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- December 2009
- Article
Strategy-proofness versus Efficiency in Matching with Indifferences: Redesigning the NYC High School Match
By: Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Parag A. Pathak and Alvin E. Roth
The design of the New York City (NYC) High School match involved tradeoffs among efficiency, stability, and strategy-proofness that raise new theoretical questions. We analyze a model with indifferences—ties—in school preferences. Simulations with field data and the... View Details
- September 2009
- Article
A Detailed Analysis of the Reduction Mammaplasty Learning Curve: A Statistical Process Model for Approaching Surgical Performance Improvement
By: Matthew Carty MD, Rodney Chan, Robert S. Huckman, Daniel C. Snow and Dennis Orgill
Background: The increased focus on quality and efficiency improvement within academic surgery has met with variable success among plastic surgeons. Traditional surgical performance metrics, such as morbidity and mortality, are insufficient to improve the... View Details
- 2009
- Other Unpublished Work
Choice-based Measures of Conflict in Preferences
By: Katherine Baldiga and Jerry R. Green
We propose a family of measures of difference between ordinal preference relations. The difference between two preferences is the probability that they would disagree about the optimal choice from a random available set. It is in this sense that these measures are... View Details
- 2009
- Working Paper
Systemic Risk and the Refinancing Ratchet Effect
By: Amir E. Khandani, Andrew W. Lo and Robert C. Merton
The confluence of three trends in the U.S. residential housing market—rising home prices, declining interest rates, and near-frictionless refinancing opportunities—led to vastly increased systemic risk in the financial system. Individually, each of these trends is... View Details
- August 2009 (Revised January 2012)
- Case
Steel Street
The case involves repositioning an old 6-story warehouse in Pittsburgh and many of the issues of rehabilitation and selecting and managing the development team especially in a world of capital market uncertainty. The case also demonstrates the alignment of interests of... View Details
- 2009
- Working Paper
Feeling Good about Giving: The Benefits (and Costs) of Self-Interested Charitable Behavior
By: Lalin Anik, Lara B. Aknin, Michael I. Norton and Elizabeth W. Dunn
While lay intuitions and pop psychology suggest that helping others leads to higher levels of happiness, the existing evidence only weakly supports this causal claim: Research in psychology, economics, and neuroscience exploring the benefits of charitable giving has... View Details
- 2009
- Working Paper
Input Constraints and the Efficiency of Entry: Lessons from Cardiac Surgery
By: David M. Cutler, Robert S. Huckman and Jonathan T. Kolstad
Prior studies suggest that, with elastically supplied inputs, free entry may lead to an inefficiently high number of firms in equilibrium. Under input scarcity, however, the welfare loss from free entry is reduced. Further, free entry may increase use of high-quality... View Details
- 2009
- Book
Supercorp: How Vanguard Companies Create Opportunity, Profits, Growth, and Social Good
Supercorp is based on a 3-year study involving more than 350 interviews in 20 countries to identify the leadership practices and operating methods of major companies seeking profitable growth through innovation that benefits society. For example, when the tsunami and... View Details
- June 2009 (Revised May 2010)
- Background Note
A Note on Cost Reduction in Financially Troubled Organizations
By: Paul W. Marshall
This note discusses methods for reducing costs, particularly labor costs, in a financially distressed organization. View Details
- 2009
- Article
Modeling Expert Opinions on Food Healthfulness: A Nutrition Metric
By: Jolie M. Martin, John Beshears, Katherine L. Milkman, Max H. Bazerman and Lisa Sutherland
Research over the last several decades indicates the failure of existing nutritional labels to substantially improve the healthiness of consumers' food and beverage choices. The difficulty for policy-makers is to encapsulate a wide body of scientific knowledge in a... View Details
- 2009
- Working Paper
Policy Bundling to Overcome Loss Aversion: A Method for Improving Legislative Outcomes
By: Katherine L Milkman, Mary Carol Mazza, Lisa L. Shu, Chia-Jung Tsay and Max H. Bazerman
Policies that would create net benefits for society but would also involve costs frequently lack the necessary support to be enacted because losses loom larger than gains psychologically. To reduce this harmful consequence of loss aversion, we propose a new type of... View Details
- May 2009 (Revised December 2009)
- Teaching Note
Reliance Baking Soda: Optimizing Promotional Spending (Brief Case)
By: John A. Quelch and Heather Beckham
Teaching Note to Briefcase 4128 View Details
- May 2009 (Revised January 2011)
- Case
HubSpot: Inbound Marketing and Web 2.0
By: Thomas J. Steenburgh, Jill Avery and Naseem Ashraf Dahod
This case introduces the concept of inbound marketing, pulling customer prospects toward a business through the use of Web 2.0 tools and applications like blogging, search engine optimization, and social media. Students follow the growth of HubSpot, an entrepreneurial... View Details
- May 2009
- Article
Configurations of Extremal Even Unimodular Lattices
We extend the results of Ozeki on the configurations of extremal even unimodular lattices. Specifically, we show that if L is such a lattice of rank 56, 72, or 96, then L is generated by its minimal-norm vectors. View Details
Keywords: Mathematical Methods
- April 2009 (Revised May 2010)
- Case
Urbi and the City Licensee Managers
By: John D. Macomber and Regina Garcia-Cuellar
A leading low income housing builder in Mexico decides which prospective new local partner best extends its advantages in managing twin production lines of homes and clients. URBI has built substantial competitive advantage in the technology and culture that matches... View Details
Keywords: Mortgages; Government and Politics; Housing; Growth and Development Strategy; Brands and Branding; Market Entry and Exit; Production; Supply Chain; Organizational Culture; Franchise Ownership; Partners and Partnerships; Competitive Advantage; Real Estate Industry; China; India; Mexico; United States
- 2009
- Chapter
Plant-Size Distribution and Cross-Country Income Differences
By: Laura Alfaro, Andrew Charlton and Fabio Kanczuk
We investigate, using plant-level data for 79 developed and developing countries, whether differences in the allocation of resources across heterogeneous plants are a significant determinant of cross-country differences in income per worker. For this purpose, we use a... View Details
- 2009
- Chapter
Identity as a Variable
By: Rawi Abdelal, Yoshiko M. Herrera, Alastair Iain Johnston and Rose McDermott
- Article
Configurations of Rank-40r Extremal Even Unimodular Lattices (r=1,2,3)
By: Scott Duke Kominers and Zachary Abel
We show that if L is an extremal even unimodular lattice of rank 40r with r=1,2,3 then L is generated by its vectors of norms 4r and 4r+2. Our result is an extension of Ozeki's result for the case r=1. View Details
Keywords: Mathematical Methods
- 2009
- Chapter
Entrepreneurship and the History of Globalization
By: G. Jones and R. Daniel Wadhwani
In this article, we build on the recent efforts of scholars to reintroduce entrepreneurship into the research agenda of business historians. We examine the value and limitations of adapting recent social scientific theories and methods on entrepreneurship to research... View Details
- 2009
- Casebook
Managing Crises: Responses to Large-Scale Emergencies
By: Arnold M. Howitt and Herman B. Leonard
This casebook provides an organized treatment of the major challenges associated with managing large scale disaster events, including discussion of systematic methods of organizing disaster response, preparing in advance for disaster situations, and distinguishing... View Details