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- January 2008
- Article
Innovation Killers: How Financial Tools Destroy Your Capacity to Do New Things
By: Clayton M. Christensen, Stephen P. Kaufman and Willy C. Shih
Most companies aren't half as innovative as their senior executives want them to be (or as their marketing claims suggest they are). What's stifling innovation? There are plenty of usual suspects, but the authors finger three financial tools as key accomplices.... View Details
- 2008
- Chapter
Matching and Market Design
By: Muriel Niederle, Alvin E. Roth and Tayfun Sonmez
Matching is the part of economics concerned with who transacts with whom and how. Models of matching, starting with the Gale-Shapley deferred acceptance algorithm, have been particularly useful in studying labour markets and in helping design clearinghouses to fix... View Details
- January 2008
- Article
Nonemployment Stigma as Rational Herding: A Field Experiment
Long spells of unemployment are known to reduce the likelihood of re-employment, but it is difficult to discern the reasons for this observation. Using an experimental method that controls for search intensity and possible discouragement of job applicants, I document... View Details
- December 2007
- Article
Fair (and Not So Fair) Division
By: John W. Pratt
Drawbacks of existing procedures are illustrated and a method of efficient fair division is proposed that avoids them. Given additive participants' utilities, each item is priced at the geometric mean (or some other function) of its two highest valuations. The... View Details
- November 2007
- Background Note
Asset Allocation I
By: Joshua D. Coval, Erik Stafford, Rodrigo Osmo, John Jernigan, Zack Page and Paulo Passoni
The goal of these simulations is to understand the mathematics of mean-variance optimization and the equilibrium pricing of risk if all investors use this rule with common information sets. Simulation A focuses on five to 10 years of monthly sector returns that are... View Details
- November 2007
- Background Note
Bayesian Estimation & Black-Litterman
By: Joshua D. Coval and Erik Stafford
Describes a practical method for asset allocation that is more robust to estimation errors than the traditional implementation of mean-variance optimization with sample means and covariances. The Bayesian inspired Black-Litterman model is described after introducing... View Details
- November 2007 (Revised March 2009)
- Case
OppenheimerFunds and Take-Two Interactive (A)
By: Jay W. Lorsch, Andrew Hill and Kaitlyn Simpson
Describes the dilemma faced by Emmanuel Ferreira, a fund manager at OppenheimerFunds. As the largest shareholder and a long-time investor in software publisher Take-Two Interactive, Ferreira contemplates whether or not to get involved with other investors in trying to... View Details
- 2007
- Working Paper
Choice, Rationality and Welfare Measurement
By: Jerry R. Green and Daniel A. Hojman
We present a method for evaluating the welfare of a decision maker, based on observed choice data. Unlike the standard economic theory of revealed preference, our method can be used whether or not the observed choices are rational. Paralleling the standard theory we... View Details
- 2007
- Manual
Managing School Districts for High Performance: Instructor's Guide
By: Stacey Childress, Richard F. Elmore, Allen S. Grossman and Susan Moore Johnson
Teaching by the case method has the potential to affect profoundly the way that teachers, students, and professionals approach the learning process. This companion volume includes detailed teaching notes on each case in the coursebook, with an emphasis on making cases... View Details
- 2007
- Working Paper
The Seer of Wellesley Hills: Roger Babson and the Babson Statistical Organization
Roger Babson was a pioneer of the business-forecasting industry in the United States in the early twentieth century. He built the largest private economic forecasting agency in the period and published a great range of economic statistics in his weekly newsletters. As... View Details
- October 2007 (Revised January 2009)
- Background Note
Analyzing Relative Costs
By: Hanna Halaburda and Jan W. Rivkin
Introduces students to the technique of relative cost analysis, a core technique of strategists. Among the intricate quantitative analyses that strategists undertake, relative cost analysis may be the most common. The goal of a relative cost analysis is simply to... View Details
- 16 Oct 2007
- Conference Presentation
Design Theory and Methods
- October 2007
- Case
The AtekPC Project Management Office
By: F. Warren McFarlan, Mark Keil and John Hupp
Presents one company's efforts to implement a project management organization, or PMO, and the challenges they faced in doing so. Issues brought out in the case include defining the PMO's purpose and mission, the structure and governance of the PMO, and how to... View Details
- Fourth Quarter 2007
- Article
Contingent Claims Approach to Measuring and Managing Sovereign Credit Risk
By: Dale . F. Gray, Robert C. Merton and Zvi Bodie
This paper proposes a new approach to measure, analyze, and manage sovereign risk based on the theory and practice of modern contingent claims analysis (CCA). The paper provides a new framework for adapting the CCA model to the sovereign balance sheet in a way that can... View Details
- October 2007
- Article
The Effectiveness of Pre-Release Advertising for Motion Pictures: An Empirical Investigation Using a Simulated Market
By: Anita Elberse and Bharat N. Anand
One of the most visible and publicized trends in the movie industry is the escalation in movie advertising expenditures over time. Yet, the returns to movie advertising are poorly understood. The main reason is that disentangling the causal effect of advertising on... View Details
- September 2007
- Article
(Noisy) Communication
By: Bharat Anand and Ron Shachar
Communication is central to many settings in marketing and economics. A focal attribute of communication is miscommunication. We model this key characteristic as a noise in the messages communicated, so that the sender of a message is uncertain about its perception by... View Details
- 2007
- Working Paper
Fair (and Not So Fair) Division
By: John W. Pratt
Drawbacks of existing procedures are illustrated and a method of efficient fair division is proposed that avoids them. Given additive participants' utilities, each item is priced at the geometric mean (or some other function) of its two highest valuations. The... View Details
- Article
Gross National Happiness As an Answer to the Easterlin Paradox?
By: Rafael Di Tella and Robert MacCulloch
The Easterlin Paradox refers to the fact that happiness data are typically stationary in spite of considerable increases in income. This amounts to a rejection of the hypothesis that current income is the only argument in the utility function. We find that the... View Details
- 2007
- Working Paper
Mental Accounting and Small Windfalls: Evidence from an Online Grocer
By: Katherine L. Milkman, John Beshears, Todd Rogers and Max H. Bazerman
We study the effect of small windfalls on consumer spending decisions by examining the purchasing behavior of a sample of online grocery shoppers over the course of a year. We compare the purchases customers make when redeeming a $10-off coupon they received from their... View Details
- Article
Reputation When Threats and Transfers Are Available
By: Ernesto Dal Bo, Pedro Dal Bo and Rafael Di Tella
We present a model where a long-run player is allowed to use both money transfers and threats to influence the decisions of a sequence of short-run players. We show that threats might be used credibly (even in arbitrarily short repeated games) by a long-lived player... View Details