Publications

2013
Article

How Concentrated Is the U.S. Advertising and Marketing Services Industry? Myth vs. Reality

By: Alvin J. Silk and Charles King III

We analyze changes in concentration levels in the U.S. Advertising and Marketing Services industry using data from the U.S. Census Bureau's quinquennial Economic Census and the Service Annual Survey. These data, heretofore largely ignored, allow us to redress some of... View Details

Keywords: Concentration Levels; Data; U.S. Census Bureau’s Quinquennial Economic Census And The Service Annual Survey; Measurement Problems; Herfindahl-Hirschman Index; Concentration Ratios; Advertising; Advertising Industry; North and Central America

Purchase

18 Nov 2016
Conference Presentation

Rawlsian Fairness for Machine Learning

By: Matthew Joseph, Michael J. Kearns, Jamie Morgenstern, Seth Neel and Aaron Leon Roth

Motivated by concerns that automated decision-making procedures can unintentionally lead to discriminatory behavior, we study a technical definition of fairness modeled after John Rawls' notion of "fair equality of opportunity". In the context of a simple model of... View Details

Keywords: Machine Learning; Algorithms; Fairness; Decision Making; Mathematical Methods

27 Sep 2009
News

Opting in vs. Opting Out

20 Nov 2019
News

Lifting Fallen Families

Scott Roth (MBA 1994) in the Black Hills of South Dakota as the pair discussed ways to help. What Kim wanted to do was build a foundation that would aid in funding the college educations of military children who had lost a parent in the... View Details

Keywords: Maureen Harmon

2024
Working Paper

Categorical Processing in a Complex World

By: Marco Sammon, Thomas Graeber and Christopher Roth

In real-world news environments, quantitative information is rarely presented in isolation; it is characterized through qualitative comparisons with various reference levels. Company earnings, for example, are commonly compared to analyst forecasts, previous earnings,... View Details

Keywords: Announcements; Cognition and Thinking; Communication Strategy

July 2018
Article

Marketplaces, Markets, and Market Design

By: Alvin E. Roth

Marketplaces are often small parts of large markets, and both markets and marketplaces come in many varieties. Market design seeks to understand what marketplaces must accomplish to enable different kinds of markets. Marketplaces can have varying degrees of success,... View Details

Keywords: Labor Market; Pricing; Market Design; Markets; Economics

July 2002
Article

The Economist As Engineer: Game Theory, Experimental Economics and Computation As Tools of Design Economics

By: Alvin E Roth

Keywords: Game Theory; Economics; Mathematical Methods; Design

Awards

Nobel

By: Alvin E. Roth

Awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in Economics with Lloyd Shapley for their research on market design and matching theory. View Details

March 1996 (Revised November 1997)
Case

Dewar's (A): Brand Repositioning in the 1990's

By: Alvin J. Silk and Lisa Klein Pearo

Dewar's, a major brand of Scotch whisky, produced by United Distillers of the U.K., and the U.S. leader in the Scotch category with a 15% market share, faced a declining market among traditional consumers of distilled spirits. Given the growing societal, legal, and... View Details

Keywords: Advertising; Customers; Brands and Branding; Marketing Strategy; Market Participation; Strategic Planning; Opportunities; Consumer Products Industry; Food and Beverage Industry; United Kingdom; United States

Educators

Purchase

September–October 2021
Article

Internalization of Advertising Services: Testing a Theory of the Firm

By: Alvin J. Silk, Birger Wernerfelt and Shuyi Yu

In 1956, a group of trade associations representing publishers and independent advertising agencies signed a consent decree aimed at ending a set of trade practices that for half a century effectively precluded advertisers from owning and operating in-house agencies.... View Details

Keywords: Internationalization; Specialization; Theory Of The Firm; Advertising Agencies; Advertising; Organizational Structure; Theory

23 Jan 2008
First Look

First Look: January 23, 2008

a question related to whether the poor should be helped by the government or if they should help themselves, while the measure of luck is the share of the oil industry in the state's economy multiplied by... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

02 Sep 2014
First Look

First Look: September 2

paper: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2133004 Don't Take 'No' for an Answer: An Experiment with Actual Organ Donor Registrations By: Kessler, Judd B., and Alvin E. Roth Abstract—Over 10,000 people in the U.S. die... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

March 1996 (Revised February 1999)
Case

Vistakon: 1 Day Acuvue Disposable Contact Lenses

By: Alvin J. Silk, Bruce Issacson and Marie Bell

Vistakon, an independent and entrepreneurial subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, pioneered the production and marketing of disposable contact lenses with the 1987 launch of Acuvue, the first disposable extended-wear lens--a soft contact lens that patients wear for a... View Details

Keywords: Advertising Campaigns; Business Subsidiaries; Business Startups; Corporate Entrepreneurship; Price; Risk Management; Marketing; Product Positioning; Production; Performance Effectiveness; Consumer Products Industry; United States

Educators

Purchase

June 2008
Article

Current State of Fellowship Hiring: Is a Universal Match Necessary? Is It Possible?

By: Christopher D. Harner, Anil S. Ranawat, Muriel Niederle, Alvin E. Roth, Peter J. Stern, Shepard R. Hurwitz, William Levine, G. Paul DeRosa and Serena S. Hu

Currently, approximately ninety percent of the six hundred twenty graduating orthopaedic residents are planning on entering a post-graduate fellowship. Since January of 2005, two of the largest fellowship match programs, Sports Medicine and Spine Surgery, were... View Details

Keywords: Medical Specialties; Recruitment; Selection and Staffing; Employment; Market Timing; Marketplace Matching; Health Industry

Oct 2020
Conference Presentation

Optimal, Truthful, and Private Securities Lending

By: Emily Diana, Michael J. Kearns, Seth Neel and Aaron Leon Roth

We consider a fundamental dynamic allocation problem motivated by the problem of securities lending in financial markets, the mechanism underlying the short selling of stocks. A lender would like to distribute a finite number of identical copies of some scarce resource... View Details

Keywords: Differential Privacy; Mechanism Design; Finance; Mathematical Methods

19 Dec 2006
First Look

First Look: December 19, 2006

Working PapersAnomalies in Estimates of Cross-Price Elasticities for Marketing Mix Models: Theory and Empirical Test Authors:Andre Bonfrer, Ernest R. Berndt, and Alvin Silk Abstract We investigate the theoretical possibility and... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

12 Dec 2006
First Look

First Look: December 12, 2006

initiatives goes to organizations that are structured to support specific groups of recipients, often with sophisticated solutions. Such organizations rarely reach the broader populations that could be served by simpler alternatives.... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

07 Aug 2012
First Look

First Look: August 7

http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/13-009.pdf The Need for (long) Chains in Kidney Exchange Authors:Itai Ashlagi, David Gamarnik, Michael A. Rees, and Alvin E. Roth Abstract It has been previously shown that... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

2021
Working Paper

Kidney Exchange: An Operations Perspective

By: Itai Ashlagi and Alvin E. Roth

Many patients in need of a kidney transplant have a willing but incompatible (or poorly matched) living donor. Kidney exchange programs arrange exchanges among such patient-donor pairs, in cycles and chains of exchange, so each patient receives a compatible kidney.... View Details

Keywords: Kidney Exchange Programs; Health Disorders; Health Care and Treatment; Programs; Design