Publications

June 2023
Article

How New Ideas Diffuse in Science

By: Mengjie Cheng, Daniel Scott Smith, Xiang Ren, Hancheng Cao, Sanne Smith and Daniel A. McFarland

What conditions help new ideas spread? Can knowledge entrepreneurs’ position and develop new ideas in ways that help them take off? Most innovation research focuses on products and their reference. That focus ignores the ideas themselves and the broader ideational... View Details

Keywords: Innovation Adoption; Natural Language Processing; Knowledge; Science; Innovation and Invention; Knowledge Sharing; Analytics and Data Science

September 2025
Article

Using Satellites and Phones to Evaluate and Promote Agricultural Technology Adoption: Evidence from Smallholder Farms in India

By: Shawn Cole, Tomoko Harigaya, Grady Killeen and Aparna Krishna

This paper evaluates a low-cost, customized soil nutrient management advisory service in India. As a methodological contribution, we examine whether and in which settings satellite measurements may be effective at estimating both agricultural yields and treatment... View Details

Keywords: Measurement and Metrics; Mathematical Methods; Analytics and Data Science; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; India

December 1998
Case

Origins of National Income Accounting

By: David A. Moss and Joseph P Gownder

Set in the Great Depression, this case explores the origins of national income accounting in the United States. Highlights Senator La Follette's 1932 proposal for the federal government to begin collecting national income statistics. View Details

Keywords: Accounting; Financial Crisis; Analytics and Data Science; Mathematical Methods; United States

Educators

06 Dec 2021
News

HBS Curricula Explore the Complexities of Innovation

of data management and analytics also led HBS to introduce Data Science for Managers, a new Required Curriculum elective for first-year MBA students. Then in their second year,... View Details

Keywords: Jennifer Gillespie

01 Jun 2018
News

Floor It

coming out of labs over the next 10 years will surpass anything we’ve experienced in the past,” says HBS senior fellow Richard Hamermesh, who co-chairs the accelerator with Kathy Giusti (MBA 1985). “Looking ahead, we expect to have the ecosystem in place to improve... View Details

Keywords: Julia Hanna; illustration by Mengxin Li

01 Dec 2018
News

Adapting to Meet Changing Needs

Sciences (SEAS), and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences debuted the Harvard Business Analytics Program (HBAP), an online certificate offering for executives focused on quantitative analysis and data science. A... View Details

01 Mar 2013
News

Faculty Books

Enterprise Analytics: Optimize Performance, Process, and Decisions through Big Data edited by Thomas Davenport (FT Press) This book, a collection of research papers from the International Institute for Analytics, addresses a wide variety... View Details

01 Jun 2013
News

Faculty Books

Professor Davenport and his coauthor offer practical tools to improve understanding of data analytics and enhance managerial thinking and decision-making, including the crucial skills of how to formulate a... View Details

Keywords: Publishing Industries (except Internet); Information

06 Oct 2011
What Do You Think?

How Will the ‘Moneyball Generation’ Influence Management?

course, referred to a type of analytic data that might suggest nontraditional indicators designed to provide a competitive edge in everything from investments to selection of talent. One such example is the... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

February 2021
Article

Testing the Waters: Behavior across Participant Pools

By: Erik Snowberg and Leeat Yariv

We leverage a large-scale incentivized survey eliciting behaviors from (almost) an entire university student population, a representative sample of the U.S. population, and Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to address concerns about the external validity of experiments... View Details

Keywords: Lab Selection; External Validity; Experiments; Behavior; Surveys; Analytics and Data Science; Analysis

February 1994
Background Note

Causal Inference

By: Arthur Schleifer Jr.

Discusses what causation is and what one can (and cannot) learn about causation from observational (nonexperimental) data. View Details

Keywords: Decision Making; Analytics and Data Science; Interests

Educators

Fast Answer

Real estate finance

data, market intelligence, research, proprietary rankings, deal analysis, profiles, and trends. Real Estate Finance & Investment Review: Ref. HD1361 .R4233 in the Stamps Reading Room Moody’s Analytics CRE: Search... View Details

2025
Article

Statistical Inference for Heterogeneous Treatment Effects Discovered by Generic Machine Learning in Randomized Experiments

By: Kosuke Imai and Michael Lingzhi Li

Researchers are increasingly turning to machine learning (ML) algorithms to investigate causal heterogeneity in randomized experiments. Despite their promise, ML algorithms may fail to accurately ascertain heterogeneous treatment effects under practical settings with... View Details

Keywords: AI and Machine Learning; Mathematical Methods; Analytics and Data Science

2022
Article

Which Explanation Should I Choose? A Function Approximation Perspective to Characterizing Post hoc Explanations

By: Tessa Han, Suraj Srinivas and Himabindu Lakkaraju

A critical problem in the field of post hoc explainability is the lack of a common foundational goal among methods. For example, some methods are motivated by function approximation, some by game theoretic notions, and some by obtaining clean visualizations. This... View Details

Keywords: Mathematical Methods; Decision Choices and Conditions; Analytics and Data Science

2022
Article

Fairness via Explanation Quality: Evaluating Disparities in the Quality of Post hoc Explanations

By: Jessica Dai, Sohini Upadhyay, Ulrich Aivodji, Stephen Bach and Himabindu Lakkaraju

As post hoc explanation methods are increasingly being leveraged to explain complex models in high-stakes settings, it becomes critical to ensure that the quality of the resulting explanations is consistently high across all subgroups of a population. For instance, it... View Details

Keywords: Prejudice and Bias; Mathematical Methods; Research; Analytics and Data Science

Fast Answer

Real Estate Prices by City

How to find office & residential rental prices by major city worldwide. You may begin with: Moody’s Analytics CRE - Search millions of real estate data points that cover every commercially... View Details

Fast Answer

Home sales (existing)

How do I find data on existing home sales and prices? Moody’s Analytics CRE allows you to search millions of real estate data points that cover every commercially... View Details

April 2001
Article

Academic-Practitioner Collaboration in Management Research: A Case of Cross-Profession Collaboration

By: T. M. Amabile, C. Patterson, Jennifer Mueller, T. Wojcik, P. Odomirok, M. Marsh and S. Kramer

We present a case of academic-practitioner research collaboration to illuminate three potential determinants of the success of such cross-profession collaborations: collaborative team characteristics, collaboration environment characteristics, and collaboration... View Details

Keywords: Research; Cases; Analytics and Data Science; Theory