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2023
Working Paper

The Complexity of Economic Decisions

By: Xavier Gabaix and Thomas Graeber

We propose a theory of the complexity of economic decisions. Leveraging a macroeconomic framework of production functions, we conceptualize the mind as a cognitive economy, where a task’s complexity is determined by its composition of cognitive operations. Complexity... View Details

Keywords: Decisions; Complexity; Perception; Consumer Behavior; Production

Article

Look 'Outside the Building' for the Future of Leadership

By: Rosabeth M. Kanter

The author discusses what she terms “outside the building” issues, such as climate change, pandemics, and racial/gender justice. These complex issues are “beyond the boundaries of single organizations.” As she writes, “I call this new leadership for the future... View Details

Keywords: Change Leadership; Advanced Leadership; Innovation; Complex Systems; Impact; Leadership; Change; Leading Change; Innovation Leadership

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2012
Chapter

Citizens' Perceptions and the Disconnect Between Economics and Regulatory Policy

By: Jonathan Baron, William T. McEnroe and Christopher Poliquin

Economic theory is clear about the advantages and disadvantages of various ways of regulating negative externalities, such as command and control, cap and trade, taxation, subsidies, and tort law. Yet public policy rarely follows the recommendations that follow from... View Details

Keywords: Regulation; Decision Making; Government and Politics; United States

2007
Article

Greedy Bidding Strategies for Keyword Auctions

By: Matthew Cary, Aparna Das, Benjamin Edelman, Ioannis Giotis, Kurtis Heimerl, Anna Karlin, Claire Mathieu and Michael Schwarz

How should players bid in keyword auctions such as those used by Google, Yahoo! and MSN? We consider greedy bidding strategies for a repeated auction on a single keyword, where in each round, each player chooses some optimal bid for the next round, assuming that the... View Details

Keywords: Auctions; Bids and Bidding; Strategy; Revenue; Search Technology

2025
Working Paper

Dynamic Personalization with Multiple Customer Signals: Multi-Response State Representation in Reinforcement Learning

By: Liangzong Ma, Ta-Wei Huang, Eva Ascarza and Ayelet Israeli

Reinforcement learning (RL) offers potential for optimizing sequences of customer interactions by modeling the relationships between customer states, company actions, and long-term value. However, its practical implementation often faces significant challenges.... View Details

Keywords: Dynamic Policy; Deep Reinforcement Learning; Representation Learning; Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment; Latent Variable Models; Customer Relationship Management; Customer Value and Value Chain; Foreign Direct Investment; Analytics and Data Science

SSRN

July–August 2024
Article

Doing More with Less: Overcoming Ineffective Long-Term Targeting Using Short-Term Signals

By: Ta-Wei Huang and Eva Ascarza

Firms are increasingly interested in developing targeted interventions for customers with the best response, which requires identifying differences in customer sensitivity, typically through the conditional average treatment effect (CATE) estimation. In theory, to... View Details

Keywords: Long-run Targeting; Heterogeneous Treatment Effect; Statistical Surrogacy; Customer Churn; Field Experiments; Consumer Behavior; Customer Focus and Relationships; AI and Machine Learning; Marketing Strategy

2023
Article

Which Models Have Perceptually-Aligned Gradients? An Explanation via Off-Manifold Robustness

By: Suraj Srinivas, Sebastian Bordt and Himabindu Lakkaraju

One of the remarkable properties of robust computer vision models is that their input-gradients are often aligned with human perception, referred to in the literature as perceptually-aligned gradients (PAGs). Despite only being trained for classification, PAGs cause... View Details

Keywords: AI and Machine Learning; Mathematical Methods

2022
Chapter

Decarbonizing Academia's Flyout Culture

By: Nicholas Poggioli and Andrew J. Hoffman

Flight is technologically and culturally central to academic life. Academia's flyout culture is built on a set of shared beliefs and values about the importance of flying to being an academic. But flight also generates a large proportion of academia’s carbon emissions,... View Details

Keywords: Carbon Emissions; Air Transportation; Values and Beliefs; Environmental Sustainability; Higher Education; Education Industry

June 2022
Article

A New Initiative to Track HIV Resource Allocation and Costs

By: Ryan McBain, AK Nandakumar, Michael Ruffner, Carlyn Mann, Mai Hijazi, Susanna Baker, Linden Morrison, Kalipso Chalkidou, Shufang Zhang, Iris Semini, Fern Terris-Prestholt, Steven Forsythe, Sarah Byakika, Joshua Musinguzi and Robert S. Kaplan

In early 2020, several global health institutions – including the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria; Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS); United States Agency for International Development; and Office of the Global AIDS Coordinator at... View Details

Keywords: Activity Based Costing; HIV; Cost; Health Care; Healthcare; Health Care and Treatment; Activity Based Costing and Management; Resource Allocation; Health Industry; Africa

2019
Working Paper

Design Rules, Volume 2: How Technology Shapes Organizations: Chapter 8 Rationalizing Flow Processes

By: Carliss Y. Baldwin

The purpose of this chapter is to examine the value structure of flow production processes and to explain why it is necessary to rationalize flow processes using the tools of systematic management. I first explain the problems facing managers of multi-step flow... View Details

Keywords: Flow Processes; Bottlenecks; Systematic Management; Production; Management; Problems and Challenges

2016
Working Paper

Financial Regulation in a Quantitative Model of the Modern Banking System

By: Juliane Begenau and Tim Landvoigt

How does the shadow banking system respond to changes in the capital regulation of commercial banks? This paper builds a quantitative general equilibrium model with commercial banks and shadow banks to study the unintended consequences of capital requirements. A key... View Details

Keywords: Capital; Commercial Banking

SSRN

1 Mar 2013 - 2 Mar 2013
Conference Presentation

The Value of Flexibility in Baseball Roster Construction

By: Timothy Chan and Douglas S. Fearing

Drawing inspiration from the theory of production flexibility in manufacturing networks, we provide the first optimization-based analysis of the value of positional flexibility (the ability of a player to play multiple positions) for a major league baseball team in the... View Details

Keywords: Risk and Uncertainty; Design; Production; Resource Allocation; Groups and Teams; Adaptation; Sports

24 Jul 2000
Research & Ideas

Value Maximization and Stakeholder Theory

of decisions regarding any of a firm's constituencies. The world may be complex and difficult to understand. It may leave us in deep uncertainty about the effects of any decisions we may make. It may be governed by complex dynamic systems that are difficult to View Details

Keywords: by Michael C. Jensen

Teaching Interest

Overview

By: Leemore S. Dafny

U.S. Healthcare Strategy

The U.S. healthcare sector accounts for 17 percent of GDP, and encompasses a diverse set of industries with public, nonprofit, and for-profit buyers and sellers. There are significant concerns about high and rising spending, and... View Details

Keywords: Healthcare; Health; Healthcare Reform; Life Sciences; Health Industry; United States

Teaching Interest

Executive Education: Finance for Senior Executives

By: Malcolm P. Baker

Finance for Senior Executives provides the frameworks to strategically use financial resources and position your company for future success. By examining corporate finance from both internal and external perspectives, this HBS Executive Education View Details

2024
Working Paper

Intrinsic Motivation and Referrals Within Firms: Evidence from a Large Microfinance Institution

By: Natalia Rigol and Benjamin N. Roth

Many organizations rely on internal referrals between employees with differing comparative advantages. Yet when an employee encounters a lucrative opportunity, they may be motivated to retain it even when doing so harms efficiency. We develop a framework that... View Details

Keywords: Loan Officers; Strategic Behavior; Strategic Disclosure; Microfinance; Financial Institutions; Financing and Loans

September 2008 (Revised August 2010)
Case

Boston Teacher Residency: Developing a Strategy for Long-term Impact

By: Stacey M. Childress, Geoff Eckman Marietta and Sara Suchman

In June 2008, Jesse Solomon, the founding director of the Boston Teacher Residency (BTR), faced an important decision about the organization's strategic direction. Since its founding in 2003, 125 of its graduates had joined the Boston Public Schools (BPS) and BTR had... View Details

Keywords: Restructuring; Teaching; Entrepreneurship; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Performance Improvement; Business Strategy; Education Industry; Boston

July 2003 (Revised March 2004)
Case

XM Satellite Radio (A)

By: David B. Godes and Elie Ofek

XM Satellite Radio is a radically new way to listen to radio. Management must develop a marketing strategy to launch the firm and the category. A crucial aspect of the strategy is to determine which of two business models the company will pursue. Should it focus... View Details

Keywords: Advertising; Business Model; Decision Choices and Conditions; Cost Management; Marketing Channels; Marketing Strategy; Problems and Challenges; Partners and Partnerships; Sales; Competitive Strategy; Communications Industry