Publications

16 Jan 2024
Video

Hypothesis Testing in Business: Null vs. Alternative

September 2020 (Revised July 2022)
Exercise

Artea (B): Including Customer-Level Demographic Data

By: Eva Ascarza and Ayelet Israeli

This collection of exercises aims to teach students about 1)Targeting Policies; and 2)Algorithmic bias in marketing—implications, causes, and possible solutions. Part (A) focuses on A/B testing analysis and targeting. Parts (B),(C),(D) Introduce algorithmic bias. The... View Details

Keywords: Targeting; Algorithmic Bias; Race; Gender; Marketing; Diversity; Customer Relationship Management; Demographics; Prejudice and Bias; Retail Industry; Apparel and Accessories Industry; Technology Industry; United States

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12 Jan 2023
News

‘Debiasing’ Debt with Data

Seke Ballard (MBA 2010) says he owes the inspiration for BetaBank, his small business-focused digital-banking venture, to his father—and not just as a person, but also as an archetype for every minority entrepreneur who has struggled to find capital in a banking system... View Details

Keywords: Ralph Ranalli

June 23, 2021
Article

Research: When A/B Testing Doesn't Tell You the Whole Story

By: Eva Ascarza

When it comes to churn prevention, marketers traditionally start by identifying which customers are most likely to churn, and then running A/B tests to determine whether a proposed retention intervention will be effective at retaining those high-risk customers. While... View Details

Keywords: Customer Retention; Churn; Targeting; Market Research; Marketing; Investment Return; Customers; Retention; Research

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Customer orientation is a central tenet of marketing. However, less is known about how customer orientation varies across countries and time. Mintz, Currim, and Deshpandé (Eur. J. Mark., 56: 1014–1041, 2022) propose a country-level construct, national customer... View Details

2021
Working Paper

Pandemic Schooling Mode and Student Test Scores: Evidence from U.S. States

By: Clare Halloran, Rebecca Jack, James C. Okun and Emily Oster

We estimate the impact of district-level schooling mode (in-person versus hybrid or distance learning) on test scores. We combine Spring 2021 state standardized test score data with comprehensive data on schooling in the 2020-21 school year across 12 states. We find... View Details

Keywords: COVID-19 Pandemic; In-person Schooling; Distance Learning; Outcomes Measurement; Health Pandemics; Education; Performance Evaluation

24 Feb 2016
Research & Ideas

Why It's Best to Take Tests Early in the Day

interviews become tired and more cynical throughout the day,” Gino says. Familiar with Gino’s time-of-day research, Sievertsen and Piovesan approached her with an enormous set of data from Denmark, which introduced a nationwide student... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Education

September–October 2021
Article

Internalization of Advertising Services: Testing a Theory of the Firm

By: Alvin J. Silk, Birger Wernerfelt and Shuyi Yu

In 1956, a group of trade associations representing publishers and independent advertising agencies signed a consent decree aimed at ending a set of trade practices that for half a century effectively precluded advertisers from owning and operating in-house agencies.... View Details

Keywords: Internationalization; Specialization; Theory Of The Firm; Advertising Agencies; Advertising; Organizational Structure; Theory

November 2019
Article

How Do Sales Efforts Pay Off? Dynamic Panel Data Analysis in the Nerlove-Arrow Framework

By: Doug J. Chung, Byungyeon Kim and Byoung G. Park

This paper evaluates the short- and long-term value of sales representatives’ detailing visits to different types of physicians. By understanding the dynamic effect of sales calls across heterogeneous physicians, we provide guidance on the design of optimal call... View Details

Keywords: Nerlove-Arrow Framework; Stock-of-goodwill; Dynamic Panel Data; Serial Correlation; Instrumental Variables; Sales Effectiveness; Detailing; Analytics and Data Science; Sales; Analysis; Performance Effectiveness; Pharmaceutical Industry

22 Aug 2024
Blog Post

LM Wind Power Test and Validation Center

itself. The wind tunnel data forms half of the company’s iterative aerodynamic design cycle. Combined with the use of simulation tools, design engineers get a full picture of the blade design. Finally, the facilities also include a rain... View Details

February 2021
Article

Testing the Waters: Behavior across Participant Pools

By: Erik Snowberg and Leeat Yariv

We leverage a large-scale incentivized survey eliciting behaviors from (almost) an entire university student population, a representative sample of the U.S. population, and Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to address concerns about the external validity of experiments... View Details

Keywords: Lab Selection; External Validity; Experiments; Behavior; Surveys; Analytics and Data Science; Analysis

2019
Article

Time Series Experiments and Causal Estimands: Exact Randomization Tests and Trading

By: Iavor I Bojinov and Neil Shephard

We define causal estimands for experiments on single time series, extending the potential outcome framework to dealing with temporal data. Our approach allows the estimation of a broad class of these estimands and exact randomization based p-values for testing causal... View Details

Keywords: Causality; Nonparametric; Potential Outcomes; Trading Costs; Mathematical Methods

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1987
Working Paper

Tests of Excess Forecast Volatility in the Foreign Exchange and Stock Markets

By: K. A. Froot

Simple regression tests that have power against the alternatives that asset prices and expected future asset returns are excessively volatile are developed and performed for the foreign exchange and stock markets. These tests have a number of advantages over... View Details

Keywords: Risk Aversion; Risk; International Investing; International Finance; Risk and Uncertainty; Asset Pricing; Financial Markets; Investment; Behavioral Finance; Volatility

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

We define causal estimands for experiments on single time series, extending the potential outcome framework to dealing with temporal data. Our approach allows the estimation of a broad class of these estimands and exact... View Details

Article

Tabulated Nonsense? Testing the Validity of the Ethnographic Atlas

By: Duman Bahrami-Rad, Anke Becker and Joseph Henrich

The Ethnographic Atlas (Murdock, 1967), an anthropological database, is widely used across the social sciences. The Atlas is a quantified and discretely categorized collection of information gleaned from ethnographies covering more than 1200... View Details

Keywords: Ethnographic Atlas; Validation; Culture; Economic Anthropology

September 16, 2022
Article

A Causal Test of the Strength of Weak Ties

By: Karthik Rajkumar, Guillaume Saint-Jacques, Iavor I. Bojinov, Erik Brynjolfsson and Sinan Aral

The authors analyzed data from multiple large-scale randomized experiments on LinkedIn’s People You May Know algorithm, which recommends new connections to LinkedIn members, to test the extent to which weak ties increased job mobility in the world’s largest... View Details

Keywords: Job Mobility; Social Networks; Social Ties; Networks; Personal Development and Career

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March 2021
Supplement

Artea (A), (B), (C), and (D): Designing Targeting Strategies

By: Eva Ascarza and Ayelet Israeli

Power Point Supplement to Teaching Note for HBS No. 521-021,521-022,521-037,521-043. This collection of exercises aims to teach students about 1)Targeting Policies; and 2)Algorithmic bias in marketing—implications, causes, and possible solutions. Part (A) focuses on... View Details

Keywords: Targeted Advertising; Targeting; Algorithmic Data; Bias; A/B Testing; Experiment; Advertising; Gender; Race; Diversity; Marketing; Customer Relationship Management; Prejudice and Bias; Analytics and Data Science; Retail Industry; Apparel and Accessories Industry; Technology Industry; United States