Publications

March 2005
Article

Sovereign Debt As a Contingent Claim: A Quantitative Approach

By: Laura Alfaro and Fabio Kanczuk

We construct a dynamic equilibrium model with contingent service and adverse selection to quantitatively study sovereign debt. In the model, benefits of defaulting are tempered by higher future interest rates. For a wide set of parameters, the only equilibrium is one... View Details

Keywords: Sovereign Finance; Borrowing and Debt; Interest Rates; Balance and Stability; Risk and Uncertainty; Risk Management; Mathematical Methods; Management Style; Segmentation; Debt Securities; Banking Industry

18 Sep 2006
Research & Ideas

When Words Get in the Way: The Failure of Fiscal Language

arbitrary terms with no intrinsic meaning, a lesson that even economists have not learned. "On the General Relativity of Fiscal Language," a working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, provides a mathematical... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Hanna

14 Jun 2017
Working Paper Summaries

Minimizing Justified Envy in School Choice: The Design of New Orleans' OneApp

Keywords: by Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Yeon-Koo Che, Parag A. Pathak, Alvin E. Roth, and Oliver Tercieux; Education

1995
Chapter

Regression to the Mean, Expectation Inflation, and the Winner's Curse in Organizational Contexts

By: J. R. Harrison and M. H. Bazerman

Keywords: Mathematical Methods; Conflict and Resolution; Competition; Organizational Structure

2014
Working Paper

Non-Adherence in Health Care: A Positive and Normative Analysis

By: Mark Egan and Tomas J. Philipson

Non-adherence in health care results when a patient does not initiate or continue care that a provider has recommended. Previous research identifies non-adherence as a major source of waste in US health care, totaling approximately 2.3% of GDP, and have proposed a... View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Behavior; Economics; Analysis; Mathematical Methods

January 2009 (Revised June 2010)
Teaching Note

Lyons Document Storage Corporation: Bond Math (Brief Case)

By: William J. Bruns Jr.

Teaching Note to 3215 View Details

Keywords: Financial Accounting; Quantitative Analysis; Securities; Debt Securities; Cash Flow; Mathematical Methods; Accounting

Purchase

Article

How Much Is a Reduction of Your Customers' Wait Worth? An Empirical Study of the Fast-Food Drive-Thru Industry Based on Structural Estimation Methods

In many service industries, companies compete with each other on the basis of the waiting time their customers experience, along with other strategic instruments such as the price they charge for their service. The objective of this paper is to conduct an empirical... View Details

Keywords: Customer Satisfaction; Price; Service Delivery; Mathematical Methods; Competition; Food and Beverage Industry; Service Industry

2008
Working Paper

CPC/CPA Hybrid Bidding in a Second Price Auction

By: Benjamin Edelman and Hoan Lee

We develop a model of online advertising in which each advertiser chooses from multiple advertising measurement metrics—paying either for each click on its ads (CPC), or for each purchase that follows an ad-click (CPA). Our analysis extends classic auction results by... View Details

Keywords: Online Advertising; Auctions; Bids and Bidding; Measurement and Metrics; Quality; Mathematical Methods; Web Sites

05 Dec 2017
Research & Ideas

What We've Learned from 101 Entrepreneurs in Emerging Markets

not just relying on the printed word—why can we not do research by referring to video, sound, and the like? There is so much mathematics devoted today to extraction of quantitative data from all sorts of data sources that a move in this... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

18 Oct 2006
Research & Ideas

New at the Helm: A Talk with HBS Dean Light

application aside and asked whether I'd like to get a doctorate instead," recalls Light. After discussions during a visit to the campus, Light agreed to enter a new doctoral program in decision and control theory, a joint program between HBS and Harvard's... View Details

Keywords: by Roger Thompson; Education

December 2024
Article

Respect for Improvements and Comparative Statics in Matching Markets

By: Scott Duke Kominers

One of the oldest results in the theory of two-sided matching is the entry comparative static, which shows that under the Gale–Shapley deferred acceptance algorithm, adding a new agent to one side of the market makes all the agents on the other side weakly... View Details

Keywords: Market Entry and Exit; Marketplace Matching; Mathematical Methods; Market Design

September – October 2007
Article

Trading Patterns and Excess Comovement of Stock Returns

By: Robin Greenwood and Nathan Sosner

n April 2000, 30 stocks were replaced in the Nikkei 225 Index. The unusually broad index redefinition allowed for a study of the effects of index-linked trading on the excess comovement of stock returns. A large increase occurred in the correlation of trading volume of... View Details

Keywords: Stocks; Investment Return; Market Transactions; Mathematical Methods

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

2010
Working Paper

The Unbundling of Advertising Agency Services: An Economic Analysis

By: Mohammad Arzaghi, Ernst R. Berndt, James C. Davis and Alvin J. Silk

We address a longstanding puzzle surrounding the unbundling of services occurring over several decades in the U.S. advertising agency industry: What accounts for the shift from bundling to unbundling of services and the slow pace of change? Using Evans and Salinger's... View Details

Keywords: Advertising; Change; Forecasting and Prediction; Cost; Price; Analytics and Data Science; Surveys; Marketing Strategy; Media; Service Operations; Agency Theory; Mathematical Methods; Advertising Industry; United States

29 Nov 2004
Research & Ideas

Caves, Clusters, and Weak Ties: The Six Degrees World of Inventors

letter actually getting to his friend—there were six referrals. This idea has passed into popular culture and urban folklore as the six degrees of separation. That's where it lay until a decade ago when a few researchers out of the Santa Fe Institute formalized the... View Details

Keywords: by Sara Grant; Publishing

13 Mar 2017
Research & Ideas

Hiding Products From Customers May Ultimately Boost Sales

sushi restaurant where customers order from a fixed menu.” Next steps The mathematical model in the paper assumes a situation in which a retailer would sell all styles of a product at the same price (e.g., all fall sandals would be priced... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Retail; Fashion

1979
Chapter

Research Methods and Data Analysis: The Challenge of Knowing How to Do What About Why

By: T. M. Amabile and W. DeJong

Keywords: Mathematical Methods; Knowledge Acquisition; Knowledge Management; Knowledge Use and Leverage

2017
Working Paper

Minimizing Justified Envy in School Choice: The Design of New Orleans' OneApp

By: Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Yeon-Koo Che, Parag A. Pathak, Alvin E. Roth and Oliver Tercieux

In 2012, New Orleans Recovery School District (RSD) became the first U.S. district to unify charter and traditional public school admissions in a single-offer assignment mechanism known as OneApp. The RSD also became the first district to use a mechanism based on Top... View Details

Keywords: Education; Decision Choices and Conditions; Marketplace Matching; Mathematical Methods; Design

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

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Theory; Measurement and Metrics; Mathematical Methods; Society