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12 Dec 2023
Blog Post

Bridging Science and Business: My Summer Internship at Eli Lilly

Earlier this year, I had the incredible opportunity to further cultivate my intersecting interests during a transformative internship at Eli Lilly. It wasn't just a summer of tasks and projects—it was an experience that tied together my... View Details

Article

The Critical Role of Second-order Normative Beliefs in Predicting Energy Conservation

By: Jon M. Jachimowicz, Oliver P. Hauser, Julia D. O'Brien, Erin Sherman and Adam D. Galinsky

Sustaining large-scale public goods requires individuals to make environmentally friendly decisions today to benefit future generations. Recent research suggests that second-order normative beliefs are more powerful predictors of behaviour than first-order personal... View Details

Keywords: Climate Change; Energy; Environmental Sustainability; Household; Behavior; Values and Beliefs; Forecasting and Prediction

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28 Nov 2018
HBS Seminar

Paul Niehaus, University of California San Diego, Department of Economics

Article

Best Practices for Differentiated Products Demand Estimation with PyBLP

Differentiated products demand systems are a workhorse for understanding the price effects of mergers, the value of new goods, and the contribution of products to seller networks. Berry, Levinsohn, and Pakes (1995) provide a flexible random coefficients logit model... View Details

2014
Working Paper

Contraceptive Access and Fertility: The Impact of Supply-Side Interventions

By: Nava Ashraf, Erica Field and Jessica Leight

Declining fertility in both the developed and developing world has led to large and potentially welfare-enhancing changes in women's labor supply, education and investment in children in recent decades. However, it has been widely noted that the pace of this decline... View Details

Keywords: Fertility; Contraceptive Access; Zambia

August 2022
Case

Rocket Learning: Evidence in Action

By: Brian Trelstad, Tomas Rosales and Malini Sen

Founders of Rocket Learning, an India-based nonprofit which focused on early childhood education (ECE), received an invitation from MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (JPAL), a development research organization, to test its intervention for ECE with a... View Details

Keywords: Social Entrepreneurship; Early Childhood Education; Nonprofit Organizations; Literacy; Values and Beliefs; Social and Collaborative Networks; Education Industry; India; Asia

Educators

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December 2014
Article

The Discipline of Business Experimentation

By: Stefan Thomke and Jim Manzi

The data you already have can't tell you how customers will react to innovations. To discover if a truly novel concept will succeed, you must subject it to a rigorous experiment. In most companies, tests do not adhere to scientific and statistical principles. As a... View Details

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The data you already have can't tell you how customers will react to innovations. To discover if a truly novel concept will succeed, you must subject it to a rigorous experiment. In most companies, tests do not adhere to scientific and statistical principles. As... View Details

08 Nov 2023
Blog Post

Zone Defense: These self-driving, AI-powered drones do recon so soldiers don’t have to

armor, a project known in the press as the “Iron Man suit.” The idea seemed absurd—but not because of the comic-book connotations. Tseng, with a background in mechanical engineering and on-the-ground experience in actual conflict zones... View Details

Keywords: Technology; Entrepreneurship

July 31, 2017
Article

A Commitment Contract to Achieve Virologic Suppression in Poorly Adherent Patients with HIV/AIDS

By: Marcella Alsan, John Beshears, Wendy S. Armstrong, James J. Choi, Brigitte C. Madrian, Minh Ly T. Nguyen, Carlos Del Rio, David Laibson and Vincent C. Marconi

Objective: Assess whether a commitment contract informed by behavioral economics leads to persistent virologic suppression among HIV-positive patients with poor antiretroviral therapy (ART) adherence. Design: Single-center pilot randomized clinical trial and a... View Details

Keywords: Adherence; Antiretroviral Therapy; Behavioral Economics; Commitment Contract; Financial Incentives; HIV-1 Virologic Suppression; Health Disorders; Motivation and Incentives

February 2021
Article

Trust and Disintermediation: Evidence from an Online Freelance Marketplace

By: Grace Gu and Feng Zhu

As an intermediary improves trust between the two sides of its market to facilitate matching and transactions, it faces an increased risk of disintermediation: with sufficient trust, the two sides may circumvent the intermediary to avoid the intermediary’s fees. In... View Details

Keywords: Disintermediation; Intermediaries; Online Marketplace; Platform Strategy; Trust; Marketplace Matching; Digital Platforms

2024
Working Paper

The Uneven Impact of Generative AI on Entrepreneurial Performance

By: Nicholas G. Otis, Rowan Clarke, Solène Delecourt, David Holtz and Rembrand Koning

Scalable and low-cost AI assistance has the potential to improve firm decision-making and economic performance. However, running a business involves a myriad of open-ended problems, making it difficult to know whether recent AI advances can help business owners make... View Details

Keywords: AI and Machine Learning; Performance Improvement; Small Business; Decision Choices and Conditions; Kenya

SSRN

Article

Diversity and Team Performance in a Kenyan Organization

By: Benjamin Marx, Vincent Pons and Tavneet Suri

We present the results from a field experiment on team diversity. Individuals working as door-to-door canvassers for a non-profit organization were randomly assigned a teammate, a supervisor, and a list of individuals to canvass. This created random variation within... View Details

Keywords: Ethnic Diversity; Organizational Behavior; Labor Management; Groups and Teams; Diversity; Performance

2021
Working Paper

Quantifying the Value of Iterative Experimentation

By: Iavor I Bojinov and Jialiang Mao

Over the past decade, most technology companies and a growing number of conventional firms have adopted online experimentation (or A/B testing) into their product development process. Initially, A/B testing was deployed as a static procedure in which an experiment was... View Details

Keywords: Product Development; Value Creation; Research