Publications

SSRN

Article

On Derivatives Markets and Social Welfare: A Theory of Empty Voting and Hidden Ownership

By: Jordan M. Barry, John William Hatfield and Scott Duke Kominers

In the past twenty-five years, derivatives markets have grown exponentially. Large, modern derivatives markets increasingly enable investors to hold economic interests in corporations without owning voting rights, and vice versa. This leads to both empty... View Details

Keywords: Voting; Corporate Disclosure; Financial Markets; Ownership

June 26, 2024
Article

How NFT Royalties Work: Designs, Challenges, and New Ideas

By: Michael Blau, Scott Duke Kominers and Daren Matsuoka

Keywords: Royalties; NFTs; Framework; Ownership; Market Transactions

October 2020
Article

Comparative Statics for Size-Dependent Discounts in Matching Markets

By: David Delacretaz, Scott Duke Kominers and Alexandru Nichifor

We prove a natural comparative static for many-to-many matching markets in which agents’ choice functions exhibit size-dependent discounts: reducing the extent to which some agent discounts additional partners leads to improved outcomes for the agents on the other side... View Details

Keywords: Size-dependent Discounts; Path-independence; Respect For Improvements; Market Design; Mathematical Methods

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September 2019
Article

Optimizing Reserves in School Choice: A Dynamic Programming Approach

By: Franklyn Wang, Ravi Jagadeesan and Scott Duke Kominers

We introduce a new model of school choice with reserves in which a social planner is constrained by a limited supply of reserve seats and tries to find an optimal matching according to a social welfare function. We construct the optimal distribution of reserves via a... View Details

Keywords: Matching; Reserves; Dynamic Programming; Marketplace Matching; Mathematical Methods

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Article

Strategy-Proofness of Worker-Optimal Matching with Continuously Transferable Utility

By: Ravi Jagadeesan, Scott Duke Kominers and Ross Rheingans-Yoo

We give a direct proof of one-sided strategy-proofness for worker-firm matching under continuously transferable utility. A new “Lone Wolf” theorem (Jagadeesan et al., 2017) for settings with transferable utility allows us to adapt the method of proving one-sided... View Details

Keywords: Matching; Strategy-proofness; Lone Wolf Theorem; Rural Hospitals Theorem; Mechanism Design; Marketplace Matching

2017
Working Paper

Lone Wolves in Competitive Equilibria

By: Ravi Jagadeesan, Scott Duke Kominers and Ross Rheingans-Yoo

This paper develops a class of equilibrium-independent predictions of competitive equilibrium with indivisibilities. Specifically, we prove an analogue of the “Lone Wolf Theorem” of classical matching theory, showing that when utility is perfectly transferable, any... View Details

Keywords: Indivisibilities; Matching; Lone Wolf Theorem; Marketplace Matching; Theory

SSRN

2016
Working Paper

Refugee Resettlement

By: David Delacretaz, Scott Duke Kominers and Alexander Teytelboym

Over 100,000 refugees are permanently resettled from refugee camps to hosting countries every year. Nevertheless, refugee resettlement processes in most countries are ad hoc, accounting for neither the priorities of hosting communities nor the preferences of refugees... View Details

Keywords: Refugees; Marketplace Matching; Mathematical Methods

24 Sep 2021
News

A Labor Movement for the Platform Economy

Keywords: Gig economy; gig workers

14 Jul 2023
Blog Post

What You Can Do to Create an Anti-Racist Organization

taught that living in this world means you have a social responsibility for thinking about how you create more joy for people in this world.” After graduating from Duke University with a dual major in Dance and Sociology, and from Harvard... View Details

Keywords: All Industries

15 Nov 2020
News

Global Outposts Expand HBS’s Intellectual Footprint

“Zoom Video Communications and COVID-19,” by Scott Duke Kominers, the MBA Class of 1960 Associate Professor of Business Administration, and George Gonzalez, senior researcher. The case examines Zoom’s strengths and weaknesses, role in... View Details

02 Jun 2011
Research & Ideas

Signing at the Top: The Key to Preventing Tax Fraud?

experiments, are published in a new paper, When to Sign on the Dotted Line? Signing First Makes Ethics Salient and Decreases Dishonest Self-Reports, written by Lisa L. Shu, Francesca Gino, and Max H. Bazerman of Harvard Business School, Nina Mazar of the University of... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Accounting

2019
Article

Allocation for Social Good: Auditing Mechanisms for Utility Maximization

By: Taylor Lundy, Alexander Wei, Hu Fu, Scott Duke Kominers and Kevin Leyton-Brown

January 2019 (Revised May 2019)
Case

When Trolls Attack: Carbonite vs. Oasis Research

By: Lauren H. Cohen, Umit G. Gurun, Scott Duke Kominers and Sarah Mehta

This case, set in October 2017, follows Danielle Sheer, general counsel for Carbonite, as she defends the company against claims of patent infringement. It provides a broad overview of the U.S. patent system and explores the impact that non-practicing entities... View Details

Keywords: Patent Infringement Litigation; Non-practicing Entities; Patent Trolls; Innovation and Invention; Intellectual Property; Patents; Laws and Statutes; Lawsuits and Litigation; Legal Liability; Computer Industry; Technology Industry; Boston

Educators

February 2018
Background Note

Patent Trolling

By: Lauren H. Cohen, Umit G. Gurun, Scott Duke Kominers and George Hou

The U.S. Intellectual Property (IP) Ecosystem is one of the most robust and dynamic in the world—and has been for centuries. The bedrock of this system is the "patent," a legal document that allows its holder exclusive commercialization rights of a part of the "idea... View Details

Keywords: Intellectual Property; Patents; Lawsuits and Litigation; United States

Educators

2019
Working Paper

Collusion in Markets with Syndication

By: John William Hatfield, Scott Duke Kominers, Richard Lowery and Jordan M. Barry

Many markets, including markets for IPOs and debt issuances, are syndicated: each winning bidder invites competitors to join its syndicate to complete production. Using repeated extensive form games, we show that collusion in syndicated markets may become easier as... View Details

Keywords: Collusion; Antitrust; IPO Underwriting; Syndication; ＂Repeated Games＂

SSRN

17 Jul 2018
First Look

New Research and Ideas, July 17, 2018

Political Economy Costly Concessions: An Empirical Framework for Matching with Imperfectly Transferable Utility By: Galichon, Alfred, Scott Duke Kominers, and Simon Weber Abstract—We introduce an empirical framework for models of matching... View Details

Keywords: Dina Gerdeman

25 Apr 2019
Research & Ideas

Incubators Take Notice: Your Entrepreneurs Are Networking with the Wrong People

learning and advice when members are already embedded in existing networks,” Koning and coauthor Sharique Hasan of Duke University argue in Prior ties and the limits of peer effects on startup team performance, published April 11 in... View Details

Keywords: by Danielle Kost

June 2019
Supplement

Quantopian: A New Model for Active Management (B)

By: Sara Fleiss, Scott Duke Kominers and Charles B. Ughetta

Article

Testing Substitutability

By: John William Hatfield, Nicole Immorlica and Scott Duke Kominers

We provide an algorithm for testing the substitutability of a length-N preference relation over a set of contracts X in time O(|X|3⋅N3). Access to the preference relation is essential for this result: We show that a substitutability-testing algorithm with access only... View Details

Keywords: Substitutability; Matching; Communication Complexity; Preference Elicitation; Marketplace Matching; Communication; Mathematical Methods; Economics

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