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- All HBS Web (517)
- Faculty Publications (145)
- 2024
- Working Paper
Consumer Inertia and Market Power
By: Alexander MacKay and Marc Remer
We study the pricing decisions of firms in the presence of consumer inertia. Inertia, which can arise from habit formation, brand loyalty, and switching costs, generates dynamic pricing incentives. These incentives mediate the impact of competition on market power in... View Details
Keywords: Consumer Inertia; Market Power; Dynamic Competition; Demand Estimation; Consumer Behavior; Markets; Performance; Competition; Price
MacKay, Alexander, and Marc Remer. "Consumer Inertia and Market Power." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 19-111, April 2019. (Revised January 2024. Direct download.)
- 18 Jul 2023
- Research & Ideas
Will Global Demand for Oil Peak This Decade?
Is the globe’s thirst for oil finally topping out? A major international energy watcher says yes, predicting last month that demand for global oil for transport will peak around 2026, plateau for all uses by 2028, and possibly hit a zenith by the end of the decade.... View Details
- Winter 2016
- Article
Analytics for an Online Retailer: Demand Forecasting and Price Optimization
By: Kris J. Ferreira, Bin Hong Alex Lee and David Simchi-Levi
We present our work with an online retailer, Rue La La, as an example of how a retailer can use its wealth of data to optimize pricing decisions on a daily basis. Rue La La is in the online fashion sample sales industry, where they offer extremely limited-time... View Details
Ferreira, Kris J., Bin Hong Alex Lee, and David Simchi-Levi. "Analytics for an Online Retailer: Demand Forecasting and Price Optimization." Manufacturing & Service Operations Management 18, no. 1 (Winter 2016): 69–88.
- March 2011
- Module Note
Quantitative Analysis of Competitive Position: Customer Demand and Willingness to Pay
By: David J. Collis
This note is designed to provide strategists with tools to perform two critical customer-related analyses: determining willingness to pay — the estimation of how much a given customer would be willing to pay for a particular product or service; and demand estimation —... View Details
Keywords: Price; Demand and Consumers; Competitive Advantage; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques; Market Participation; Segmentation
Collis, David J. "Quantitative Analysis of Competitive Position: Customer Demand and Willingness to Pay." Harvard Business School Module Note 711-495, March 2011.
- 2025
- Working Paper
Climate Risk and the U.S. Insurance Gap: Measurement, Drivers and Implications
By: Pari Sastry, Therese Scharlemann, Ishita Sen and Ana-Maria Tenekedjieva
Despite rising climate-related property damage, the average American is under-insured. We study the homeowners insurance protection gap using nationwide state-of-the-art insurance, mortgage, and climate databases at a property level and exploiting quasi-exogenous... View Details
Keywords: Climate Change; Risk and Uncertainty; Insurance; Personal Finance; Consumer Behavior; Mortgages
Sastry, Pari, Therese Scharlemann, Ishita Sen, and Ana-Maria Tenekedjieva. "Climate Risk and the U.S. Insurance Gap: Measurement, Drivers and Implications." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 25-054, February 2025.
- May 2014
- Article
Dynamics of Demand for Index Insurance: Evidence from a Long-Run Field Experiment
By: Shawn A. Cole, Daniel Stein and Jeremy Tobacman
This paper estimates how experimentally-manipulated experiences with a novel financial product, rainfall index insurance, affect subsequent insurance demand. Using a seven-year panel, we develop three main findings. First, recent experience matters for demand,... View Details
Cole, Shawn A., Daniel Stein, and Jeremy Tobacman. "Dynamics of Demand for Index Insurance: Evidence from a Long-Run Field Experiment." American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings 104, no. 5 (May 2014): 284–290.
- 2011
- Working Paper
Price Competition under Multinomial Logit Demand Functions with Random Coefficients
In this paper, we postulate a general class of price competition models with Mixed Multinomial Logit demand functions under affine cost functions. We first characterize the equilibrium behavior of this class of models in the case where each product in the market is... View Details
Keywords: Customers; Income Characteristics; Price; Product Marketing; Mathematical Methods; Competition; Segmentation
Allon, Gad, Awi Federgruen, and Margaret Pierson. "Price Competition under Multinomial Logit Demand Functions with Random Coefficients." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 12-030, October 2011.
- January 2020
- Article
The Long-Run Dynamics of Electricity Demand: Evidence from Municipal Aggregation
By: Tatyana Deryugina, Alexander MacKay and Julian Reif
We study the dynamics of residential electricity demand by exploiting a natural experiment that produced large and long-lasting price changes in over 250 Illinois communities. Using a flexible difference-in-differences matching approach, we estimate that the price... View Details
Keywords: Electricity Demand; Consumption Dynamics; Energy; Policy; Demand and Consumers; Price; Mathematical Methods
Deryugina, Tatyana, Alexander MacKay, and Julian Reif. "The Long-Run Dynamics of Electricity Demand: Evidence from Municipal Aggregation." American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 12, no. 1 (January 2020): 86–114.
- Article
How Much Is a Reduction of Your Customers' Wait Worth? An Empirical Study of the Fast-Food Drive-Thru Industry Based on Structural Estimation Methods
In many service industries, companies compete with each other on the basis of the waiting time their customers experience, along with other strategic instruments such as the price they charge for their service. The objective of this paper is to conduct an empirical... View Details
Keywords: Customer Satisfaction; Price; Service Delivery; Mathematical Methods; Competition; Food and Beverage Industry; Service Industry
Allon, Gad, Awi Federgruen, and Margaret P. Pierson. "How Much Is a Reduction of Your Customers' Wait Worth? An Empirical Study of the Fast-Food Drive-Thru Industry Based on Structural Estimation Methods ." Manufacturing & Service Operations Management 13, no. 4 (Fall 2011).
- 2010
- Working Paper
Cheaper by the Dozen: Using Sibling Discounts at Catholic Schools to Estimate the Price Elasticity of Private School Attendance
By: Susan Dynarski, Jonathan Gruber and Danielle Li
The effect of vouchers on sorting between private and public schools depends upon the price elasticity of demand for private schooling. Estimating this elasticity is empirically challenging because prices and quantities are jointly determined in the market for private... View Details
Dynarski, Susan, Jonathan Gruber, and Danielle Li. "Cheaper by the Dozen: Using Sibling Discounts at Catholic Schools to Estimate the Price Elasticity of Private School Attendance." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 16-054, October 2015.
- December 2019
- Article
Invest in Information or Wing It? A Model of Dynamic Pricing with Seller Learning
By: Guofang Huang, Hong Luo and Jing Xia
Pricing idiosyncratic products is often challenging because the seller, ex ante, lacks information about the demand for individual items. This paper develops a model of dynamic pricing for idiosyncratic products that features the optimal stopping structure and a seller... View Details
Keywords: Dynamic Pricing; Idiosyncratic Products; Item-specific Demand; Demand Uncertainty; Active Seller Learning; The Value Of Information; Price; Information; Value; Learning
Huang, Guofang, Hong Luo, and Jing Xia. "Invest in Information or Wing It? A Model of Dynamic Pricing with Seller Learning." Management Science 65, no. 12 (December 2019): 5556–5583.
- 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
Huang, Ta-Wei, and Eva Ascarza. "Enhancing Treatment Effect Prediction on Privacy-Protected Data: An Honest Post-Processing Approach." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 24-034, December 2023. (Revised March 2025.)
- 09 Dec 2015
- Research Event
How Do You Predict Demand and Set Prices For Products Never Sold Before?
predict demand and set prices to maximize revenue of products that have no historical sales data? To that end, they set out to develop a pricing decision support tool that would use existing data to maximize revenue on new products. The... View Details
- Forthcoming
- Article
Institutional Corporate Bond Pricing
By: Ishita Sen, Lorenzo Bretscher, Lukas Schmid and Varun Sharma
We propose an equilibrium corporate bond pricing model that accommodates the heterogeneity in institutional investors' preferences and mandates in an empirically tractable way. Our model, estimated on rich holdings data, quantifies investors' preferences and demand... View Details
Keywords: Corporate Bonds; Demand Systems; Insurance Companies; Mutual Funds; Liquidity; Bonds; Price; Investment Funds
Sen, Ishita, Lorenzo Bretscher, Lukas Schmid, and Varun Sharma. "Institutional Corporate Bond Pricing." Review of Financial Studies (forthcoming).
- 2017
- Working Paper
The Importance of Unemployment Insurance as an Automatic Stabilizer
By: Marco Di Maggio and Amir Kermani
We assess the extent to which unemployment insurance (UI) serves as an automatic stabilizer to mitigate the economy's sensitivity to shocks. Using a local labor market design based on heterogeneity in local benefit generosity (defined as the percentage of household... View Details
Keywords: Unemployment Insurance; Automatic Stabilizers; Bartik Shocks; Aggregate Demand; System Shocks; Employment; Balance and Stability; Insurance; Volatility; Insurance Industry
Di Maggio, Marco, and Amir Kermani. "The Importance of Unemployment Insurance as an Automatic Stabilizer." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 17-009, July 2016. (Revise and Resubmit to American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics.)
- Forthcoming
- Article
Consumer Choice and Corporate Bankruptcy
By: Samuel Antill and Megan Hunter
We estimate the indirect costs of corporate bankruptcy associated with lost customers. In incentivized experiments, randomly informing consumers about a firm’s Chapter 11 reorganization lowers their willingness to pay for the firm’s products by 17%-28%. Consumers worry... View Details
- 2018
- Working Paper
Shipping Fees and Product Assortment in Online Retail
By: Chaoqun Chen and Donald Ngwe
Shipping fees are an important aspect of online retail for both consumers and sellers. A common fee structure is contingent free shipping, in which consumers are granted free shipping for basket sizes above a minimum value and are charged a flat fee for orders below... View Details
Keywords: Shpping Fee; E-commerce; Multi-category Demand; Search Costs; Shipping Membership; Spending; Consumer Behavior; Retail Industry
Chen, Chaoqun, and Donald Ngwe. "Shipping Fees and Product Assortment in Online Retail." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 19-034, September 2018.
- 2019
- Working Paper
The Wisdom of Crowds in Operations: Forecasting Using Prediction Markets
By: Achal Bassamboo, Ruomeng Cui and Antonio Moreno
Prediction is an important activity in various business processes, but it becomes difficult when historical information is not available, such as forecasting demand of a new product. One approach that can be applied in such situations is to crowdsource opinions from... View Details
Keywords: Wisdom Of Crowds; Demand Forecasting; Price Forecasting; Forecasting and Prediction; Social and Collaborative Networks; Size; Performance
Bassamboo, Achal, Ruomeng Cui, and Antonio Moreno. "The Wisdom of Crowds in Operations: Forecasting Using Prediction Markets." Working Paper, 2019.
- August 2022
- Supplement
Zalora: Data-Driven Pricing Recommendations
By: Ayelet Israeli
This exercise can be used in conjunction with the main case "Zalora: Data-Driven Pricing" to facilitate class discussion without requiring data analysis from the students. Instead, the exercise presents reports that were created by the data science team to answer the... View Details
Keywords: Pricing; Pricing Algorithms; Dynamic Pricing; Ecommerce; Pricing Strategy; Pricing And Revenue Management; Apparel; Singapore; Startup; Demand Estimation; Data Analysis; Data Analytics; Exercise; Price; Internet and the Web; Apparel and Accessories Industry; Retail Industry; Fashion Industry; Singapore
Israeli, Ayelet. "Zalora: Data-Driven Pricing Recommendations." Harvard Business School Supplement 523-032, August 2022.
- 2018
- Working Paper
Quantile Forecasts of Product Life Cycles Using Exponential Smoothing.
By: Xiaojia Guo, Kenneth C. Lichtendahl Jr. and Yael Grushka-Cockayne
We introduce an exponential smoothing model that a manager can use to forecast the demand of a new product or service. The model has five features that make it suitable for accurately forecasting product life cycles at scale. First, the trend in our model follows the... View Details
Keywords: New Product Development; Demand Forecasting; Product Adoption; Innovation Diffusion; Product Development; Demand and Consumers; Forecasting and Prediction; Adoption
Guo, Xiaojia, Kenneth C. Lichtendahl Jr., and Yael Grushka-Cockayne. "Quantile Forecasts of Product Life Cycles Using Exponential Smoothing." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 19-038, October 2018. (Darden Business School Working Paper, No. 2805244, July 2016.)