Publications

July 2014
Article

Accounting for Crises

By: Venky Nagar and Gwen Yu

We provide among the first empirical evidence consistent with recent macro global-game crisis models, which show that the precision of public signals can coordinate crises (e.g., Angeletos and Werning, 2006; Morris and Shin, 2002, 2003). In these models,... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Disclosure; Mathematical Methods; Game Theory; Financial Markets; Forecasting and Prediction; Accounting; Financial Crisis

SSRN

Research Summary

Overview

By: Andy Wu

How can technology entrepreneurs build competitive advantage from the ground up? Professor Andy Wu conducts scholarly research and develops course materials that document how technology entrepreneurs can (1) organize for innovation to create new market opportunities... View Details

Keywords: Strategy; Entrepreneurship; Venture Capital; Growth Management; Organizational Design; Organizational Structure; Technology Platform; Technological Innovation; Information Technology Industry; Retail Industry; Pharmaceutical Industry; Video Game Industry; Media and Broadcasting Industry; United States; China; Southeast Asia; South Asia

28 Nov 2011
Research & Ideas

Rethinking the Fairness of Organ Transplants

A proposal out of Harvard and MIT to rethink how kidney transplants are allocated could result in a fairer system giving patients longer lives. The new empirical model, which is intensely data driven, would provide a flexible framework to... View Details

Keywords: by Dennis Fisher; Health

2017
Working Paper

Identifying Sources of Inefficiency in Health Care

By: Amitabh Chandra and Douglas O. Staiger

In medicine, the reasons for variation in treatment rates across hospitals serving similar patients are not well understood. Some interpret this variation as unwarranted and push standardization of care as a way of reducing allocative inefficiency. However, an... View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Performance Efficiency; Performance Productivity; Mathematical Methods

11 Dec 2007
First Look

First Look: December 11, 2007

method patents that were litigated compared to patents that were not litigated offer empirical evidence supporting the hypotheses. Cases & Course MaterialsThe AtekPC Project Management Office Harvard... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

May 2020
Article

Identifying Sources of Inefficiency in Health Care

By: Amitabh Chandra and Douglas O. Staiger

In medicine, the reasons for variation in treatment rates across hospitals serving similar patients are not well understood. Some interpret this variation as unwarranted and push standardization of care as a way of reducing allocative inefficiency. However, an... View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Performance Efficiency; Performance Productivity; Mathematical Methods

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October 2011
Article

The Surprising Power of Age-Dependent Taxes

By: Matthew C. Weinzierl

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

Keywords: Taxation; Policy; Age; Income; Mathematical Methods; Welfare; United States

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

23 May 2023
Research & Ideas

Face Value: Do Certain Physical Features Help People Get Ahead?

not even be aware of how much someone’s facial attributes are driving interpersonal judgments,” Zhang says. An empirical method for capturing charisma Traditionally, people assess charisma based on... View Details

Keywords: by Kara Baskin

20 Feb 2018
First Look

First Look at New Research and Ideas, February 20, 2018

priors/worldviews, or relevant features of a problem not being top of mind. Most research studying such losses does not empirically distinguish between these mechanisms. Instead, we show that most highly cited papers in this area presume... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

2023
Article

On Minimizing the Impact of Dataset Shifts on Actionable Explanations

By: Anna P. Meyer, Dan Ley, Suraj Srinivas and Himabindu Lakkaraju

The Right to Explanation is an important regulatory principle that allows individuals to request actionable explanations for algorithmic decisions. However, several technical challenges arise when providing such actionable explanations in practice. For instance, models... View Details

Keywords: Mathematical Methods; Analytics and Data Science

2024
Working Paper

Fiscal Policy under Convex Supply Curves

By: Shlok Goyal, Avi Lipton and Borui Niklas Zhu

Recent empirical evidence suggests that supply curves are convex. Supply curve convexity is at odds with conventional Phillips curves, which rely on an infinitely elastic underlying supply curve. This paper explores the effect of supply curve convexity on the... View Details

Keywords: Fiscal Stimulus; Fiscal Policy; Inflation; Inflation and Deflation; Macroeconomics; Policy; Mathematical Methods; United States

SSRN

21 Oct 2014
First Look

First Look: October 21

cross-sectional empirical evidence is most persuasive in favor of agency considerations. Studies centered on the May 2003 dividend tax cut confirm that differences in the taxation of dividends and capital gains have only a second-order... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

29 Jul 2002
Research & Ideas

Time Pressure and Creativity: Why Time is Not on Your Side

empirical research on time pressure and creativity in organizations, and the results were somewhat contradictory. Over the past few years, there's been more and more talk about time pressure in organizations, and what a prominent feature... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Education; Fine Arts

09 Mar 2010
First Look

First Look: March 9

the Panama Canal to make use of both conventional historical methods and the tools of quantitative analysis, The Big Ditch examines the impact of the Panama Canal on the Republic of Panama, the United States, and the world. Noel Maurer... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

May 2010
Article

Bye Bye Bundles: The Unbundling of Music in Digital Channels

By: Anita Elberse

Fueled by digital distribution, unbundling is prevalent in many information industries. What is the effect of this unbundling on sales? And what bundle characteristics drive this effect? I empirically examine these questions in the context of the music industry, using... View Details

Keywords: Unbundling; Bundling; Digital Distribution; System-of-equations Modeling; Sales; Distribution Channels; Framework; Mathematical Methods; Revenue; Reputation; Internet and the Web; System; E-commerce; Information Industry; Music Industry

Article

Oracle Efficient Private Non-Convex Optimization

By: Seth Neel, Aaron Leon Roth, Giuseppe Vietri and Zhiwei Steven Wu

One of the most effective algorithms for differentially private learning and optimization is objective perturbation. This technique augments a given optimization problem (e.g. deriving from an ERM problem) with a random linear term, and then exactly solves it.... View Details

Keywords: Machine Learning; Algorithms; Objective Perturbation; Mathematical Methods

2023
Working Paper

Distributionally Robust Causal Inference with Observational Data

By: Dimitris Bertsimas, Kosuke Imai and Michael Lingzhi Li

We consider the estimation of average treatment effects in observational studies and propose a new framework of robust causal inference with unobserved confounders. Our approach is based on distributionally robust optimization and proceeds in two steps. We first... View Details

Keywords: AI and Machine Learning; Mathematical Methods

2011
Working Paper

Price Competition under Multinomial Logit Demand Functions with Random Coefficients

In this paper, we postulate a general class of price competition models with Mixed Multinomial Logit demand functions under affine cost functions. We first characterize the equilibrium behavior of this class of models in the case where each product in the market is... View Details

Keywords: Customers; Income Characteristics; Price; Product Marketing; Mathematical Methods; Competition; Segmentation