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- 2025
- Working Paper
Evaluations Amid Measurement Error: Determining the Optimal Timing for Workplace Interventions
By: Matthew DosSantos DiSorbo, Iavor I. Bojinov and Fiammetta Menchetti
Researchers have embraced factorial experiments to simultaneously evaluate multiple treatments, each with different levels. Typically, in large-scale factorial experiments, the primary objective is identifying the treatment with the largest causal effect, especially... View Details
- 2024
- Article
A Universal In-Place Reconfiguration Algorithm for Sliding Cube-Shaped Robots in Quadratic Time
By: Zachary Abel, Hugo A. Akitaya, Scott Duke Kominers, Matias Korman and Frederick Stock
In the modular robot reconfiguration problem we are given n cube-shaped modules (or "robots") as well as two configurations, i.e., placements of the n modules so that their union is face-connected. The goal is to find a sequence of moves that reconfigures the modules... View Details
- June, 2024
- Book Review
Debunking Immigration Myths: A Review Essay of 'Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success' (PublicAffairs, 2022) by Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan
By: Marco Tabellini
This essay reviews Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success by Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan. This elegantly written book, highly accessible to both economists and non-economists, is a must-read for anyone interested in the topic of... View Details
- June 2024
- Article
Redistributive Allocation Mechanisms
By: Mohammad Akbarpour, Piotr Dworczak and Scott Duke Kominers
Many scarce public resources are allocated at below-market-clearing prices, and sometimes for free. Such "non-market" mechanisms sacrifice some surplus, yet they can potentially improve equity. We develop a model of mechanism design with redistributive concerns. Agents... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
What Is Newsworthy? Theory and Evidence
By: Luis Armona, Matthew Gentzkow, Emir Kamenica and Jesse M. Shapiro
We study newsworthiness in theory and practice. We focus on situations in which a news outlet observes the realization of a state of the world and must decide whether to report the realization to a consumer who pays an opportunity cost to consume the report. The... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Does the Case for Private Equity Still Hold?
By: Nori Gerardo Lietz and Philipp Chvanov
Private Equity (“PE”) received a 10-fold increase in capital flows since the Great Financial Crisis (“GFC”) Investors sought higher nominal returns relative to those they could obtain in the public capital markets. This paper questions the fundamental assumptions... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
The Cram Method for Efficient Simultaneous Learning and Evaluation
By: Zeyang Jia, Kosuke Imai and Michael Lingzhi Li
We introduce the "cram" method, a general and efficient approach to simultaneous learning and evaluation using a generic machine learning (ML) algorithm. In a single pass of batched data, the proposed method repeatedly trains an ML algorithm and tests its empirical... View Details
Keywords: AI and Machine Learning
- March 2024
- Case
Ava DuVernay's Array: Disrupting the Hollywood Film Industry
By: Anita Elberse and Morgan Brewton-Johnson
In February 2023 acclaimed filmmaker Ava DuVernay is filming her latest movie, Origin, a daring adaptation of Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. With Origin, DuVernay is pioneering a method to finance the endeavor—through a combination of... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
An Experimental Design for Anytime-Valid Causal Inference on Multi-Armed Bandits
By: Biyonka Liang and Iavor I. Bojinov
Typically, multi-armed bandit (MAB) experiments are analyzed at the end of the study and thus require the analyst to specify a fixed sample size in advance. However, in many online learning applications, it is advantageous to continuously produce inference on the... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Anytime-Valid Inference in Linear Models and Regression-Adjusted Causal Inference
By: Michael Lindon, Dae Woong Ham, Martin Tingley and Iavor I. Bojinov
Linear regression adjustment is commonly used to analyze randomized controlled experiments due to its efficiency and robustness against model misspecification. Current testing and interval estimation procedures leverage the asymptotic distribution of such estimators to... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Design-Based Inference for Multi-arm Bandits
By: Dae Woong Ham, Iavor I. Bojinov, Michael Lindon and Martin Tingley
Multi-arm bandits are gaining popularity as they enable real-world sequential decision-making across application areas, including clinical trials, recommender systems, and online decision-making. Consequently, there is an increased desire to use the available... View Details
- February 2024
- Article
Fifty Shades of QE: Robust Evidence
By: Brian Fabo, Marina Jančoková, Elisabeth Kempf and Ľuboš Pástor
Fabo et al. (2021) show that papers written by central bank researchers find quantitative easing (QE) to be more effective than papers written by academics. Weale and Wieladek (2022) show that a subset of these results lose statistical significance when OLS regressions... View Details
- January 2024 (Revised June 2024)
- Case
School of Rock: Tuning into Structured Empowerment (A)
By: Tatiana Sandino, Jeffrey Rayport, Samuel Grad and Stacy Straaberg
In summer 2021, School of Rock was a youth-oriented music education company with 291 franchise- and company-owned schools globally. Before CEO Rob Price’s hire in 2017, School of Rock’s nonconformist rock ‘n’ roll culture led to variability in teaching styles,... View Details
Keywords: Business Growth and Maturation; Business Plan; Change Management; Transformation; Communication Strategy; Decisions; Curriculum and Courses; Teaching; Employee Relationship Management; Knowledge Sharing; Leadership Style; Business or Company Management; Growth and Development Strategy; Management Style; Marketing Strategy; Mission and Purpose; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Culture; Organizational Structure; Franchise Ownership; Performance Expectations; Performance Improvement; Strategic Planning; Attitudes; Conflict Management; Corporate Strategy; Applications and Software; Technology Adoption; Education Industry; Music Industry; Massachusetts; United States
- January 2024 (Revised June 2024)
- Supplement
School of Rock: Tuning into Structured Empowerment (B)
By: Tatiana Sandino, Jeffrey Rayport, Samuel Grad and Stacy Straaberg
In September 2022, Price and his team evaluated the past year’s strategies to increase Method App adoption and discussed new initiatives to consider. View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Bootstrap Diagnostics for Irregular Estimators
By: Isaiah Andrews and Jesse M. Shapiro
Empirical researchers frequently rely on normal approximations in order to summarize and communicate uncertainty about their findings to their scientific audience. When such approximations are unreliable, they can lead the audience to make misguided decisions. We... View Details
- January 2024
- Article
Subset Scanning for Multi-Trait Analysis Using GWAS Summary Statistics
By: Rui Cao, Evan Olawsky, Edward McFowland III, Erin Marcotte, Logan Spector and Tianzhong Yang
Multi-trait analysis has been shown to have greater statistical power than single-trait analysis. Most of the existing multi-trait analysis methods only work with a limited number of traits and usually prioritize high statistical power over identifying relevant traits,... View Details
- 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
- 2023
- Working Paper
Estimating Productivity in the Presence of Spillovers: Firm-Level Evidence from the U.S. Production Network
By: Ebehi Iyoha
This paper examines the extent to which productivity gains are transmitted across U.S. firms through buyer-supplier relationships. Many empirical studies measure firm-to-firm spillovers using firm-level productivity estimates derived from control function approaches.... View Details
- 2023
- Article
Balancing Risk and Reward: An Automated Phased Release Strategy
By: Yufan Li, Jialiang Mao and Iavor Bojinov
Phased releases are a common strategy in the technology industry for gradually releasing new products or updates through a sequence of A/B tests in which the number of treated units gradually grows until full deployment or deprecation. Performing phased releases in a... View Details
- 2023
- Article
M4: A Unified XAI Benchmark for Faithfulness Evaluation of Feature Attribution Methods across Metrics, Modalities, and Models
By: Himabindu Lakkaraju, Xuhong Li, Mengnan Du, Jiamin Chen, Yekun Chai and Haoyi Xiong
While Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) techniques have been widely studied to explain predictions made by deep neural networks, the way to evaluate the faithfulness of explanation results remains challenging, due to the heterogeneity of explanations for... View Details
Keywords: AI and Machine Learning