Publications

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

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

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

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

Eliminating unintended bias in personalized policies using Bias Eliminating Adapted Trees (BEAT) - PNAS

An inherent risk of algorithmic personalization is disproportionate targeting of individuals from certain groups (or demographic characteristics such as gender or race), even when the decision maker does not intend to discriminate based on those... View Details

February 2024
Teaching Note

Data-Driven Denim: Financial Forecasting at Levi Strauss

By: Mark Egan

Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 224-029. Levi Strauss & Co. (“Levi Strauss”) partnered with the IT services company Wipro to incorporate more sophisticated methods, such as machine learning, into their financial forecasting process starting in 2018. The decision to... View Details

Keywords: Forecasting; Regression; Machine Learning; Artificial Intelligence; Apparel; Corporate Finance; Forecasting and Prediction; AI and Machine Learning; Apparel and Accessories Industry; United States

April 2020
Article

CEO Behavior and Firm Performance

By: Oriana Bandiera, Stephen Hansen, Andrea Prat and Raffaella Sadun

We measure the behavior of 1,114 CEOs in six countries parsing granular CEO diary data through an unsupervised machine learning algorithm. The algorithm uncovers two distinct behavioral types: "leaders" and "managers." Leaders focus on multi-function, high-level... View Details

Keywords: CEOs; Management; Behavior; Organizations; Performance; Analysis

Spring 2016
Article

Performance Responses to Competition Across Skill-Levels in Rank Order Tournaments: Field Evidence and Implications for Tournament Design

By: Kevin J. Boudreau, Karim R. Lakhani and Michael E. Menietti

Tournaments are widely used in the economy to organize production and innovation. We study individual contestant-level data from 2,796 contestants in 774 software algorithm design contests with random assignment. Precisely conforming to theory predictions, the... View Details

Keywords: Competition; Innovation Strategy

April 2008
Article

The Survey of Industrial R&D—Patent Database Link Project

By: William R. Kerr and Shihe Fu

This paper details the construction of a firm-year panel dataset combining the NBER Patent Dataset with the Survey of Industrial R&D conducted by the Census Bureau and National Science Foundation. The dataset constitutes a platform that offers an unprecedented view of... View Details

Keywords: Analytics and Data Science; Patents; Surveys; Research and Development; Innovation and Invention; Performance Productivity; Projects; Management Practices and Processes; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques

17 Jun 2015
News

High Yield On Main Street: Investors Earn 12% Lending To Small Business, When Banks Won't

Research Summary

Overview

By: Antonio Moreno

Professor Moreno’s research explores how digital technologies are reshaping operational processes, with a particular focus on retail and service industries. His early work examined omnichannel retail—the integration of online and offline channels to create seamless... View Details

Keywords: Omnichannel; Omni-channel; Omnichannel Retail; Omnichannel Retailing; Retail; Operations; Supply Chain Management; Digital Transformation; Digital Strategy; Retail Industry; Technology Industry; Service Industry; Europe; Spain; Latin America

29 May 2018
News

A Study of NASA Scientists Shows How to Overcome Barriers to Open Innovation

July 2023
Case

DayTwo: Going to Market with Gut Microbiome (Abridged)

By: Ayelet Israeli

DayTwo is a young Israeli startup that applies research on the gut microbiome and machine learning algorithms to deliver personalized nutritional recommendations to its users in order to minimize blood sugar spikes after meals. After a first year of trial rollout in... View Details

Keywords: Business Startups; AI and Machine Learning; Nutrition; Market Entry and Exit; Product Marketing; Distribution Channels

Educators

May 2023
Technical Note

Dynamic Pricing: Timing is Everything

By: Elie Ofek

This note provides a comprehensive exposition to the topic of dynamic pricing (whereby the fee customers are charged is time-dependent). It covers the motivation for firms to engage in dynamic pricing, provides a typology of the main formats dynamic pricing can take,... View Details

Keywords: Dynamic Pricing; Price

Educators

Article

Crowdsourcing City Government: Using Tournaments to Improve Inspection Accuracy

By: Edward Glaeser, Andrew Hillis, Scott Duke Kominers and Michael Luca

The proliferation of big data makes it possible to better target city services like hygiene inspections, but city governments rarely have the in-house talent needed for developing prediction algorithms. Cities could hire consultants, but a cheaper alternative is to... View Details

Keywords: User-generated Content; Operations; Tournaments; Policy-making; Machine Learning; Online Platforms; Analytics and Data Science; Mathematical Methods; City; Infrastructure; Business Processes; Government and Politics

2024
Working Paper

The Cram Method for Efficient Simultaneous Learning and Evaluation

By: Zeyang Jia, Kosuke Imai and Michael Lingzhi Li

We introduce the "cram" method, a general and efficient approach to simultaneous learning and evaluation using a generic machine learning (ML) algorithm. In a single pass of batched data, the proposed method repeatedly trains an ML algorithm and tests its empirical... View Details

Keywords: AI and Machine Learning