Publications

February 2006 (Revised March 2008)
Case

ChoicePoint (A)

By: Lynn S. Paine and Zack Phillips

The CEO of ChoicePoint, a leading company in the rapidly growing U.S. personal data industry, must reexamine the company's business model after a serious breach of data security affecting some 145,000 U.S. citizens. He must decide on steps to strengthen data protection... View Details

Keywords: Business Model; Safety; Rights; Analytics and Data Science; Ethics; Information Technology; Information Industry; United States

26 May 2015
First Look

First Look: May 26

successfully unified all analytics talent and resources into one group over a three-year period. Rapid increases in computing power and decreases in data storage costs had enabled DA2's View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

2020
Book

The Power of Experiments: Decision-Making in a Data-Driven World

By: Michael Luca and Max H. Bazerman

Have you logged into Facebook recently? Searched for something on Google? Chosen a movie on Netflix? If so, you've probably been an unwitting participant in a variety of experiments—also known as randomized controlled trials—designed to test the impact of changes to an... View Details

Keywords: Experiments; Randomized Controlled Trials; Organizations; Decision Making; Analytics and Data Science; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques

19 Nov 2014
Working Paper Summaries

The Search for Benchmarks: When Do Crowds Provide Wisdom?

Keywords: by Charles M.C. Lee, Paul Ma & Charles C.Y. Wang

October 2011
Article

The Surprising Power of Age-Dependent Taxes

By: Matthew C. Weinzierl

This article provides a new, empirically driven application of the dynamic Mirrleesian framework by studying a feasible and potentially powerful tax reform: age-dependent labor income taxation. I show analytically how age dependence improves policy on both the... View Details

Keywords: Taxation; Policy; Age; Income; Mathematical Methods; Welfare; United States

July 2002 (Revised June 2003)
Case

Microsoft Financial History

By: William A. Sahlman

Contains background financial data on Microsoft as of mid-2001. View Details

Keywords: History; Analytics and Data Science; Crime and Corruption; Profit

2023
Working Paper

The Customer Journey as a Source of Information

By: Nicolas Padilla, Eva Ascarza and Oded Netzer

In the face of heightened data privacy concerns and diminishing third-party data access, firms are placing increased emphasis on first-party data (1PD) for marketing decisions. However, in environments with infrequent purchases, reliance on past purchases 1PD... View Details

Keywords: Customer Journey; Privacy; Consumer Behavior; Analytics and Data Science; AI and Machine Learning; Customer Focus and Relationships

2025
Working Paper

Enhancing Treatment Effect Prediction on Privacy-Protected Data: An Honest Post-Processing Approach

By: Ta-Wei Huang and Eva Ascarza

As firms increasingly rely on customer data for personalization, concerns over privacy and regulatory compliance have grown. Local Differential Privacy (LDP) offers strong individual-level protection by injecting noise into data before collection. While... View Details

Keywords: Targeted Intervention; Conditional Average Treatment Effect Estimation; Differential Privacy; Honest Estimation; Post-processing; Analytics and Data Science; Consumer Behavior; Marketing

SSRN

2023
Article

Evaluating Explainability for Graph Neural Networks

By: Chirag Agarwal, Owen Queen, Himabindu Lakkaraju and Marinka Zitnik

As explanations are increasingly used to understand the behavior of graph neural networks (GNNs), evaluating the quality and reliability of GNN explanations is crucial. However, assessing the quality of GNN explanations is challenging as existing graph datasets have no... View Details

Keywords: Analytics and Data Science

February 2011 (Revised November 2011)
Supplement

Berkshire Partners: Bidding for Carter's (CW)

By: Malcolm P. Baker and David Lane

Supplemental data on comparable companies to Burger King including both public companies and similar transactions. View Details

Keywords: Leveraged Buyouts; Analytics and Data Science; Bids and Bidding; Financial Services Industry

21 May 2013
First Look

First Look: May 21

Publications 2006 Harvard Business Review Press Keeping Up with the Quants: Your Guide to Understanding and Using Analytics By: Davenport, Thomas H., and Jinho Kim Abstract—Managers today need to be able to analyze and make sense of... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

November 1990
Case

Chemplan Corp.: Paint-Rite Division

By: Paul A. Vatter

An exercise with data that allows a discussion of regression analysis as a tool for forecasting and understanding structure. View Details

Keywords: Forecasting and Prediction; Framework; Analytics and Data Science; Mathematical Methods

April–May 2024
Article

Gone with the Big Data: Institutional Lender Demand for Private Information

By: Jung Koo Kang

I explore whether big-data sources can crowd out the value of private information acquired through lending relationships. Institutional lenders have been shown to exploit their access to borrowers’ private information by trading on it in financial markets. As a shock... View Details

Keywords: Analytics and Data Science; Borrowing and Debt; Financial Markets; Value; Knowledge Dissemination; Financing and Loans

SSRN

January 1995 (Revised November 1996)
Case

Avalon Information Services, Inc.

By: Lynn S. Paine and Wilda White

The Privacy Review Committee of Avalon Information Services must decide how to deal with concerns voiced by its retail supermarket customers about the privacy of consumer data collected through Avalon's point-of-sale data collection program. One customer is proposing... View Details

Keywords: Mission and Purpose; Safety; Demand and Consumers; Rights; Analytics and Data Science; Information Technology; Ethics; Information Industry

March 2022 (Revised May 2022)
Case

Winning Business at Russell Reynolds (A)

By: Ethan Bernstein and Cara Mazzucco

In an effort to make compensation drive collaboration, Russell Reynolds Associates’ (RRA) CEO Clarke Murphy sought to re-engineer the bonus system for his executive search consultants in 2016. As his HR analytics guru, Kelly Smith, points out, that risks upsetting–and... View Details

15 Sep 2015
First Look

September 15, 2015

Operations Management Analytics for an Online Retailer: Demand Forecasting and Price Optimization By: Ferreira, Kris J., Bin Hong Alex Lee, and David Simchi-Levi Abstract—We present our work with an online retailer, Rue La La, as an... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

May 2010 (Revised May 2010)
Case

Data.gov

By: Karim R. Lakhani, Robert D. Austin and Yumi Yi

This case presents the logic and execution underlying the launch of Data.gov, an instantiation of President Obama's initiative for transparency and open government. The process used by Vivek Kundra, the federal CIO, and his team to rapidly develop the website and to... View Details

Keywords: Safety; Rights; Analytics and Data Science; Internet and the Web; Ethics; Cost vs Benefits; Innovation and Management; Information Management; Public Administration Industry; Information Industry; United States