Publications
Publications
Show Results For
- All HBS Web
(754)
- Faculty Publications (92)
- 2021
- Working Paper
Most Individuals Prefer to Compromise among Competing Normative Principles of Taxation
By: Itai Sher and Matthew C. Weinzierl
We use a novel survey to gather direct and indirect evidence on how individuals reconcile their simultaneous support for opposing normative principles when forming their policy preferences. Our evidence suggests that, when choosing policy, a minority (approximately... View Details
- July 2021
- Article
Do Interactions with Candidates Increase Voter Support and Participation? Experimental Evidence from Italy
By: Enrico Cantoni and Vincent Pons
We test whether politicians can use direct contact to reconnect with citizens, increase turnout, and win votes. During the 2014 Italian municipal elections, we randomly assigned 26,000 voters to receive visits from city council candidates, from canvassers supporting... View Details
- June 2021
- Case
Acelero Learning
By: Mario Small, Kathleen L. McGinn, Amy Klopfenstein and Katherine Chen
In November 2020, Henry Wilde, co-founder and CEO of Acelero, Inc., must decide whether to change his company’s program model for delivering early childhood education to low-income children. One of the only for-profit Head Start providers in the United States, Acelero... View Details
- Article
Birds of a Feather...Enforce Social Norms? Interactions Among Culture, Norms, and Strategy
By: Hongyi Li and Eric J. Van den Steen
Does culture eat strategy for breakfast? This paper investigates the interactions among corporate culture, norms, and strategy, in order to better understand this issue and related questions. It first shows, through microfoundations, how the forces that drive toward... 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
- 2021
- Article
To Thine Own Self Be True? Incentive Problems in Personalized Law
By: Jordan M. Barry, John William Hatfield and Scott Duke Kominers
Recent years have seen an explosion of scholarship on “personalized law.” Commentators foresee a world in which regulators armed with big data and machine learning techniques determine the optimal legal rule for every regulated party, then instantaneously disseminate... View Details
Keywords: Personalized Law; Regulation; Regulatory Avoidance; Regulatory Arbitrage; Law And Economics; Law And Technology; Law And Artificial Intelligence; Futurism; Moral Hazard; Elicitation; Signaling; Privacy; Law; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Information Technology; AI and Machine Learning
- May 2021
- Article
Preparing for a Pandemic: Accelerating Vaccine Availability
By: Amrita Ahuja, Susan Athey, Arthur Baker, Eric Budish, Juan Camilo Castillo, Rachel Glennerster, Scott Duke Kominers, Michael Kremer, Jean Lee, Canice Prendergast, Christopher M. Snyder, Alex Tabarrok, Brandon Joel Tan and Witold Wiecek
Vaccinating the world’s population quickly in a pandemic has enormous health and economic benefits. We analyze the problem faced by governments in determining the scale and structure of procurement for vaccines. We analyze alternative approaches to procurement, arguing... View Details
- January 2021
- Article
Turbulence, Firm Decentralization and Growth in Bad Times
By: Philippe Aghion, Nicholas Bloom, Brian Lucking, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen
What is the optimal form of firm organization during “bad times”? We present a model of delegation within the firm to show that the effect is ambiguous. The greater turbulence following macro shocks may benefit decentralized firms because the value of local information... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Prioritarianism and Optimal Taxation
By: Matti Tuomala and Matthew C. Weinzierl
Prioritarianism has been at the center of the formal approach to optimal tax theory since its modern starting point in Mirrlees (1971), but most theorists’ use of it is motivated by tractability rather than explicit normative reasoning. We characterize analytically and... View Details
Keywords: Prioritarianism; Optimal Taxation; Utilitarianism; Redistribution; Inverse-optimum; Taxation; Theory
- 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
- August 2020 (Revised March 2021)
- Case
Migros Turkey: Scaling Online Operations (A)
By: Antonio Moreno and Gamze Yucaoglu
The case opens in November 2019 as Ozgur Tort and Mustafa Bartin, CEO and chief large-format and online retail officer of Migros Ticaret A.S. (Migros), Turkey’s oldest and one of its largest supermarket chains, are contemplating what the best fulfillment format and... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Social Interactions in Pandemics: Fear, Altruism, and Reciprocity
By: Laura Alfaro, Ester Faia, Nora Lamersdorf and Farzad Saidi
In SIR models, homogeneous or with a network structure, infection rates are assumed to be exogenous. However, individuals adjust their behavior. Using daily data for 89 cities worldwide, we document that mobility falls in response to fear, as approximated by Google... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
On the Representativeness of Voter Turnout
By: Louis Kaplow and Scott Duke Kominers
Prominent theory research on voting uses models in which expected pivotality drives voters' turnout decisions and hence determines voting outcomes. It is recognized, however, that such work is at odds with Downs's paradox: in practice, many individuals turn out for... View Details
- 2019
- Working Paper
From Know-It-Alls to Learn-It-Alls: Executive Development in the Era of Self-Refining Algorithms, Collaborative Filtering and Wearable Computing
By: Mihnea Moldoveanu and Das Narayandas
We examine the future of executive education on a technological and cultural landscape that is imminent but different to the one we are accustomed to. We show how the contextualization, socialization and personalization of learning—avowed but distal goals of current... 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
- 2019
- Article
Time-Driven Activity-Based Cost Analysis for Outpatient Anticoagulation Therapy: Direct Costs in a Primary Care Setting with Optimal Performance
By: Robert S. Kaplan, Rohit A. Bobade, Richard A. Helmers, Thomas M. Jaeger, Laura J. Odell and Derek A. Haas
Objectives: To determine how overall cost of anticoagulation therapy for warfarin compares with that of Novel Oral Anticoagulants (NOACs). Also, to demonstrate a scientific, comprehensive, and an analytical approach to estimate direct costs involved in monitoring and... View Details
- 2019
- Working Paper
Design Rules, Volume 2: How Technology Shapes Organizations: Chapter 13 Platform Systems vs. Step Processes—The Value of Options and the Power of Modularity
This is the first chapter in Part 3. Its purpose is to contrast the value structure of platform systems with step processes from a technological perspective. I first review the basic technical architecture of computers and argue that every computer is inherently a... View Details
- 2018
- Working Paper
Channeled Attention and Stable Errors -- Previous Working Version
By: Tristan Gagnon-Bartsch, Matthew Rabin and Joshua Schwartzstein
A common critique of models of mistaken beliefs is that people should recognize their error after observations they thought were unlikely. This paper develops a framework for assessing when a given error is likely to be discovered, in the sense that the error-maker... View Details
- Article
Popular Acceptance of Inequality Due to Innate Brute Luck and Support for Classical Benefit-based Taxation
U.S. survey respondents' views on distributive justice differ in two specific, related ways from what is conventionally assumed in modern optimal tax research. When expressing their preferences over allocations in stylized, hypothetical scenarios meant to isolate key... View Details
- March 2017
- Article
Artful Paltering: The Risks and Rewards of Using Truthful Statements to Mislead Others
By: Todd Rogers, Richard Zeckhauser, F. Gino, Michael I. Norton and Maurice E. Schweitzer
Paltering is the active use of truthful statements to convey a misleading impression. Across two pilot studies and six experiments, we identify paltering as a distinct form of deception. Paltering differs from lying by omission (the passive omission of relevant... View Details