Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(591)
- Faculty Publications (70)
- 2024
- Working Paper
Omnia Juncta in Uno: Foreign Powers and Trademark Protection in Shanghai's Concession Era
By: Laura Alfaro, Cathy Bao, Maggie X. Chen, Junjie Hong and Claudia Steinwender
We investigate how firms and markets adapt to trademark protection, an extensively utilized but under-examined form of IP protection to address asymmetric information, by exploring a historical precedent: China’s 1923 trademark law. Exploiting unique, newly digitized... View Details
- November 2021
- Article
Panel Experiments and Dynamic Causal Effects: A Finite Population Perspective
By: Iavor Bojinov, Ashesh Rambachan and Neil Shephard
In panel experiments, we randomly assign units to different interventions, measuring their outcomes, and repeating the procedure in several periods. Using the potential outcomes framework, we define finite population dynamic causal effects that capture the relative... View Details
- November 2021
- Article
The Dynamics of Gender and Alternatives in Negotiation
By: Jennifer E. Dannals, Julian J. Zlatev, Nir Halevy and Margaret A. Neale
A substantial body of prior research documents a gender gap in negotiation performance. Competing accounts suggest that the gap is due either to women’s stereotype-congruent behavior in negotiations or to backlash enacted toward women for stereotype-incongruent... View Details
- August 2021
- Article
Multiple Imputation Using Gaussian Copulas
By: F.M. Hollenbach, I. Bojinov, S. Minhas, N.W. Metternich, M.D. Ward and A. Volfovsky
Missing observations are pervasive throughout empirical research, especially in the social sciences. Despite multiple approaches to dealing adequately with missing data, many scholars still fail to address this vital issue. In this paper, we present a simple-to-use... View Details
- 2021
- Article
Designing, Not Checking, for Policy Robustness: An Example with Optimal Taxation
By: Benjamin B. Lockwood, Afras Sial and Matthew C. Weinzierl
Economists typically check the robustness of their results by comparing them across plausible ranges of parameter values and model structures. A preferable approach to robustness—for the purposes of policymaking and evaluation—is to design policy that takes these... View Details
- May 2021
- Article
The Firm Next Door: Using Satellite Images to Study Local Information Advantage
By: Jung Koo Kang, Lorien Stice-Lawrence and Forester Wong
We use novel satellite data that track the number of cars in the parking lots of 92,668 stores for 71 publicly listed U.S. retailers to study the local information advantage of institutional investors. We establish car counts as a timely measure of store-level... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Designing, Not Checking, for Policy Robustness: An Example with Optimal Taxation
By: Benjami Lockwood, Afras Y. Sial and Matthew C. Weinzierl
Economists typically check the robustness of their results by comparing them across plausible ranges of parameter values and model structures. A preferable approach to robustness—for the purposes of policymaking and evaluation—is to design policy that takes these... View Details
- May 2020
- Article
Identifying Sources of Inefficiency in Health Care
By: Amitabh Chandra and Douglas O. Staiger
In medicine, the reasons for variation in treatment rates across hospitals serving similar patients are not well understood. Some interpret this variation as unwarranted and push standardization of care as a way of reducing allocative inefficiency. However, an... View Details
- May 2020
- Article
Negotiating a Better Future: How Interpersonal Skills Facilitate Inter-Generational Investment
By: Nava Ashraf, Natalie Bau, Corinne Low and Kathleen McGinn
Using a randomized control trial, we examine whether offering adolescent girls nonmaterial resources—specifically, negotiation skills—can improve educational outcomes in a low-income country. In so doing, we provide the first evidence on the effects of an intervention... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
The Myth of the Lead Arranger’s Share
By: Kristian Blickle, Quirin Fleckenstein, Sebastian Hillenbrand and Anthony Saunders
We make use of Shared National Credit Program (SNC) data to examine syndicated loans in which the lead arranger retains no stake. We find that the lead arranger sells its entire loan share for 27 percent of term loans and 48 percent of Term B loans, typically shortly... View Details
- 2020
- Article
Subjective Semantic Surprise Resulting from Divided Attention Biases Evaluations of an Idea’s Creativity
By: Goran Calic, Nour El Shamy, Isaac Kinley, Scott Watter and Khaled Hassanein
The evaluation of an idea’s creativity constitutes an important step in successfully responding to an unexpected problem with a new solution. Yet, distractions compete for cognitive resources with the evaluation process and may change how individuals evaluate ideas. In... View Details
- August 2019
- Article
When and How to Diversify—A Multicategory Utility Model for Personalized Content Recommendation
By: Yicheng Song, Nachiketa Sahoo and Elie Ofek
Sometimes we desire change, a break from the same or an opportunity to fulfill different aspects of our needs. Noting that consumers seek variety, several approaches have been developed to diversify items recommended by personalized recommender systems. However,... View Details
- May 29, 2019
- Article
A Study of More Than 250 Platforms Reveals Why Most Fail
By: David B. Yoffie, Annabelle Gawer and Michael A. Cusumano
This piece explores why digital platforms fail. We collected data on 250 failures over the last 20 years, analyzed the most common causes for a platform to disappear or morph into an alternative business. View Details
- 2018
- Working Paper
Opportunistic Returns and Dynamic Pricing: Empirical Evidence from Online Retailing in Emerging Markets
By: Chaithanya Bandi, Antonio Moreno, Donald Ngwe and Zhiji Xu
We investigate how dynamic pricing can lead to more product returns in the online retail industry. Using detailed sales data of more than two million transactions from the Indian online retail market, where price promotions are very common, we document two types of... View Details
- July 2018 (Revised June 2020)
- Case
The Boston Cranberry Company
By: Alan MacCormack
This case describes the operations of a fictitious company that processes Cranberries. The case contains data that allows students to calculate the bottleneck stage in production, and to evaluate alternative investment options for increasing cranberry processing... View Details
- February 2018 (Revised June 2021)
- Case
New Constructs: Disrupting Fundamental Analysis with Robo-Analysts
By: Charles C.Y. Wang and Kyle Thomas
This case highlights the business challenges associated with a financial technology firm, New Constructs, that created a technology that can quickly parse complicated public firm financials to paint a clearer economic picture of firms, remove accounting distortions,... View Details
- January 2018 (Revised January 2019)
- Case
ZappRx
By: Jeffrey J. Bussgang and Olivia Hull
In October 2015, ZappRx founder Zoe Barry is deciding between two business models for her health technology start-up. Her product, a software application that aims to expedite the prescription fulfillment process for patients with rare diseases, has attracted interest... View Details
- 2017
- Working Paper
Identifying Sources of Inefficiency in Health Care
By: Amitabh Chandra and Douglas O. Staiger
In medicine, the reasons for variation in treatment rates across hospitals serving similar patients are not well understood. Some interpret this variation as unwarranted and push standardization of care as a way of reducing allocative inefficiency. However, an... View Details
- October 2017 (Revised April 2018)
- Case
Improving Worker Safety in the Era of Machine Learning (A)
By: Michael W. Toffel, Dan Levy, Jose Ramon Morales Arilla and Matthew S. Johnson
Managers make predictions all the time: How fast will my markets grow? How much inventory do I need? How intensively should I monitor my suppliers? Which potential customers will be most responsive to a particular marketing campaign? Which job candidates should I... View Details
- 2017
- Working Paper
Biased Beliefs About Random Samples: Evidence from Two Integrated Experiments
By: Daniel J. Benjamin, Don A. Moore and Matthew Rabin
This paper describes results of a pair of incentivized experiments on biases in judgments about random samples. Consistent with the Law of Small Numbers (LSN), participants exaggerated the likelihood that short sequences and random subsets of coin flips would be... View Details