Statistics - Publications - Faculty & Research

07 Feb 2023
Research & Ideas

Supervisor of Sandwiches? More Companies Inflate Titles to Avoid Extra Pay

2019, holding down jobs with management titles but making less than $50,000 a year, Cohen reports, citing Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Based on the assumption that about a third of these roles weren’t management positions, the study... View Details

Keywords: by Scott Van Voorhis

30 May 2024
Research & Ideas

Racial Bias Might Be Infecting Patient Portals. Can AI Help?

registered nurses. The statistical evidence suggests that medical teams tended to prioritize messages from white patients, says Ariel Stern, a visiting professor at Harvard Business School and one of the study’s authors. As mobile... View Details

Keywords: by Ben Rand; Health

28 Nov 2018
HBS Case

On Target: Rethinking the Retail Website

products in the same session were considered statistically significant and quantifiable,” Datar says. “By setting the bar that high, you remain humble about what you can learn from both successful and unsuccessful transactions.” Managers... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman; Retail

13 Jan 2020
Research & Ideas

Do Private Equity Buyouts Get a Bad Rap?

When all of the transactions were considered together, employment fell 1.4 percent—a statistically insignificant amount. Since this total includes jobs added when other firms are acquired by the bought-out firms, the researchers isolated... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Financial Services; Banking

01 Oct 2021
Research & Ideas

Dying to Lead: How Reaching the Top Can Kill You Sooner

its upper ranks. Having amassed a dataset of estimated social status and managerial levels for the large pool of GE managers, Nicholas then ran his data through various statistical models. He found that the likelihood of a death for upper... View Details

Keywords: by Jay Fitzgerald

Research Summary

THEME #2: BUILDING CAPABILITIES THROUGH VARIATION

Prior work has yet to establish definitively the role that variation (e.g. in individuals' activities or organizational processes) plays in the development of capabilities. Variation is usually either not considered (e.g., the learning curve examines... View Details

22 Feb 2018
Book

The New History of American Capitalism

communicate reality. Timothy Mitchell, for example, explores how the parameters of economic expertise shape the questions the discipline investigates, while others have scrutinized how data and statistics come to represent the... View Details

Keywords: Manufacturing

09 Dec 2019
Research & Ideas

Identify Great Customers from Their First Purchase

working paper, Ascarza and coauthor Nicolas Padilla, a doctoral candidate at Columbia Business School, show that a statistical tool known as a deep exponential family model can effectively sort the most relevant variables and account for... View Details

Keywords: by Kristen Senz; Retail; Service

31 Oct 2011
Research & Ideas

The Most Powerful Workplace Motivator

the sale right away and improve the chance of attaining club membership. In the paper, Larkin uses actual choices of hundreds of salespeople facing this decision to statistically estimate the average salesperson's "willingness to pay" for... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

06 Jul 2011
Research & Ideas

Are You a Level-Six Leader?

"transactional" leaders. Level One: Sociopath At the base of the model is the person who literally serves no one: the Sociopath. The Sociopath, afflicted with what the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders... View Details

Keywords: by Mitch Maidique

Research Summary

Output and asset price fluctuations

What are the sources of business cycles? How are these shocks propagated in the economy? Why are their effects so persistent? How can we explain asset price fluctuations? How are shocks transmitted internationally?To study these questions, I have developed a series... View Details

05 May 2020
Research & Ideas

China Tariffs and Coronavirus a Double Hit to American Retailers

from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that is more detailed than the US Census data economists typically examine. In addition, they relied on a database called the Billion Prices Project, which Cavallo first developed as a Ph.D. student at... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

30 Jul 2018
Research & Ideas

Why Ethical People Become Unethical Negotiators

Fortune article. “We knew it was statistically impossible. As a collective, we always kind of wondered: How the hell does he do it? Every person was curious. But that’s where it stopped. You’d stop yourself from wondering. You’d say,... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

Research Summary

Models of optimal experience (flow)

Flow is a state of profound task-absorption, involvement, and intrinsic enjoyment that makes the person feel one with the activity. Csikszentmihalyi's Flow Theory states that flow is more likely to occur in situations in which the person feels that the activity is very... View Details

06 Oct 2003
Research & Ideas

The Problem with Hedge Funds

claims to have but really doesn't—any more than the mutual funds had expertise in picking dot-com stocks. The banks argue that they have expertise allowing them to pick the better hedge funds in which to invest. And they provide View Details

Keywords: by D. Quinn Mills

24 Apr 2019
Research & Ideas

The 'Amazon Effect' Is Changing Online Price Competition—and the Fed Needs to Pay Attention

phenomena.” “In a world with online competition, we need to reconsider what makes prices sticky, not just across time but also across locations.” Cavallo focuses on multichannel retailers—those that have an online presence but sell most goods offline—because they are... View Details

Keywords: by Roberta Holland; Retail

13 Nov 2017
Research & Ideas

Want to Be Happier? Spend Some Money on Avoiding Household Chores

other time-sucking tasks reported greater life satisfaction. In the United States, for example, buying time increased happiness about 0.77 on a 10-point scale, which may not seem like much, but it is statistically significant, Whillans... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

08 Apr 2019
Sharpening Your Skills

The Life of Luxury and How to Sell It

knowingly: Money can’t buy you a happy ride. But looking at the statistics more closely reveals a more nuanced reality. The vehicles traded in are often baseline models of those prestige brands, favored more by aspirational buyers than... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Auto; Retail; Fashion

09 Jan 2006
Research & Ideas

When Benchmarks Don’t Work

indicate a range of expenses, typically measured by the cost of the support department as a percentage of total revenue or the number of full-time-equivalent (FTE) employees per billion dollars of revenue. Hackett presents summary View Details

Keywords: by Robert S. Kaplan; Service

21 Aug 2019
Research & Ideas

What Machine Learning Teaches Us about CEO Leadership Style

First, the researchers looked at the words that CEOs chose, using statistical inference to eventually generate 100 topics as diverse as marketing, corporate boards, and personal family history. Each CEO was scored based on their tendency... View Details