Publications

2012
Working Paper

Modularity and Organizations

By: Carliss Y. Baldwin

Modularity describes the degree to which a complex system can be broken apart into subunits (modules) that can be recombined in various ways. Modularity is important for organizations and the economy because the boundaries of organizational units and corporations are... View Details

Keywords: Complex Systems; Information Hiding; Loosely-coupled Systems; Mirroring; Mirroring Hypothesis; Modules; Modularity; Near-decomposable Systems; Product Architecture; Option Value; Organizational Design; Complexity

Article

An Invitation to Market Design

By: Scott Duke Kominers, Alexander Teytelboym and Vincent P. Crawford

Market design seeks to translate economic theory and analysis into practical solutions to real-world problems. By redesigning both the rules that guide market transactions and the infrastructure that enables those transactions to take place, market designers can... View Details

Keywords: Matching; Trading; Scrip; Liquidity; Efficiency; Equity; Allocation Rules; Marketplaces; Market Design; Marketplace Matching; Auctions

March 2024
Article

Do Safety Management System Standards Indicate Safer Operations? Evidence from the OHSAS 18001 Occupational Health and Safety Standard

By: Kala Viswanathan, Matthew S. Johnson and Michael W. Toffel

Problem definition: Given the enormous disruptions and costs of occupational injuries, companies and buyers are increasingly looking to voluntary occupational health and safety standards to improve worker safety. Yet because these standards only require... View Details

Keywords: Occupational Health; Occupational Safety; Program Evaluation; Safety Performance; Injuries; OHSAS 18001; ISO 45001; Working Conditions; Safety; Standards

May 2021
Article

Stability, Strategy-Proofness, and Cumulative Offer Mechanisms

By: John William Hatfield, Scott Duke Kominers and Alexander Westkamp

We consider the setting of many-to-one matching with contracts, where firms may demand multiple contracts, but each worker desires at most one contract. We introduce three novel conditions—observable substitutability, observable size monotonicity, and... View Details

Keywords: Matching With Contracts; Stability; Strategy-proofness; Substitutability; Size Monotonicity; Cumulative Offer Mechanism; Marketplace Matching; Balance and Stability

2015
Working Paper

Stability, Strategy-Proofness, and Cumulative Offer Mechanisms

By: John William Hatfield, Scott Duke Kominers and Alexander Westkamp

We consider the setting of many-to-one matching with contracts, where firms may demand multiple contracts but each worker desires at most one contract. We introduce three novel conditions—observable substitutability, observable size monotonicity,... View Details

Keywords: Matching With Contracts; Stability; Strategy-proofness; Substitutability; Size Monotonicity; Cumulative Offer Mechanism; Contracts; Market Design; Marketplace Matching; Balance and Stability

11 Dec 2008
Working Paper Summaries

Quality Management and Job Quality: How the ISO 9001 Standard for Quality Management Systems Affects Employees and Employers

Keywords: by David I. Levine & Michael W. Toffel

November 2024 (Revised January 2025)
Case

MiDAS: Automating Unemployment Benefits

By: Shikhar Ghosh and Shweta Bagai

In 2015, the state of Michigan considered whether to nominate its Michigan Integrated Data Automated System (MiDAS) for a prestigious state technology award. Launched in 2013 amid severe budget pressures, the $47 million automated fraud detection system was designed to... View Details

Educators

2016
Working Paper

Operations in the On-Demand Economy: Staffing Services with Self-Scheduling Capacity

By: Itai Gurvich, Martin Lariviere and Antonio Moreno

Motivated by recent innovations in service delivery such as ride-sharing services and work-from-home call centers, we study capacity management when workers self-schedule. Our service provider chooses capacity to maximize its profit (revenue from served customers minus... View Details

Keywords: Strategic Servers; On-demand Economy; Independent Capacity; Distributed Systems; Uber; Service Operations; Performance Capacity

SSRN

March 2019
Case

Wattpad

By: John Deighton and Leora Kornfeld

How to run a platform to match four million writers of stories to 75 million readers? Use data science. Make money by doing deals with television and filmmakers and book publishers. The case describes the challenges of matching readers to stories and of helping writers... View Details

Educators

Purchase

January 2021
Article

Chain Stability in Trading Networks

By: John William Hatfield, Scott Duke Kominers, Alexandru Nichifor, Michael Ostrovsky and Alexander Westkamp

We show that in general trading networks with bilateral contracts, a suitably adapted chain stability concept (Ostrovsky, 2008) is equivalent to stability (Hatfield and Kominers, 2012; Hatfield et al., 2013) if all agents' preferences are fully substitutable and... View Details

Keywords: Matching; Trading Networks; Chain Stability; Stability; Competitive Equilibria; Full Substitutability; Laws Of Aggregate Supply And Demand; Contracts; Market Design; Balance and Stability

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

Keywords: Recommender Systems; Personalization; Recommendation Diversity; Variety Seeking; Collaborative Filtering; Consumer Utility Models; Digital Media; Clickstream Analysis; Learning-to-rank; Consumer Behavior; Media; Customization and Personalization; Strategy; Mathematical Methods

Al Roth is the George Gund Professor of Economics and Business Administration in the Department of Economics at Harvard University, and in the Harvard Business School. His research, teaching, and consulting interests are in game theory, experimental economics, and... View Details

Keywords: e-commerce industry; education industry; health care; information; internet; legal services

July 1998 (Revised August 1998)
Case

Optimark: Launching a Virtual Securities Market

Bill Lupien's OptiMark Technologies, Inc., plans to launch a super-computer system in September, 1998 that he believes will release previously withheld liquidity to the securities market. While today's market matches those trades based on price and size, Lupien's... View Details

Keywords: Information Technology; Financial Markets; Product Launch; Financial Services Industry; United States

25 Apr 2023
Op-Ed

How SHEIN and Temu Conquered Fast Fashion—and Forged a New Business Model

information technology to directly match consumer demand to dispersed production by a collection of factories in China. This method of reaching customers should inspire any business that provides products or services that come from many... View Details

Keywords: by John Deighton; Fashion; Retail; Consumer Products

03 Apr 2011
News

The Matchmaker

19 Sep 2017
Working Paper Summaries

An Invitation to Market Design

.ExternalClass535E8B0AB65740BCB51D3AB82FC0F8CE p.MsoNormal, .ExternalClass535E8B0AB65740BCB51D3AB82FC0F8CE li.MsoNormal, .ExternalClass535E8B0AB65740BCB51D3AB82FC0F8CE div.MsoNormal... View Details

Keywords: by Scott Duke Kominers, Alexander Teytelboym, and Vincent P. Crawford

2015
Chapter

Modularity and Organizations

By: Carliss Y. Baldwin

Modularity describes the degree to which a complex system can be broken apart into subunits (modules) that can be recombined in various ways. Modularity is important for organizations and the economy because the boundaries of organizational units and corporations are... View Details

Keywords: Complexity; Organizations