Publications

December 2020
Article

The Parable of the Auctioneer: Complexity in Paul R. Milgrom's Discovering Prices

By: Scott Duke Kominers and Alexander Teytelboym

Designing marketplaces in complex settings requires both novel economic theory and real-world engineering, often drawing upon ideas from fields such as computer science and operations research. In Discovering Prices, Milgrom (2017) explains the theory and design... View Details

Keywords: Pricing; Design; Auctions; Market Design; Complexity

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November 2020 (Revised July 2022)
Case

Dell Technologies: Bringing the Cloud to the Ground

By: Navid Mojir and V. Kasturi Rangan

The case tells the story of Dell Technologies and its efforts to revitalize its value proposition and escape a commodity trap by acquiring EMC for $67 billion—the largest tech acquisition in history. It also shows the deeply intertwined connections between a company’s... View Details

Keywords: Value Proposition; Go-to-market; Strategic Positioning; Mergers and Acquisitions; Business Strategy; Marketing Strategy; Technological Innovation; Business Divisions; Computer Industry; Computer Industry

Oct 2020
Conference Presentation

Optimal, Truthful, and Private Securities Lending

By: Emily Diana, Michael J. Kearns, Seth Neel and Aaron Leon Roth

We consider a fundamental dynamic allocation problem motivated by the problem of securities lending in financial markets, the mechanism underlying the short selling of stocks. A lender would like to distribute a finite number of identical copies of some scarce resource... View Details

Keywords: Differential Privacy; Mechanism Design; Finance; Mathematical Methods

September 2020
Case

True North: Pioneering Analytics, Algorithms and Artificial Intelligence

By: Karim R. Lakhani, Kairavi Dey and Hannah Mayer

True North was a private equity fund that specialized in the growth and buyout of mid-market, India-centric companies. The leadership team initially believed that technology was not core to traditional businesses and steered clear of new age technology-oriented... View Details

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence; Information Technology; Management; Operations; Organizations; Leadership; Innovation and Invention; Business Model; AI and Machine Learning; Computer Industry; Computer Industry

2022
Working Paper

Where the Cloud Rests: The Location Strategies of Data Centers

By: Shane Greenstein and Tommy Pan Fang

This study provides an analysis of the entry strategies of third-party data centers in the United States. We examine the market before the pandemic in 2018 and 2019, when supply and demand for data services were geographically stable. We compare with the entry... View Details

Keywords: Cloud Computing; Location Strategies; Data Centers; Information Infrastructure

2020
Working Paper

(When) Does Appearance Matter? Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial

By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Tarun Khanna, Christos A. Makridis and Subhradip Sarker

While there is evidence about labor market discrimination based on race, religion, and gender, we know little about whether physical appearance leads to discrimination in labor market outcomes. We deploy a randomized experiment on 1,000 respondents in India between... View Details

Keywords: Behavioral Economics; Coronavirus; Discrimination; Homophily; Labor Market Mobility; Limited Attention; Resumes; Personal Characteristics; Prejudice and Bias

September 2020
Article

Creativity, Artificial Intelligence, and a World of Surprises

By: Teresa M. Amabile

In recent years, progress has been made toward AI Creativity, which I define as the production of highly novel, yet appropriate, ideas, problem solutions, or other outputs by autonomous machines. I argue that organizational researchers of creativity and innovation... View Details

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence; AI Creativity; Computer Science; Organizational Behavior; Psychology; Creativity; Technological Innovation; AI and Machine Learning

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2020
Book

Work, Mate, Marry, Love: How Machines Shape Our Human Destiny

By: Debora L. Spar

Covering a time frame that ranges from 8000 BC to the present, and drawing upon both Marxist and feminist theories, the book argues that nearly all the decisions we make in our most intimate lives—whom to marry, how to have children, how to have sex, how to think about... View Details

June 2020
Case

Extended Reality Extends into Enterprise?

By: David B. Yoffie, Kaushal Jain, Amy Villasenor, Vicky Xu and Annie Yang

While the growth of virtual reality started in gaming, the industry was increasingly focused on enterprise applications in 2020. This note explores the market opportunities and challenges for virtual reality and augmented reality in the enterprise, while diving into a... View Details

Keywords: Virtual Reality; Augmented Reality; Enterprise Computing; Organizations; Information Technology; Markets; Opportunities; Strategy

May 2020
Teaching Note

Digitalization at Siemens

By: David J. Collis

Teaching Note for HBS No. 717-428. View Details

Keywords: Innovation and Invention; Technology; Computer Industry; Computer Industry; Computer Industry; Computer Industry; Computer Industry; Computer Industry; Computer Industry

April 2020
Case

Apple Inc. in 2020

By: David B. Yoffie and Daniel Fisher

After a decade as CEO, Tim Cook is facing one of his biggest strategic transitions of his tenure. While Apple had performed spectacularly well under Cook, Apple's core business was maturing. Sales of iPhones, iPads, and Macs were flat or down. However, Apple's new... View Details

Keywords: Innovation; Market Positioning; Marketing Implementation; Planning; Products; Strategic Positioning; Strategy; Information Technology; Competitive Strategy; Technological Innovation; Competitive Advantage; Product Positioning; Communication; Competition; Leadership; Strategic Planning; Computer Industry; Computer Industry; Computer Industry

Article

Detecting Adversarial Attacks via Subset Scanning of Autoencoder Activations and Reconstruction Error

By: Celia Cintas, Skyler Speakman, Victor Akinwande, William Ogallo, Komminist Weldemariam, Srihari Sridharan and Edward McFowland III

Reliably detecting attacks in a given set of inputs is of high practical relevance because of the vulnerability of neural networks to adversarial examples. These altered inputs create a security risk in applications with real-world consequences, such as self-driving... View Details

Keywords: Autoencoder Networks; Pattern Detection; Subset Scanning; Computer Vision; Statistical Methods And Machine Learning; Machine Learning; Deep Learning; Data Mining; Big Data; Large-scale Systems; Mathematical Methods; Analytics and Data Science

May 2020
Article

Scalable Holistic Linear Regression

By: Dimitris Bertsimas and Michael Lingzhi Li

We propose a new scalable algorithm for holistic linear regression building on Bertsimas & King (2016). Specifically, we develop new theory to model significance and multicollinearity as lazy constraints rather than checking the conditions iteratively. The resulting... View Details

Keywords: Mathematical Methods; Analytics and Data Science

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