Publications

02 Oct 2017
What Do You Think?

Do Bitcoin and Digital Currency Have a Future?

mathematical puzzles,” receiving Bitcoins as payment for their services. Today, the largest “miner” of Bitcoins is a factory containing 25,000 computers and serviced on a 24/7 basis by 50 employees in Dallad Banner in Inner Mongolia,... View Details

Keywords: by James L. Heskett; Financial Services

16 Dec 2021
Blog Post

African American Student Union Spotlight on STEM

as a STEM student, and how did you overcome it? I don't come from a finance background, and it often shows when I'm going through cases or engaging in the classroom. The jargon and concepts are new, but I find solace in breaking things down to fundamental View Details

04 Feb 2010
What Do You Think?

What’s the Best Way to Make Careful Decisions?

for a more careful approach, suggesting that we place too much emphasis on intuition and personal experience as opposed to the "wisdom of crowds," mathematical models, and systematically-collected data. He argues that... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

October 2000 (Revised April 2001)
Case

Cost of Capital at Ameritrade

By: Mark L. Mitchell and Erik Stafford

Ameritrade Holding Corp. is planning large marketing and technology investments to improve the company's competitive position in deep-discount brokerage by taking advantage of emerging economies of scale. In order to evaluate whether the strategy would generate... View Details

Keywords: Developing Countries and Economies; Asset Pricing; Cash Flow; Cost of Capital; Investment; Marketing; Mathematical Methods; Competition; Information Technology; Internet and the Web; Financial Services Industry

08 Dec 2020
Research & Ideas

Why Companies Hunt for Talent on Digital Platforms, Not in Resume Piles

When it comes to the job hunt, many of us have a traditional view of what it takes to find a new position: A worker searches for available openings, sends in a resume, and waits for an interview. Much of academic research assumes that’s the way people find jobs, too.... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Employment

07 Jun 2004
Research & Ideas

What Drives Supply Chain Behavior?

provide prescriptive recommendations, many of these papers pursue an optimizing approach given the assumption of a completely rational decision maker. Testament to the complexity of these activities is the high level of mathematical... View Details

Keywords: by Sarah Jane Johnston

September 2010 (Revised January 2012)
Case

OPOWER: Increasing Energy Efficiency through Normative Influence (A)

By: Amy J.C. Cuddy, Kyle Todd Doherty and Maarten W. Bos

The case profiles OPOWER, an energy efficiency software company that applies Cialdini's principles of social influence to successfully encourage consumers to reduce their energy usage. OPOWER was co-founded in 2008 by two young Harvard graduates, Dan Yates and Alex... View Details

Keywords: Mathematical Methods; Applications and Software; Attitudes; Entrepreneurship; Energy Conservation; Power and Influence; Growth and Development Strategy; Energy Industry; United States

October 2001 (Revised October 2017)
Case

Store24 (A): Managing Employee Retention

By: Frances X. Frei and Dennis Campbell

Provides a retailing context in which employee retention strategies are explored through analyzing detailed store-level data. View Details

Keywords: Retention; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques; Analytics and Data Science; Strategy; Mathematical Methods; Retail Industry

September 2010 (Revised December 2010)
Case

Compass Maritime Services, LLC: Valuing Ships

By: Benjamin C. Esty and Albert W. Sheen

Tom Roberts, a founding partner of Compass Maritime Services, a New Jersey-based shipping research and consulting firm, has been asked by a new potential customer in May 2008 for advice on purchasing a capesize bulk carrier. After identifying a suitable ship with his... View Details

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Judgments; Price; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques; Negotiation Offer; Mathematical Methods; Ship Transportation; Valuation; Consulting Industry; Shipping Industry

Web

Frequently Asked Questions | HBS Online

data literacy. Data Science Principles introduces key concepts in data science—such as prediction, causality, visualization, data wrangling, privacy, and ethics—but does so without coding or mathematical application. The course is... View Details

30 Jun 2021
In Practice

The Harvard Business School Faculty Summer Reader 2021

What’s on HBS faculty members’ reading list for summer 2021? Which books are most meaningful to them and why? Below, faculty share their top picks, ranging from biographies and memoirs to their colleagues’ latest works. Julia Austin: Social justice and the Obamas I... View Details

Keywords: by Kathryn Haviland

17 Dec 2007
Research & Ideas

The Rise of Medical Tourism

the U.S. medical profession are still large. In India, the same depth of pool of engineering and mathematical talent for software, offshoring, and outsourcing is there for medicine, too. In the 1950s and '60s, the Indian government... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Health; Medical Devices & Supplies

03 May 2010
Research & Ideas

What Is the Future of MBA Education?

situations into mathematical models. The percentage of MBAs that we hire will go down in the next ten years. A director of a leading consulting firm made much the same point: We now hire a very large number of non-MBAs into our Associate... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Education

Student-Profile

Sagar Saxena

While applying for graduate programs, Sagar Saxena (he/him) was unsure about whether he had the right background to pursue a PhD in Business Economics at HBS because he had not taken graduate-level courses in mathematics or economics.... View Details

01 Mar 2009
News

The Case for Studying Financial History

guide than certain other disciplines that are sometimes regarded as more rigorous, like economics, for example. Economists with their more mathematical approach to social science conspicuously failed to anticipate this crisis, whereas a... View Details

Keywords: Roger Thompson; federal bailouts; Finance; Administration of Economic Programs; Government

Web

Bibliography - Option Pricing in Theory & Practice: The Nobel Prize Research of Robert C. Merton - Exhibits - Historical Collections

the American Mathematical Society , no. 4. New York, N.Y.: American Mathematical Society, 1951. * Samuelson, Paul A. Foundations of Economic Analysis . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1947. *... View Details

2024
Article

A Universal In-Place Reconfiguration Algorithm for Sliding Cube-Shaped Robots in Quadratic Time

By: Zachary Abel, Hugo A. Akitaya, Scott Duke Kominers, Matias Korman and Frederick Stock

In the modular robot reconfiguration problem we are given n cube-shaped modules (or "robots") as well as two configurations, i.e., placements of the n modules so that their union is face-connected. The goal is to find a sequence of moves that reconfigures the modules... View Details

Keywords: Robots; Mathematical Methods

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2023
Working Paper

Causal Interpretation of Structural IV Estimands

By: Isaiah Andrews, Nano Barahona, Matthew Gentzkow, Ashesh Rambachan and Jesse M. Shapiro

We study the causal interpretation of instrumental variables (IV) estimands of nonlinear, multivariate structural models with respect to rich forms of model misspecification. We focus on guaranteeing that the researcher's estimator is sharp zero consistent, meaning... View Details

Keywords: Mathematical Methods

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2022
Working Paper

Slowly Varying Regression under Sparsity

By: Dimitris Bertsimas, Vassilis Digalakis Jr, Michael Lingzhi Li and Omar Skali Lami

We consider the problem of parameter estimation in slowly varying regression models with sparsity constraints. We formulate the problem as a mixed integer optimization problem and demonstrate that it can be reformulated exactly as a binary convex optimization problem... View Details

Keywords: Mathematical Methods