Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(346)
- Faculty Publications (133)
- 2021
- Working Paper
Competitive Two-Part Tariffs
By: Jorge Tamayo and Guofu Tan
We study competitive two-part tariffs in a model of asymmetric duopoly firms that offer (vertically and horizontally) differentiated products. We show that the sign of the markup for each product depends on the average expected demand among all customers as well as the... View Details
- January 2021
- Article
Chain Stability in Trading Networks
By: John William Hatfield, Scott Duke Kominers, Alexandru Nichifor, Michael Ostrovsky and Alexander Westkamp
We show that in general trading networks with bilateral contracts, a suitably adapted chain stability concept (Ostrovsky, 2008) is equivalent to stability (Hatfield and Kominers, 2012; Hatfield et al., 2013) if all agents' preferences are fully substitutable and... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
Heterogeneity of Gain-Loss Attitudes and Expectations-Based Reference Points
By: Pol Campos-Mercade, Lorenz Goette, Thomas Graeber, Alex Kellogg and Charles Sprenger
Existing tests of reference-dependent preferences assume universal loss aversion. This paper examines heterogeneity in gain-loss attitudes, and explores its implications for identifying models of the reference point. In two experimental settings we measure gain-loss... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Reverse Information Sharing: Reducing Costs in Supply Chains with Yield Uncertainty
By: Pavithra Harsha, Ashish Jagmohan, Retsef Levi, Elisabeth Paulson and Georgia Perakis
Supply uncertainty in produce supply chains presents major challenges to retailers. Supply shortages create frequent disruptions in terms of promised delivery times, quantity and quality delivered. To alleviate these challenges, dual sourcing--a strategy in which... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Design Rules, Volume 2: How Technology Shapes Organizations: Chapter 5 Ecosystems and Complementarities
The purpose of this chapter is to introduce two new building blocks to the theory of how technology shapes organizations. The first is a new layer of organization structure: a business “ecosystem.” The second is the economic concept of “complementarity.” Ecosystems are... View Details
- August 2020
- Article
Lone Wolves in Competitive Equilibria
By: Ravi Jagadeesan, Scott Duke Kominers and Ross Rheingans-Yoo
This paper develops a class of equilibrium-independent predictions of competitive equilibrium with indivisibilities. Specifically, we prove an analogue of the “Lone Wolf Theorem” of classical matching theory, showing that when utility is perfectly transferable, any... View Details
- Article
The Price of Anarchy of Self-Selection in Tullock Contests
By: Hau Chan, David C. Parkes and Karim R. Lakhani
Crowdsourcing platforms operate by offering their clients the ability to obtain cost-effective solutions for their problems through contests. The top contestants with the best solutions are rewarded, and the submitted solutions are provided to the clients. Within the... View Details
- 2021
- Working Paper
Hunting for Talent: Firm-Driven Labor Market Search in the United States
By: Ines Black, Sharique Hasan and Rembrand Koning
This article analyzes the phenomenon of firm-driven labor market search—or outbound recruiting—where recruiters are increasingly “hunting for talent” rather than passively relying on workers to search for and apply to job vacancies. Our research methodology leverages... View Details
- December 2019
- Article
Costly Concessions: An Empirical Framework for Matching with Imperfectly Transferable Utility
By: Alfred Galichon, Scott Duke Kominers and Simon Weber
We introduce an empirical framework for models of matching with imperfectly transferable utility and unobserved heterogeneity in tastes. Our framework allows us to characterize matching equilibrium in a flexible way that includes as special cases the classic fully- and... View Details
- November 2019
- Other Article
Corrigendum to "Multilateral Matching"
By: Keisuke Bando, Toshiyuki Hirai, John William Hatfield and Scott Duke Kominers
We identify an error in the claim by Hatfield and Kominers (2015) that every stable outcome in the setting of multilateral matching with contracts is efficient. We then show that the result can be recovered under a suitable differentiability condition. View Details
- July 2019
- Article
Optimal Capital Structure and Bankruptcy Choice: Dynamic Bargaining vs Liquidation
By: Samuel Antill and Steven R. Grenadier
We model a firm’s optimal capital structure decision in a framework in which it may later choose to enter either Chapter 11 reorganization or Chapter 7 liquidation. Creditors anticipate equityholders’ ex-post reorganization incentives and price them into the ex-ante... View Details
- January 2019
- Article
Making Moves Matter: Experimental Evidence on Incentivizing Bureaucrats Through Performance-Based Postings
By: Adnan Q. Khan, Asim Ijaz Khwaja and Benjamin A. Olken
Bureaucracies often post staff to better or worse locations, ostensibly to provide incentives. Yet we know little about whether this works, with heterogeneity in preferences over postings impacting effectiveness. We propose a performance-ranked serial dictatorship... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Arbitration with Uninformed Consumers
By: Mark Egan, Gregor Matvos and Amit Seru
This paper studies the impact of the arbitrator selection process on consumer outcomes by examining roughly 9,000 consumer arbitration cases in the securities industry. Securities disputes present a good laboratory: arbitration is mandatory for all disputes,... View Details
- 2018
- Working Paper
Bundling Incentives in (Many-to-Many) Matching with Contracts
By: Jonathan Ma and Scott Duke Kominers
In many-to-many matching with contracts, the way in which contracts are specified can affect the set of stable equilibrium outcomes. Consequently, agents may be incentivized to modify the set of contracts upfront. We consider one simple way in which agents may do so:... View Details
- 2017
- Working Paper
Lone Wolves in Competitive Equilibria
By: Ravi Jagadeesan, Scott Duke Kominers and Ross Rheingans-Yoo
This paper develops a class of equilibrium-independent predictions of competitive equilibrium with indivisibilities. Specifically, we prove an analogue of the “Lone Wolf Theorem” of classical matching theory, showing that when utility is perfectly transferable, any... View Details
- August 2017
- Article
A Formal Theory of Strategy
What makes a decision strategic? When is strategy most important? This paper formally studies these questions, starting from a (functional) definition of strategy as “the smallest set of choices to optimally guide (or force) other choices.” The paper shows that this... View Details
- 2017
- Chapter
Innovation Policies
By: Ramana Nanda and Matthew Rhodes-Kropf
Past work has shown that failure tolerance by principals has the potential to stimulate innovation, but has not examined how this affects which projects principals will start. We demonstrate that failure tolerance has an equilibrium price – in terms of an investor’s... View Details
- Article
Who Will Vote Quadratically? Voter Turnout and Votes Cast Under Quadratic Voting
By: Louis Kaplow and Scott Duke Kominers
Who will vote quadratically in large-N elections under quadratic voting (QV)? First, who will vote? Although the core QV literature assumes that everyone votes, turnout is endogenous. Drawing on other work, we consider the representativeness of endogenously... View Details
- 2019
- Chapter
Network Effects
By: Andrei Hagiu and David B. Yoffie
Network effects are a key economic and strategic phenomenon in 'new economy' industries. They can, but do not necessarily, lead to market tipping, unless they outweigh customers' benefits from differentiation and are accompanied by high switching and multi-homing... View Details
Keywords: Network Effects
- May 2017
- Article
Experimental Evidence of Pooling Outcomes Under Information Asymmetry
By: William Schmidt and Ryan W. Buell
Operational decisions under information asymmetry can signal a firm's prospects to less-informed parties, such as investors, customers, competitors, and regulators. Consequently, managers in these settings often face a tradeoff between making an optimal decision and... View Details