Publications

Article

The Case for a COVID Vaccine Lottery

By: Scott Duke Kominers and Alex Tabarrok

Even the smartest distribution plans are complicated by a stubborn fact: We won't have enough for everyone right away. View Details

Keywords: COVID-19; Vaccine; Distribution; Health Pandemics

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July 3, 2020
Article

Delivery Apps Need to Start Treating Suppliers As Partners

By: Scott Duke Kominers and Ian Macomber

Home delivery has shifted from a luxury service aimed at young urban professionals to a core part of many businesses, which is used by almost everyone. That upheaval has strained capacity of many delivery services and changed how they relate to the suppliers that they... View Details

Keywords: Service Delivery; Supply Chain; Performance Capacity; Performance Efficiency; Entrepreneurship

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February 2020
Case

Klöckner & Co: Steeling for a Digital World

By: Scott Duke Kominers and Carin-Isabel Knoop

Hoping to get ahead of potential digital disruption at Klöckner & Co.—one of the world’s largest steel and metal distributors—CEO Gisbert Rühl set up both kloeckner.i (KCI), an internal transformation arm, and XOM Materials (XOM), an independent industry platform. KCI... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Entrepreneurship; Market Design; Digital Platforms; Markets; Industry Structures; Supply and Industry; Technology Adoption; Transformation; Digital Transformation; Steel Industry; Information Technology Industry; Europe; Germany

Educators

December 2018
Teaching Note

Feeding America (A) and (B)

By: Scott Duke Kominers and Alan Lam

Teaching Note for HBS Nos. 818-130 and 818-131. View Details

2010
Article

On Congruence Conditions for Primality

By: Sherry Gong and Scott Duke Kominers

July 2012
Article

Discrete Choice Cannot Generate Demand That Is Additively Separable in Own Price

By: Sonia Jaffe and Scott Duke Kominers

We show that in a unit demand discrete choice framework with at least three goods, demand cannot be additively separable in own price. This result sharpens the analogous result of Jaffe and Weyl (2010) in the case of linear demand and has implications for testing of... View Details

Keywords: Discrete Choice; Unit Demand; Separable Demand; Linear Demand; Demand and Consumers; Market Design; Mathematical Methods; Economics

October 2011
Supplement

Online Marketing at Big Skinny — slide supplement

By: Benjamin Edelman and Scott Duke Kominers

Slide Supplement for 911-034 View Details

Keywords: Consumer Products Industry

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

29 Mar 2019
Blog Post

My Concerns About Learning Accounting at HBS

first day at HBS. My name is Melanie Sperling and I am a first-year student here at HBS. Before attending school, I worked for four years at the One Love Foundation – America’s leader in health relationship education - and graduated with a BA in Psychology from View Details

05 Jul 2011
News

The Business of Champions

more visible — lessons than do other endeavors is subject to debate. (Popular HBS cases include ones about Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski, the West Point crew team, and the NFL’s New England Patriots.) Still, Bruins fans can be... View Details

Keywords: Garry Emmons; Performing Arts, Spectator Sports, and Related Industries; Arts, Entertainment

July 2021
Article

Redistribution through Markets

By: Piotr Dworczak, Scott Duke Kominers and Mohammad Akbarpour

Policymakers frequently use price regulations as a response to inequality in the markets they control. In this paper, we examine the optimal structure of such policies from the perspective of mechanism design. We study a buyer-seller market in which agents have private... View Details

Keywords: Optimal Mechanism Design; Redistribution; Inequality; Welfare Theorems; Market Design; Equality and Inequality

December 2019
Article

Costly Concessions: An Empirical Framework for Matching with Imperfectly Transferable Utility

By: Alfred Galichon, Scott Duke Kominers and Simon Weber

We introduce an empirical framework for models of matching with imperfectly transferable utility and unobserved heterogeneity in tastes. Our framework allows us to characterize matching equilibrium in a flexible way that includes as special cases the classic fully- and... View Details

Keywords: Sorting; Matching; Marriage Market; Intrahousehold Allocation; Imperfectly Transferable Utility; Marketplace Matching; Mathematical Methods

SSRN

Article

Orienteering for Electioneering

By: Jonah Kallenbach, Robert Kleinberg and Scott Duke Kominers

In this paper, we introduce a combinatorial optimization problem that models the investment decision a political candidate faces when treating his or her opponents’ campaign plans as given. Our formulation accounts for both the time cost of traveling between districts... View Details

Keywords: Political Elections; Resource Allocation; Time Management; Analysis

Article

Delayed-Response Strategies in Repeated Games with Observation Lags

By: Drew Fudenberg, Yuhta Ishii and Scott Duke Kominers

We extend the folk theorem of repeated games to two settings in which players' information about others' play arrives with stochastic lags. In our first model, signals are almost-perfect if and when they do arrive, that is, each player either observes an almost-perfect... View Details

Keywords: ＂Repeated Games＂; Folk Theorem; Private Monitoring; Observation Lag; Game Theory

Article

The Growing Problem of Patent Trolling

By: Lauren Cohen, Umit Gurun and Scott Duke Kominers

The last decade has seen a sharp rise in patent litigation in the U.S., with 2015 having one of the highest patent lawsuit counts on record. In theory, this could be a consequence of growth in the commercialization of technology and innovation—patent lawsuits increase... View Details

Keywords: Patent Aggregators; Patent Litigation; Patent Pools; Patent Trolls; Patents; Lawsuits and Litigation; United States

2017
Chapter

Empirical Evidence on the Behavior and Impact of Patent Trolls: A Survey

By: Lauren Cohen, Umit Gurun and Scott Duke Kominers

We survey the empirical literature on non-practicing entity (NPE) litigation behavior and its consequences. We document both aggregate trends and cross-sectional differences amongst various types of NPEs. Survey evidence illustrates a number of ways in which NPEs can... View Details

Keywords: Patent Trolls; NPEs; PAEs; Innovation; Patents; Lawsuits and Litigation; Innovation and Invention