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- Faculty Publications (459)
Optimism
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- 2008
- Chapter
Allocating Marketing Resources
By: Sunil Gupta and Thomas J. Steenburgh
Companies spend billions of dollars on marketing every year because it is essential to organic growth. Given these large investments, marketing managers have the responsibility to optimally allocate resources and to demonstrate that their investments generate... View Details
- 2008
- Working Paper
How Can Decision Making Be Improved?
By: Katherine L. Milkman, Dolly Chugh and Max H. Bazerman
The optimal moment to address the question of how to improve human decision making has arrived. Thanks to fifty years of research by judgment and decision making scholars, psychologists have developed a detailed picture of the ways in which human judgment is bounded.... View Details
- Article
Optimal Life-Cycle Investing with Flexible Labor Supply: A Welfare Analysis of Life-Cycle Funds
By: Francisco J. Gomes, Laurence J. Kotlikoff and Luis M. Viceira
- 2008
- Working Paper
Allocating Marketing Resources
By: Sunil Gupta and Thomas J. Steenburgh
Marketing is essential for the organic growth of a company. Not surprisingly, firms spend billions of dollars on marketing. Given these large investments, marketing managers have the responsibility to optimally allocate these resources and demonstrate that these... View Details
- 2008
- Working Paper
Performance and Control across Multiple Markets
By: Tatiana Sandino, Dennis Campbell and Shelby Yu
Chain organizations typically operate units across different types of markets, with significantly diverging customer bases. Such market-type dispersion potentially influences performance through two channels: it makes performance a noisier indicator of store manager... View Details
- November 2007
- Background Note
Asset Allocation I
By: Joshua D. Coval, Erik Stafford, Rodrigo Osmo, John Jernigan, Zack Page and Paulo Passoni
The goal of these simulations is to understand the mathematics of mean-variance optimization and the equilibrium pricing of risk if all investors use this rule with common information sets. Simulation A focuses on five to 10 years of monthly sector returns that are... View Details
- November 2007
- Background Note
Bayesian Estimation & Black-Litterman
By: Joshua D. Coval and Erik Stafford
Describes a practical method for asset allocation that is more robust to estimation errors than the traditional implementation of mean-variance optimization with sample means and covariances. The Bayesian inspired Black-Litterman model is described after introducing... View Details
- 2007
- Working Paper
Optimal Reserve Management and Sovereign Debt
By: Laura Alfaro and Fabio Kanczuk
Most models currently used to determine optimal foreign reserve holdings take the level of international debt as given. However, given the sovereign's willingness-to-pay incentive problems, reserve accumulation may reduce sustainable debt levels. In addition, assuming... View Details
- February 2007 (Revised April 2007)
- Teaching Note
10 Uncommon Values®: Optimizing the Stock-Selection Process (TN)
By: Boris Groysberg and Paul M. Healy
- December 2006 (Revised October 2007)
- Course Overview Note
Managing Networked Businesses: Course Overview for Educators
Provides an overview for educators of concepts covered in the MBA elective course, "Managing Networked Businesses," (MNB). MNB focuses on management challenges in businesses that exhibit network effects. Such businesses comprise a large and growing share of the global... View Details
- December 2006
- Article
Europe vs America: Institutional Hysteresis in a Simple Normative Model
By: Rafael Di Tella and Robert MacCulloch
We show how the differences in US and European institutions can arise in a normative model. The paper focuses on the labor market and the government's decision to set unemployment benefits in response to an unemployment shock. The government balances insurance... View Details
- 2006
- Working Paper
The Value of a 'Free' Customer
By: Sunil Gupta, Carl F. Mela and Jose M. Vidal-Sanz
Central to a firm's growth and marketing policy is the revenus and profit potential of its customer assets. As a result, there has been a recent proliferation of work regarding customer lifetime value. However, extant research in this area is silent regarding how to... View Details
- 2006
- Working Paper
Too Motivated?
I show that an agent's motivation to do well (objectively) may be unambiguously bad in a world with differing priors, i.e., when people openly disagree on the optimal course of action. The reason is that an agent who is strongly motivated is more likely to follow... View Details
- January 2006 (Revised March 2010)
- Case
Peer-to-Peer File Sharing and the Market for Digital Information Goods
By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell, Andres Hervas and Jordan Mitchell
We study competitive interaction between two alternative models of digital content distribution over the Internet: peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing and centralized client-server distribution. We present microfoundations for a stylized model of p2p file sharing where all... View Details
Keywords: Price; Profit; Distribution; Competition; Internet and the Web; Information Infrastructure
- January 2006 (Revised October 2007)
- Background Note
Managing Networked Businesses: Course Overview for Students
Provides an overview for students of the MBA elective course Managing Networked Businesses (MNB). MNB focuses on management challenges in businesses that exhibit network effects. The first section of the note explains that such businesses comprise a large and growing... View Details
- 2005
- Article
Early Decisions: A Regulatory Framework
By: John Beshears, James J. Choi, David Laibson and Brigitte C. Madrian
We describe a regulatory framework that helps consumers who have difficulty sticking to their own long-run plans. Early Decision regulations help long-run preferences prevail by allowing consumers to partially commit to their long-run goals, making it harder for a... View Details
- Article
Organizational Beliefs and Managerial Vision
Can managers have an impact on their firm that goes beyond their direct actions and decisions? This article shows that a manager with strong beliefs about the right course of action will attract, through sorting in the labor market, employees with similar beliefs. This... View Details
- November 2004
- Tutorial
Principles of Microeconomics for Strategists
By: Felix Oberholzer-Gee, Pai-Ling Yin and Elizabeth Raabe
Reviews microeconomic principles from a business strategy perspective, using the digital music industry as context. Contains three modules: demand, supply, and equilibrium. The demand module discusses the willingness to pay, market demand, price elasticity, and... View Details