statistics - Publications - Faculty & Research

24 Apr 2019
Research & Ideas

The 'Amazon Effect' Is Changing Online Price Competition—and the Fed Needs to Pay Attention

phenomena.” “In a world with online competition, we need to reconsider what makes prices sticky, not just across time but also across locations.” Cavallo focuses on multichannel retailers—those that have an online presence but sell most goods offline—because they are... View Details

Keywords: by Roberta Holland; Retail

08 Apr 2019
Sharpening Your Skills

The Life of Luxury and How to Sell It

knowingly: Money can’t buy you a happy ride. But looking at the statistics more closely reveals a more nuanced reality. The vehicles traded in are often baseline models of those prestige brands, favored more by aspirational buyers than... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Auto; Retail; Fashion

09 Dec 2019
Research & Ideas

Identify Great Customers from Their First Purchase

working paper, Ascarza and coauthor Nicolas Padilla, a doctoral candidate at Columbia Business School, show that a statistical tool known as a deep exponential family model can effectively sort the most relevant variables and account for... View Details

Keywords: by Kristen Senz; Retail; Service

31 Oct 2011
Research & Ideas

The Most Powerful Workplace Motivator

the sale right away and improve the chance of attaining club membership. In the paper, Larkin uses actual choices of hundreds of salespeople facing this decision to statistically estimate the average salesperson's "willingness to pay" for... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

26 Mar 2018
Research & Ideas

To Motivate Employees, Give an Unexpected Bonus (or Penalty)

penalty,” says Gallani, “but who was expecting to.” Ultimately, such tournament-style motivation schemes may be a zero-sum game, Gallani and Cai found, with the increased productivity of the winners and decreased productivity of the losers canceling each other out to... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Manufacturing

06 Jul 2011
Research & Ideas

Are You a Level-Six Leader?

"transactional" leaders. Level One: Sociopath At the base of the model is the person who literally serves no one: the Sociopath. The Sociopath, afflicted with what the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders... View Details

Keywords: by Mitch Maidique

11 Jun 2018
Research & Ideas

Why South Korea's Samsung Built the Only Outdoor Skating Rink in Texas

advertisers. They were especially likely to spend in areas where trials are decided by juries, rather than bench trials (i.e., decided by judges), where advertising increases were statistically zero. “You are not buying billboards to... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Legal Services

07 Jan 2019
Research & Ideas

The Better Way to Forecast the Future

“overfitting” a statistical model, ensuring the model hits every historical data point and thus making it overly specific and lacking room for future variables. Another problem can develop with miscalibration, failing to consider whether... View Details

Keywords: by Roberta Holland; Air Transportation; Transportation

07 Jul 2003
What Do You Think?

Can We Have Too Much Productivity Improvement?

had risen to the highest rate in nine years. Economists assure us that productivity (the ratio of product and service outputs to labor and capital inputs) improvements are good for all of us, whether we are employed (and thus factored into the statistic) or not (which... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

21 May 2012
Research & Ideas

OSHA Inspections: Protecting Employees or Killing Jobs?

help with the data analysis. Thus began the long saga of extracting statistics on inspections and sorting out which were randomly assigned, which followed accidents, and which followed complaints. In addition, Toffel and Levine... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

26 Mar 2006
Research & Ideas

The Office of Strategy Management

statistics about how strategy formulation is so often disconnected from strategy execution. What is an office of strategy management, and when and why is it needed? What are its typical activities? How it is distinct from a strategic... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

28 Apr 2003
Research & Ideas

Supply Chain Risk: Deal With It

risks being caused by high-profile events such as the attacks of 9/11. Based on statistical probabilities, risk managers view 9/11 as an "outlier" or exceptional event; but even so, it has spurred a host of defensive reactions.... View Details

Keywords: by David Stauffer

07 Aug 2013
What Do You Think?

Is There Still a Role for Judgment in Decision-Making?

film, Moneyball, at least in part a glorification of the triumph of statistics and probabilities over intuition and managerial judgment in professional baseball? Two recent books add to the genre of advice on decision-making. One advises... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

08 Dec 2020
Research & Ideas

Why Companies Hunt for Talent on Digital Platforms, Not in Resume Piles

apply, firms can now hop on a platform and pick out talent they think would be an especially good fit for their needs. When Koning and his colleagues set out to learn how many workers were being recruited versus applying for jobs directly, View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Employment

20 Nov 2019
Research & Ideas

It's No Joke: AI Beats Humans at Making You Laugh

of tests to make its own estimations. The computer had no way of parsing the language in the jokes, nor did it follow a model indicating what features made a joke funny. Instead, it relied on “collaborative filtering” algorithms to learn which sample jokes were View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

09 Mar 2015
Research & Ideas

Why Entrepreneurs Should Go Work for Government

enforcement on air pollution controls. In California, OpenCounter streamlined registration for small businesses and provided zoning clearances in a fraction of the usual time. In New York, Mark43 is developing software to analyze crime View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

14 Feb 2017
Research & Ideas

A Strategy For Steady Leadership in an Unsteady World

forecasting, strategic planning, and statistical decision making have not prepared them for this amount of flux in the environment. In short, these rapid-fire changes are putting extreme pressure on business leaders to lead in ways not... View Details

Keywords: by Bill George

22 Aug 2005
Research & Ideas

The Hard Work of Failure Analysis

analysis and deep probing, individuals tend to leap prematurely to unfounded conclusions and misunderstand complicated problems. Some understanding of system dynamics, the ability to see patterns, statistical process controls, and group... View Details

Keywords: by Amy Edmondson & Mark D. Cannon

06 Oct 2010
Research & Ideas

John Kotter: Four Ways to Kill a Good Idea

into a forest of complexity where nearly anyone can become lost. Statistics can be powerful weapons, used not to clarify but to bewilder. "You are trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist. Just look at this [twenty-two-page]... View Details

Keywords: by John Kotter & Lorne A. Whitehead

Research Summary

Clinical Trials as a setting for Health Policy and Management Research

The clinical trial marketplace is in flux. A decade ago, pharmaceutical firms almost exclusively conducted the study of their novel drug compounds within major academic medical centers. But today, industry-sponsored clinical trials are increasingly using community... View Details

Publications