Publications

December 2022 (Revised June 2023)
Case

Hacking the U.S. Election: Russia's Misinformation Campaign

By: Shikhar Ghosh

The case discusses the relatively low technology approach used by Russia to influence the U.S. Presidential Election in 2016. Although political parties manipulating the media was not a new phenomenon, the Russians ran a broad, well-financed, and sophisticated social... View Details

Keywords: Political Elections; International Relations; Social Media; Power and Influence; Information; Russia; United States

Educators

19 Dec 2023
Research & Ideas

The 10 Most Popular Articles of 2023

life that includes rest, relationships, and a rewarding career. Is AI Coming for Your Job?In a post-AI world, where an algorithm can draft marketing copy—or even pop songs and movie scripts—anything seems possible. Harvard Business School... View Details

Keywords: by Danielle Kost

22 Feb 2024
Research & Ideas

How to Make AI 'Forget' All the Private Data It Shouldn't Have

predictions about the world. And now, even though generative AI feels very different from making a simple prediction, at a technical level, that's really what it is. In order to train these predictive systems, you need lots of example data input and output pairs. The... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne; Technology; Information Technology

March 2022
Article

Where to Locate COVID-19 Mass Vaccination Facilities?

By: Dimitris Bertsimas, Vassilis Digalakis Jr, Alexander Jacquillat, Michael Lingzhi Li and Alessandro Previero

The outbreak of COVID-19 led to a record-breaking race to develop a vaccine. However, the limited vaccine capacity creates another massive challenge: how to distribute vaccines to mitigate the near-end impact of the pandemic? In the United States in particular, the new... View Details

Keywords: Vaccines; COVID-19; Health Care and Treatment; Health Pandemics; Performance Effectiveness; Analytics and Data Science; Mathematical Methods

2022
Article

Towards Robust Off-Policy Evaluation via Human Inputs

By: Harvineet Singh, Shalmali Joshi, Finale Doshi-Velez and Himabindu Lakkaraju

Off-policy Evaluation (OPE) methods are crucial tools for evaluating policies in high-stakes domains such as healthcare, where direct deployment is often infeasible, unethical, or expensive. When deployment environments are expected to undergo changes (that is, dataset... View Details

Keywords: Analytics and Data Science; Research

Find at Harvard

13 Jan 2023
Research & Ideas

Are Companies Actually Greener—or Are They All Talk?

Most companies now account for social good in their financial reports in some way, but with regulation scattershot and evolving, it’s complicated for investors to assess so-called ESG reports. The disclosures, known as Environmental, Social, and Governance reports,... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne

2021
Working Paper

Time Dependency, Data Flow, and Competitive Advantage

By: Ehsan Valavi, Joel Hestness, Marco Iansiti, Newsha Ardalani, Feng Zhu and Karim R. Lakhani

Data is fundamental to machine learning-based products and services and is considered strategic due to its externalities for businesses, governments, non-profits, and more generally for society. It is renowned that the value of organizations (businesses, government... View Details

Keywords: Economics Of AI; Value Of Data; Perishability; Time Dependency; Flow Of Data; Data Strategy; Analytics and Data Science; Value; Strategy; Competitive Advantage

SSRN

July 2024
Article

How Artificial Intelligence Constrains Human Experience

By: A. Valenzuela, S. Puntoni, D. Hoffman, N. Castelo, J. De Freitas, B. Dietvorst, C. Hildebrand, Y.E. Huh, R. Meyer, M. Sweeney, S. Talaifar, G. Tomaino and K. Wertenbroch

Many consumption decisions and experiences are digitally mediated. As a consequence, consumer behavior is increasingly the joint product of human psychology and ubiquitous algorithms (Braun et al. 2024; cf. Melumad et al. 2020). The coming of age of Large Language... View Details

Keywords: Large Language Model; User Experience; AI and Machine Learning; Consumer Behavior; Technology Adoption; Risk and Uncertainty; Cost vs Benefits

December 2016
Article

Fake It Till You Make It: Reputation, Competition, and Yelp Review Fraud

By: Michael Luca and Georgios Zervas

Consumer reviews are now part of everyday decision making. Yet, the credibility of these reviews is fundamentally undermined when businesses commit review fraud, creating fake reviews for themselves or their competitors. We investigate the economic incentives to commit... View Details

Keywords: Ethics; Marketing Reference Programs

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2015
Working Paper

Fake It Till You Make It: Reputation, Competition, and Yelp Review Fraud

By: Michael Luca and Georgios Zervas

Consumer reviews are now part of everyday decision-making. Yet, the credibility of these reviews is fundamentally undermined when businesses commit review fraud, creating fake reviews for themselves or their competitors. We investigate the economic incentives to commit... View Details

Keywords: Information; Competition; Internet and the Web; Ethics; Reputation; Social and Collaborative Networks; Retail Industry; Food and Beverage Industry

SSRN

30 Nov 2010
Working Paper Summaries

Achieving Reliable Causal Inference with Data-Mined Variables: A Random Forest Approach to the Measurement Error Problem

By: Mochen Yang, Edward McFowland III, Gordon Burtch and Gediminas Adomavicius

Combining machine learning with econometric analysis is becoming increasingly prevalent in both research and practice. A common empirical strategy involves the application of predictive modeling techniques to "mine" variables of interest from available data, followed... View Details

Keywords: Machine Learning; Econometric Analysis; Instrumental Variable; Random Forest; Causal Inference; AI and Machine Learning; Forecasting and Prediction

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Register to Read

July 2013 (Revised August 2017)
Case

TaKaDu

By: Elie Ofek and Matthew Preble

In December 2012, Amir Peleg, founder and CEO of TaKaDu, reflected on how to position his young firm for the next fiscal year and beyond. The small Israeli startup had developed an innovative software system that used patented algorithms and statistical analysis to... View Details

Educators