Publications

February 26, 2024
Article

Making Workplaces Safer Through Machine Learning

By: Matthew S. Johnson, David I. Levine and Michael W. Toffel

Machine learning algorithms can dramatically improve regulatory effectiveness. This short article describes the authors' scholarly work that shows how the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) could have reduced nearly twice as many occupational... View Details

Keywords: Government Experimentation; Auditing; Inspection; Evaluation; Process Improvement; Government Administration; AI and Machine Learning; Safety; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms

February 2023 (Revised March 2024)
Supplement

Shanty Real Estate: Teaching Note Supplement

By: Michael Luca and Jesse M. Shapiro

Shanty is a simulation in which students inhabit the role of either a traditional home buyer or an iBuyer, both bidding on the same condo. The traditional home buyer has access to a “comp sheet” of similar properties that have recently sold, and has done a walkthrough.... View Details

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Decision Making; Measurement and Metrics; Market Timing

25 Mar 2020
News

Data-centric business: Inside the artificial intelligence factory

2023
Working Paper

In-Context Unlearning: Language Models as Few Shot Unlearners

By: Martin Pawelczyk, Seth Neel and Himabindu Lakkaraju

Machine unlearning, the study of efficiently removing the impact of specific training points on the trained model, has garnered increased attention of late, driven by the need to comply with privacy regulations like the Right to be Forgotten. Although unlearning is... View Details

Keywords: AI and Machine Learning; Copyright; Information

14 Dec 2017
News

Broker Leaks and Bitcoin Biases

Balancing Risk and Reward: An Automated Phased Release Strategy

Phased releases are a common strategy in the technology industry for gradually releasing new products or updates through a sequence of A/B tests in which the number of treated units gradually grows until full deployment or deprecation. Performing phased releases... View Details

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

Winter 2016
Article

Analytics for an Online Retailer: Demand Forecasting and Price Optimization

By: Kris J. Ferreira, Bin Hong Alex Lee and David Simchi-Levi

We present our work with an online retailer, Rue La La, as an example of how a retailer can use its wealth of data to optimize pricing decisions on a daily basis. Rue La La is in the online fashion sample sales industry, where they offer extremely limited-time... View Details

Keywords: Internet and the Web; Price; Forecasting and Prediction; Revenue; Sales; Retail Industry

September 24, 2021
Article

A Labor Movement for the Platform Economy

By: Li Jin, Scott Duke Kominers and Lila Shroff

Platforms are fundamentally changing the contract between workers and companies—and the workers and creatives that create value for platform companies, and rely on platforms for their livelihoods, often have little power when it comes to getting their concerns... View Details

Keywords: Gig Workers; Decentralized Collective Action; Internet and the Web; Labor; Labor and Management Relations; Digital Platforms

Register to Read

10 Jun 2017
News

How big data helped secure Emmanuel Macron’s astounding victory

Eva Ascarza

Eva Ascarza is the Jakurski Family Associate Professor of Business Administration in the Marketing Unit. She is the co-founder of the Customer Intelligence Lab at the D^3 institute at Harvard Business School. She teaches the Marketing core in the MBA required... View Details

Keywords: telecommunications; e-commerce industry; entertainment; financial services; retailing

2021
Working Paper

The Demand for Executive Skills

By: Stephen Hansen, Raffaella Sadun, Tejas Ramdas and Joseph B. Fuller

We use a unique corpus of job descriptions for C-suite positions to document skills requirements in top managerial occupations across a large sample of firms. A novel algorithm maps the text of each executive search into six separate skill clusters reflecting... View Details

Keywords: C-Suite; Jobs and Positions; Competency and Skills; Management Skills; Job Search; Job Design and Levels

2021
Working Paper

The Demand for Executive Skills

By: Stephen Hansen, Tejas Ramdas, Raffaella Sadun and Joseph B. Fuller

We use a unique corpus of job descriptions for C-suite positions to document skills requirements in top managerial occupations across a large sample of firms. A novel algorithm maps the text of each executive search into six separate skill clusters reflecting... View Details

Keywords: Executives; Management Skills; Competency and Skills

March 2021
Case

VideaHealth: Building the AI Factory

By: Karim R. Lakhani and Amy Klopfenstein

Florian Hillen, co-founder and CEO of VideaHealth, a startup that used artificial intelligence (AI) to detect dental conditions on x-rays, spent the early years of his company laying the groundwork for an AI factory. A process for quickly building and iterating on new... View Details

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence; Innovation and Invention; Disruptive Innovation; Technological Innovation; Information Technology; Applications and Software; Technology Adoption; Digital Platforms; Entrepreneurship; AI and Machine Learning; Technology Industry; Medical Devices and Supplies Industry; North and Central America; United States; Massachusetts; Cambridge

Educators

January 2023
Case

Proday: Calling the Right Play

By: Lindsay N. Hyde, Thomas R. Eisenmann and Tom Quinn

Sarah Kunst knew the elements of a successful startup from her tenure at venture capital firms. In April 2018, however, her own app – Proday, a home fitness platform featuring exercises filmed by professional sports stars – was floundering. Kunst theorized that... View Details

Keywords: Social Media; Entrepreneurship; Advertising; Digital Marketing; Product Launch; Social Marketing; Failure; Sports; Applications and Software; Business Startups; Technology Industry; United States

Educators

March 2019
Case

Wattpad

By: John Deighton and Leora Kornfeld

How to run a platform to match four million writers of stories to 75 million readers? Use data science. Make money by doing deals with television and filmmakers and book publishers. The case describes the challenges of matching readers to stories and of helping writers... View Details

Educators

2019
Article

More Amazon Effects: Online Competition and Pricing Behaviors

By: Alberto Cavallo

I study how online competition, with its shrinking margins, algorithmic pricing technologies, and the transparency of the web, can change the pricing behavior of large retailers in the U.S. and affect aggregate inflation dynamics. In particular, I show that in the past... View Details

Keywords: Amazon; Online Prices; Inflation; Uniform Pricing; Price Stickiness; Monetary Economics; Economics; Macroeconomics; Inflation and Deflation; System Shocks; United States