Publications

SSRN

Research Summary

Behavioral Hazard and Public Policy

By: Joshua R. Schwartzstein

It is well recognized that people overuse low-value medical care due to moral hazard—because copays are lower than costs. Now Professor Schwartzstein has introduced the concept of “behavioral hazard” to explain the opposite: people underuse high-value care because... View Details

2025
Working Paper

How to Choose Among Technologies with Learning Curves: Making Better Investment Decisions

By: Christian Kaps and Arielle Anderer

Learning curves, the fact that technologies improve as a function of cumulative experience or investment, are desirable-think inexpensive solar panels or higher performing semiconductors. But, for firms that need to pick one technology among several candidates, such as... View Details

Keywords: Learning Curve; Technology; Innovation; Batteries; Energy Storage; Sequential Decision Making; TELCO; Exploration; Exploitation; Problems and Challenges; Cost vs Benefits; Technology Adoption; Battery Industry

SSRN

06 Sep 2005
Research & Ideas

The Best Place for Retirement Funds

and Harold Zhang, set out to derive rules for optimal asset location behavior for investors with these individually managed retirement accounts. Two results came out of this work: First, the optimal strategy... View Details

Keywords: by Ann Cullen

April–June 2022
Other Article

Commentary on 'Causal Decision Making and Causal Eﬀect Estimation Are Not the Same... and Why It Matters'

By: Edward McFowland III

There has been a substantial discussion in various methodological and applied literatures around causal inference; especially in the use of machine learning and statistical models to understand heterogeneity in treatment effects and to make optimal decision... View Details

Keywords: Causal Inference; Treatment Effect Estimation; Treatment Assignment Policy; Human-in-the-loop; Decision Making; Fairness

Purchase

2023
Working Paper

The Complexity of Economic Decisions

By: Xavier Gabaix and Thomas Graeber

We propose a theory of the complexity of economic decisions. Leveraging a macroeconomic framework of production functions, we conceptualize the mind as a cognitive economy, where a task’s complexity is determined by its composition of cognitive operations. Complexity... View Details

Keywords: Decisions; Complexity; Perception; Consumer Behavior; Production

March 2019
Article

Economics of Converting Renewable Power to Hydrogen

By: Gunther Glenk and Stefan Reichelstein

The recent sharp decline in the cost of renewable energy suggests that the production of hydrogen from renewable power through a power-to-gas process might become more economical. Here we examine this alternative from the perspective of an investor who considers a... View Details

Article

Mitigating Bias in Adaptive Data Gathering via Differential Privacy

By: Seth Neel and Aaron Leon Roth

Data that is gathered adaptively—via bandit algorithms, for example—exhibits bias. This is true both when gathering simple numeric valued data—the empirical means kept track of by stochastic bandit algorithms are biased downwards—and when gathering more complicated... View Details

Keywords: Bandit Algorithms; Bias; Analytics and Data Science; Mathematical Methods; Theory

January–February 2012
Article

Do You Need a New Product-Development Strategy?

By: Alan MacCormack, W. Crandall, P. Toft and P. Henderson

Many firms rely on a single new-product development process for all projects. But designing new products for different business contexts requires that a firm deploy different new-product development processes. Products designed for stable and mature end-user markets... View Details

Keywords: Strategy; Product Development

February 2001 (Revised March 2003)
Case

i2 TradeMatrix

i2 has recently acquired Aspect Development and is incorporating Aspect's offerings into its TradeMatrix product for business-to-business e-commerce. TradeMatrix embeds i2's existing products for optimizing supply chain performance by applying advanced planning and... View Details

Keywords: Internet and the Web; Applications and Software; Organizational Culture; Mergers and Acquisitions; Information Technology Industry

19 Jan 2022
In Practice

7 Trends to Watch in 2022

hiring in order to attract a sufficient number of applicants to meet their needs. They will also need to relax the many superfluous conditions they have applied in evaluating job seekers. Abandoning business models based on the assumption... View Details

Keywords: by HBS News

January 2002 (Revised April 2002)
Case

Space Data Corporation

By: Alan D. MacCormack and Jay Wynn

Space Data Corp. plans to partner with the U.S. National Weather Service to place transceivers on weather balloons and thereby create a national mobile communications network. The company is in the late development stages and is planning to launch a regional test that... View Details

Keywords: Wireless Technology; Business Startups; Business Processes; Adaptation; Partners and Partnerships; Opportunities; Telecommunications Industry; Public Administration Industry; United States

Educators

Purchase

Forthcoming
Article

Branch-and-Price for Prescriptive Contagion Analytics

By: Alexandre Jacquillat, Michael Lingzhi Li, Martin Ramé and Kai Wang

Contagion models are ubiquitous in epidemiology, social sciences, engineering, and management. This paper formulates a prescriptive contagion analytics model where a decision maker allocates shared resources across multiple segments of a population, each governed by... View Details

Keywords: COVID-19; Mathematical Methods

Teaching Interest

Overview

By: Leemore S. Dafny

U.S. Healthcare Strategy

The U.S. healthcare sector accounts for 17 percent of GDP, and encompasses a diverse set of industries with public, nonprofit, and for-profit buyers and sellers. There are significant concerns about high and rising spending, and... View Details

Keywords: Healthcare; Health; Healthcare Reform; Life Sciences; Health Industry; United States

1 Mar 2013 - 2 Mar 2013
Conference Presentation

The Value of Flexibility in Baseball Roster Construction

By: Timothy Chan and Douglas S. Fearing

Drawing inspiration from the theory of production flexibility in manufacturing networks, we provide the first optimization-based analysis of the value of positional flexibility (the ability of a player to play multiple positions) for a major league baseball team in the... View Details

Keywords: Risk and Uncertainty; Design; Production; Resource Allocation; Groups and Teams; Adaptation; Sports

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 higher operational costs through more product returns in the online retail industry. Dynamic pricing has been widely applied by many online retailers. Research has shown that, in response to dynamic pricing, some customers... View Details

Keywords: Price; Policy; Consumer Behavior; Cost Management; Emerging Markets; Retail Industry

Article

The Role of Interactivity in Local Differential Privacy

By: Matthew Joseph, Jieming Mao, Seth Neel and Aaron Leon Roth

We study the power of interactivity in local differential privacy. First, we focus on the difference between fully interactive and sequentially interactive protocols. Sequentially interactive protocols may query users adaptively in sequence, but they cannot return to... View Details

February 2018
Article

Retention Futility: Targeting High-Risk Customers Might Be Ineffective.

By: Eva Ascarza

Companies in a variety of sectors are increasingly managing customer churn proactively, generally by detecting customers at the highest risk of churning and targeting retention efforts towards them. While there is a vast literature on developing churn prediction models... View Details

Keywords: Retention/churn; Proactive Churn Management; Field Experiments; Heterogeneous Treatment Effect; Machine Learning; Customer Relationship Management; Risk Management