Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(1,270)
- Faculty Publications (171)
- 2024
- Working Paper
Using LLMs for Market Research
By: James Brand, Ayelet Israeli and Donald Ngwe
Large language models (LLMs) have rapidly gained popularity as labor-augmenting
tools for programming, writing, and many other processes that benefit from quick text
generation. In this paper we explore the uses and benefits of LLMs for researchers and
practitioners... View Details
- 2023
- Article
Estimating Causal Peer Influence in Homophilous Social Networks by Inferring Latent Locations.
By: Edward McFowland III and Cosma Rohilla Shalizi
Social influence cannot be identified from purely observational data on social networks, because such influence is generically confounded with latent homophily, that is, with a node’s network partners being informative about the node’s attributes and therefore its... View Details
- March–April 2023
- Article
Pricing for Heterogeneous Products: Analytics for Ticket Reselling
By: Michael Alley, Max Biggs, Rim Hariss, Charles Herrmann, Michael Lingzhi Li and Georgia Perakis
Problem definition: We present a data-driven study of the secondary ticket market. In particular, we are primarily concerned with accurately estimating price sensitivity for listed tickets. In this setting, there are many issues including endogeneity, heterogeneity in... View Details
- 2023
- Chapter
Marketing Through the Machine’s Eyes: Image Analytics and Interpretability
By: Shunyuan Zhang, Flora Feng and Kannan Srinivasan
he growth of social media and the sharing economy is generating abundant unstructured image and video data. Computer vision techniques can derive rich insights from unstructured data and can inform recommendations for increasing profits and consumer utility—if only the... View Details
- March–April 2023
- Article
Market Segmentation Trees
By: Ali Aouad, Adam Elmachtoub, Kris J. Ferreira and Ryan McNellis
Problem definition: We seek to provide an interpretable framework for segmenting users in a population for personalized decision making. Methodology/results: We propose a general methodology, market segmentation trees (MSTs), for learning market... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Nailing Prediction: Experimental Evidence on the Value of Tools in Predictive Model Development
By: Daniel Yue, Paul Hamilton and Iavor Bojinov
Predictive model development is understudied despite its centrality in modern artificial
intelligence and machine learning business applications. Although prior discussions
highlight advances in methods (along the dimensions of data, computing power, and
algorithms)... View Details
Keywords: Analytics and Data Science
- 2022
- Article
OpenXAI: Towards a Transparent Evaluation of Model Explanations
By: Chirag Agarwal, Satyapriya Krishna, Eshika Saxena, Martin Pawelczyk, Nari Johnson, Isha Puri, Marinka Zitnik and Himabindu Lakkaraju
While several types of post hoc explanation methods have been proposed in recent literature, there is very little work on systematically benchmarking these methods. Here, we introduce OpenXAI, a comprehensive and extensible opensource framework for evaluating and... View Details
- December 2022
- Article
Scarlet Letters: Rehabilitation Through Transgression Transparency and Personal Narrative Control
By: Erin L. Frey, Ethan Bernstein and Nick Rekenthaler
When employees commit transgressions, organizations often use tools of organizational control to prevent them from transgressing again. We investigate whether organizations can use transgression transparency to rehabilitate transgressors. Although making transgressions... View Details
- December 2022
- Article
The Rise of People Analytics and the Future of Organizational Research
By: Jeff Polzer
Organizations are transforming as they adopt new technologies and use new sources of data, changing the experiences of employees and pushing organizational researchers to respond. As employees perform their daily activities, they generate vast digital data. These data,... View Details
- October–December 2022
- Article
Achieving Reliable Causal Inference with Data-Mined Variables: A Random Forest Approach to the Measurement Error Problem
By: Mochen Yang, Edward McFowland III, Gordon Burtch and Gediminas Adomavicius
Combining machine learning with econometric analysis is becoming increasingly prevalent in both research and practice. A common empirical strategy involves the application of predictive modeling techniques to "mine" variables of interest from available data, followed... View Details
- October 2022
- Article
How Leaders with Divergent Visions Generate Novel Strategy: Navigating the Paradox of Preservation and Modernization in Swiss Watchmaking
By: Ryan Raffaelli, Rich DeJordy and Rory M. McDonald
How do leaders with divergent visions for their organization come together to create a novel strategy? This paper employs paradox as a lens to investigate how leader-dyads can integrate opposing strategies to produce a new, generative approach. Drawing on a qualitative... View Details
- 2022
- Article
Data Poisoning Attacks on Off-Policy Evaluation Methods
By: Elita Lobo, Harvineet Singh, Marek Petrik, Cynthia Rudin and Himabindu Lakkaraju
Off-policy Evaluation (OPE) methods are a crucial tool for evaluating policies in high-stakes domains such as healthcare, where exploration is often infeasible, unethical, or expensive. However, the extent to which such methods can be trusted under adversarial threats... View Details
- June 2022
- Article
Conservatism Gets Funded? A Field Experiment on the Role of Negative Information in Novel Project Evaluation
By: Jacqueline N. Lane, Misha Teplitskiy, Gary Gray, Hardeep Ranu, Michael Menietti, Eva C. Guinan and Karim R. Lakhani
The evaluation and selection of novel projects lies at the heart of scientific and technological innovation, and yet there are persistent concerns about bias, such as conservatism. This paper investigates the role that the format of evaluation, specifically information... View Details
- 2022
- Article
Exploring Counterfactual Explanations Through the Lens of Adversarial Examples: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis.
By: Martin Pawelczyk, Chirag Agarwal, Shalmali Joshi, Sohini Upadhyay and Himabindu Lakkaraju
As machine learning (ML) models become more widely deployed in high-stakes applications, counterfactual explanations have emerged as key tools for providing actionable model explanations in practice. Despite the growing popularity of counterfactual explanations, a... View Details
- Article
How Much Should We Trust Staggered Difference-In-Differences Estimates?
By: Andrew C. Baker, David F. Larcker and Charles C.Y. Wang
We explain when and how staggered difference-in-differences regression estimators, commonly applied to assess the impact of policy changes, are biased. These biases are likely to be relevant for a large portion of research settings in finance, accounting, and law that... View Details
- 2022
- Article
Probing GNN Explainers: A Rigorous Theoretical and Empirical Analysis of GNN Explanation Methods.
By: Chirag Agarwal, Marinka Zitnik and Himabindu Lakkaraju
As Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are increasingly employed in real-world applications, it becomes critical to ensure that the stakeholders understand the rationale behind their predictions. While several GNN explanation methods have been proposed recently, there has... View Details
- April 12, 2022
- Article
Evaluation of Individual and Ensemble Probabilistic Forecasts of COVID-19 Mortality in the United States
By: Estee Y. Cramer, Evan L. Ray, Velma K. Lopez, Johannes Bracher, Andrea Brennen, Alvaro J. Castro Rivadeneira, Michael Lingzhi Li and et al.
Short-term probabilistic forecasts of the trajectory of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States have served as a visible and important communication channel between the scientific modeling community and both the general public and decision-makers. Forecasting models... View Details
- March 2022 (Revised March 2024)
- Case
Hometown Foods: Changing Price amid Inflation
During the early part of the 2021 Covid-19 pandemic, Hometown Foods, a large seller of flour-based products, thrived as consumers hoarded baked goods and took up baking to pass the time and find comfort. Then, amid growing shortages in commodities, a vaccine arrived,... View Details
- Article
Eliminating Unintended Bias in Personalized Policies Using Bias-Eliminating Adapted Trees (BEAT)
By: Eva Ascarza and Ayelet Israeli
An inherent risk of algorithmic personalization is disproportionate targeting of individuals from certain groups (or demographic characteristics such as gender or race), even when the decision maker does not intend to discriminate based on those “protected”... View Details
- March 2022
- Article
Estimating the Effectiveness of Permanent Price Reductions for Competing Products Using Multivariate Bayesian Structural Time Series Models
By: Fiammetta Menchetti and Iavor Bojinov
Researchers regularly use synthetic control methods for estimating causal effects when a sub-set of units receive a single persistent treatment, and the rest are unaffected by the change. In many applications, however, units not assigned to treatment are nevertheless... View Details