Publications

Predictive model development is understudied despite its importance to modern businesses. Although prior discussions highlight advances in methods (along the dimensions of data, computing power, and algorithms) as the primary driver of model quality, the value of... View Details

22 Nov 2023
Research & Ideas

Humans vs. Machines: Untangling the Tasks AI Can (and Can't) Handle

nuances of its limits. Since ChatGPT debuted a year ago, automation hopes and fears—previously limited to factory floors and supermarket checkout lines—have shaken the ranks of... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne; Information Technology; Technology

2023
Working Paper

Applications or Approvals: What Drives Racial Disparities in the Paycheck Protection Program?

By: Sergey Chernenko, Nathan Kaplan, Asani Sarkar and David S. Scharfstein

We use the 2020 Small Business Credit Survey to study the sources of racial disparities in use of the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). Black-owned firms are 8.9 percentage points less likely than observably similar white-owned firms to receive PPP loans. About 55% of... View Details

Keywords: Borrowing and Debt; Small Business; Race; Financing and Loans

SSRN

August 1998
Case

Electronic Commerce at Air Products

By: F. Warren McFarlan and Melissa Dailey

In 1998,chief information officers (CIOs) in the highly competitive international gases and chemicals business faced the reality that electronic commerce capability was a strategic necessity. The results of annual surveys of technology officers in the chemical industry... View Details

Keywords: Management Teams; Information Technology; Globalized Markets and Industries; Infrastructure; Internet and the Web; Technology Adoption; Business Strategy; Chemical Industry; United States

Find at Harvard

2019
Working Paper

Design Rules, Volume 2: How Technology Shapes Organizations: Chapter 8 Rationalizing Flow Processes

By: Carliss Y. Baldwin

The purpose of this chapter is to examine the value structure of flow production processes and to explain why it is necessary to rationalize flow processes using the tools of systematic management. I first explain the problems facing managers of multi-step flow... View Details

Keywords: Flow Processes; Bottlenecks; Systematic Management; Production; Management; Problems and Challenges

15 Mar 2016
First Look

March 15, 2016

Case 516-059 Ocado In 2015, U.K.–based Ocado was the world's largest pure player in the online home-delivery grocery business and was gaining a growing share of the highly competitive U.K. grocery market. Ocado had made heavy investments... View Details

Article

Use of Crowd Innovation to Develop an Artificial Intelligence-Based Solution for Radiation Therapy Targeting

By: Raymond H. Mak, Michael G. Endres, Jin Hyun Paik, Rinat A. Sergeev, Hugo Aerts, Christopher L. Williams, Karim R. Lakhani and Eva C. Guinan

Importance: Radiation therapy (RT) is a critical cancer treatment, but the existing radiation oncologist work force does not meet growing global demand. One key physician task in RT planning involves tumor segmentation for targeting, which requires substantial... View Details

Keywords: Crowdsourcing; AI Algorithms; Health Care and Treatment; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; AI and Machine Learning

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2022
Article

OpenXAI: Towards a Transparent Evaluation of Model Explanations

By: Chirag Agarwal, Satyapriya Krishna, Eshika Saxena, Martin Pawelczyk, Nari Johnson, Isha Puri, Marinka Zitnik and Himabindu Lakkaraju

While several types of post hoc explanation methods have been proposed in recent literature, there is very little work on systematically benchmarking these methods. Here, we introduce OpenXAI, a comprehensive and extensible opensource framework for evaluating and... View Details

Keywords: Measurement and Metrics; Analytics and Data Science

January 1987
Article

Posterior Implementability in a Two-person Decision Problem

By: Jerry R. Green and Jean-Jacques Laffont

When a decision rule is implemented using a Bayesian incentive compatible mechanism in which the messages are publicly observable, the players' information is augmented by their observation of each others' strategies. In this paper we study the set of Bayesian... View Details

Keywords: Incentives; Commitment; Mechanism Design; Decision Making; Information

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January 2018 (Revised November 2018)
Case

Index

By: Jose Alvarez and Julia Kelley

In December 2017, Marc Freed-Finnegan and Jonathan Wall, the co-founders of retail technology company Index, had to discuss the company’s direction as they entered 2018. Five years earlier, Freed-Finnegan and Wall had founded Index after observing the technological... View Details

Keywords: Product Launch; Product Positioning; Sales; Strategy; Marketing Strategy; Retail Industry; Technology Industry

Educators

August 2015 (Revised May 2017)
Case

TSG Hoffenheim: Football in the Age of Analytics

By: Feng Zhu, Karim R. Lakhani, Sascha L. Schmidt and Kerry Herman

In 2015, Dietmar Hopp, owner of Germany's Bundesliga football team TSG Hoffenheim and co-founder of the global enterprise software company SAP, was considering how to ensure long-term sustainability and competitiveness for TSG Hoffenheim. While historically a small... View Details

Keywords: Information Technology; Measurement and Metrics; Sports; Sports Industry

Educators

26 Mar 2024
Research & Ideas

How Humans Outshine AI in Adapting to Change

solve other than navigation when it unexpectedly gets stuck in a ditch. “Algorithms can be very good at specialized tasks, and sometimes even have almost superhuman capabilities when confined to specific domains,” says De Freitas, who... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne; Technology; Information Technology

15 May 2024
Research & Ideas

A Major Roadblock for Autonomous Cars: Motorists Believe They Drive Better

Think you’re a better driver than most people? You’re not alone. And you may be one reason self-driving cars haven’t taken off. About 77 percent of participants surveyed in a new study rated themselves superior to View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne; Transportation; Auto

Research Summary

Using IT to Leverage Human Resources in Services

Discussion of the Internet and IT to date concentrates on how they will replace, rather than support, human service providers. While this approach is appropriate for a few firms, it is inadequate for many. The Internet and other information technology... View Details

April 2024 (Revised November 2024)
Case

Moderna: Pioneering a People Platform to Accelerate Science Innovation

By: Tatiana Sandino, Emil Dy and Samuel Grad

Moderna was founded in 2010 to explore how messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) could be used to create breakthrough medicines by encoding instructions for the body to create antibodies. When Stéphane Bancel (HBS 2000) took over in 2011, he bet on the potential of this... View Details

Keywords: Disruptive Innovation; Talent and Talent Management; Selection and Staffing; AI and Machine Learning; Digital Strategy; Innovation and Management; Leadership Development; Management Practices and Processes; Management Systems; Organizational Culture; Performance Evaluation; Alignment; Employee Relationship Management; Science-Based Business; Expansion; Pharmaceutical Industry; Biotechnology Industry; United States

Educators

11 Jun 2024
In Practice

The Harvard Business School Faculty Summer Reader 2024

As the vacation season looms, Harvard Business School faculty members share recommendations for a little light reading. Spoiler alert: Lessons in Chemistry tops two of their beach-read lists. For those whose brains can’t—or won’t—turn off, HBS faculty also suggest some... View Details

Keywords: by Avery Forman

2002
Other Unpublished Work

The Effect of Editorial Discretion Book Promotion on Sales at Amazon.com

By: Benjamin Edelman

A new dataset collected by the author allows estimation of the effect on book sales of promotional listing on Amazon's editorial discretion pages. Following Goolsbee and Chevalier (2001), sales quantities are inferred from sales rank data freely available on Amazon's... View Details

Keywords: Online Advertising; Sales; Marketing Strategy; Web Sites; Competition; Books

24 Jul 2023
Research & Ideas

Part-Time Employees Want More Hours. Can Companies Tap This ‘Hidden’ Talent Pool?

workforce, since an ever-growing proportion of college and graduate school enrollees are women, he adds. This planning is even more necessary with the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Fuller cautions. As computers View Details

Keywords: by Kara Baskin

March 2018 (Revised March 2018)
Teaching Note

OpenInvest

By: Boris Vallee and Caitlin Reimers Brumme

Founded by a team of hedge fund and NGO alumni, OpenInvest launched its platform in 2015 to enable retail investors to tailor their portfolio to their personal values in an automated way, for instance by screening out weapon manufacturers stocks or overweighting LGBTQ... View Details

Keywords: Socially Responsible Investing; Investing For Impact; Robo-advisors; Investment; Values and Beliefs; Customization and Personalization; Technology; Financial Services Industry