stephan Meier and Felix Oberholzer-Gee
One of the benefits of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programs, it has been argued, is that they build up a reservoir of public good will, shielding companies in times of trouble. In this paper, we test the view that CSR provides protection from public ire by... View Details
- 2012
- Chapter
Problem Solving and Search in Networks
By: David Lazer and Ethan Bernstein
This chapter examines the role that networks play in facilitating or inhibiting search for solutions to problems at both the individual and collective levels. At the individual level, search in networks enables individuals to transport themselves to a very different... View Details
- Article
The Stock Selection and Performance of Buy-Side Analysts
We examine the selection and performance of stocks recommended by analysts at a large investment firm relative to those of sell-side analysts during the period mid-1997 and 2004. The buy-side firm's analysts issued less optimistic recommendations for stocks with larger... View Details
- February 2, 2012
- Article
Is There an Optimal Degree of Sustainability?
By: Robert G. Eccles, Ioannis Ioannou and George Serafeim
Corporate sustainability is not a one size fits all concept. A successful strategy balances all business pressures. View Details
- 2012
- Working Paper
~Why Do We Redistribute so Much but Tag so Little? Normative Diversity, Equal Sacrifice and Optimal Taxation
Tagging is a free lunch in conventional optimal tax theory because it eases the classic tradeoff between efficiency and equality. But tagging is used in only limited ways in tax policy. I propose one explanation: conventional optimal tax theory has yet to capture the... View Details
- 2014
- Working Paper
De Gustibus non est Taxandum: Heterogeneity in Preferences and Optimal Redistribution
By: Benjamin B Lockwood and Matthew Weinzierl
The prominent but unproven intuition that preference heterogeneity reduces redistribution in a standard optimal tax model is shown to hold under the plausible condition that the distribution of preferences for consumption relative to leisure rises, in terms of... View Details
- January–February 2012
- Article
Do You Need a New Product-Development Strategy?
By: Alan MacCormack, W. Crandall, P. Toft and P. Henderson
Many firms rely on a single new-product development process for all projects. But designing new products for different business contexts requires that a firm deploy different new-product development processes. Products designed for stable and mature end-user markets... View Details
- December 2011
- Case
Peace, Non-Aligned: The Pragmatic Optimism of Lakhdar Brahimi
By: James K. Sebenius and Laurence A. Green
Describes the background and career of Lakhdar Brahimi in numerous roles ranging from Algeria's ambassador to Indonesia and the Arab League, to serving as that country's foreign minister, and to his many years at the United Nations, with special emphasis on his actions... View Details
- November 2011
- Case
Celeritas, Inc.: Leadership Challenges in a Fast-Growth Industry
By: Michael Beer and Ingrid Vargas
In 2011, Celeritas is a leading data communications company in the crowded, highly competitive, and ever-evolving enterprise-network optimization market. Having experienced rapid growth since its founding in 2003, Celeritas has recently seen sales decline and has begun... View Details
- October 2011
- Article
The Surprising Power of Age-Dependent Taxes
This article provides a new, empirically driven application of the dynamic Mirrleesian framework by studying a feasible and potentially powerful tax reform: age-dependent labor income taxation. I show analytically how age dependence improves policy on both the... View Details
- September 2011 (Revised July 2012)
- Case
Building Watson: Not So Elementary, My Dear!
By: Willy Shih
This case is set inside IBM Research's efforts to build a computer that can successfully take on human challengers playing the game show Jeopardy! It opens with the machine named Watson offering the incorrect answer "Toronto" to a seemingly simple question during the... View Details
- September – October 2011
- Article
The Manufacturer's Incentive to Reduce Lead Times
By: Santiago Kraiselburd, Richard Pibernik and Ananth Raman
It is generally a well acknowledged fact that, ceteris paribus, reducing the lead times between downstream and upstream parties in a supply chain is desirable from an overall system perspective. However, an upstream party (e.g., a manufacturer) may have strong... View Details
- July 2011
- Article
Mixed Source
By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Gaston Llanes
We study competitive interaction between a profit-maximizing firm that sells software and complementary services and a free open source competitor. We examine the firm's choice of business model between the proprietary model (where all software modules are... View Details