Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(854)
- Faculty Publications (432)
- February 2021
- Tutorial
What is AI?
By: Tsedal Neeley
This video explores the elements that constitute artificial intelligence (AI). From its mathematical basis to current advances in AI, this video introduces students to data, tools, and statistical models that make a computer 'intelligent.' Through an explanation of... View Details
- February 2021
- Article
A Dynamic Theory of Multiple Borrowing
By: Daniel Green and Ernest Liu
Multiple borrowing—a borrower obtains overlapping loans from multiple lenders—is a common phenomenon in many credit markets. We build a highly tractable, dynamic model of multiple borrowing and show that, because overlapping creditors may impose default externalities... View Details
- 2021
- Article
Prisoners, Rooms, and Lightswitches
By: Daniel M. Kane and Scott Duke Kominers
We examine a new variant of the classic prisoners and lightswitches puzzle: A warden leads his n prisoners in and out of r rooms, one at a time, in some order, with each prisoner eventually visiting every room an arbitrarily large number of times. The... View Details
Keywords: Mathematical Methods
- 2021
- Article
Fair Algorithms for Infinite and Contextual Bandits
By: Matthew Joseph, Michael J Kearns, Jamie Morgenstern, Seth Neel and Aaron Leon Roth
We study fairness in linear bandit problems. Starting from the notion of meritocratic fairness introduced in Joseph et al. [2016], we carry out a more refined analysis of a more general problem, achieving better performance guarantees with fewer modelling assumptions... View Details
- January 2021
- Article
Using Models to Persuade
By: Joshua Schwartzstein and Adi Sunderam
We present a framework where "model persuaders" influence receivers’ beliefs by proposing models that organize past data to make predictions. Receivers are assumed to find models more compelling when they better explain the data, fixing receivers’ prior beliefs. Model... View Details
- Article
Beyond Individualized Recourse: Interpretable and Interactive Summaries of Actionable Recourses
By: Kaivalya Rawal and Himabindu Lakkaraju
As predictive models are increasingly being deployed in high-stakes decision-making, there has been a lot of interest in developing algorithms which can provide recourses to affected individuals. While developing such tools is important, it is even more critical to... View Details
- 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
- 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
- 2020
- Working Paper
Design Rules, Volume 2: How Technology Shapes Organizations: Chapter 6 The Value Structure of Technologies, Part 1: Mapping Functional Relationships
Organizations are formed in a free economy because an individual or group perceives value in carrying out a technical recipe that is beyond the capacity of a single person. Technology specifies what must be done, what resources must be assembled, what actions taken in... View Details
- September 2020 (Revised March 2022)
- Case
JOANN: Joannalytics Inventory Allocation Tool
By: Kris Ferreira and Srikanth Jagabathula
Michael Joyce, Vice President of Inventory Management at JOANN, championed an effort to develop and implement an inventory allocation analytics tool that used advanced analytics to predict in-season demand of seasonal items for each of JOANN’s nearly 900 stores and... View Details
Keywords: Analytics; Machine Learning; Optimization; Inventory Management; Mathematical Methods; Decision Making; Operations; Supply Chain Management; Resource Allocation; Distribution; Technology Adoption; Applications and Software; Change Management; Fashion Industry; Consumer Products Industry; Retail Industry; United States; Ohio
- 2020
- Working Paper
Design and Analysis of Switchback Experiments
By: Iavor I Bojinov, David Simchi-Levi and Jinglong Zhao
In switchback experiments, a firm sequentially exposes an experimental unit to a random treatment, measures its response, and repeats the procedure for several periods to determine which treatment leads to the best outcome. Although practitioners have widely adopted... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Design Rules, Volume 2: How Technology Shapes Organizations: Chapter 5 Ecosystems and Complementarities
The purpose of this chapter is to introduce two new building blocks to the theory of how technology shapes organizations. The first is a new layer of organization structure: a business “ecosystem.” The second is the economic concept of “complementarity.” Ecosystems are... View Details
- August 2020 (Revised September 2020)
- Technical Note
Assessing Prediction Accuracy of Machine Learning Models
The note introduces a variety of methods to assess the accuracy of machine learning prediction models. The note begins by briefly introducing machine learning, overfitting, training versus test datasets, and cross validation. The following accuracy metrics and tools... View Details
- August 2020
- Technical Note
Comparing Two Groups: Sampling and t-Testing
This note describes sampling and t-tests, two fundamental statistical concepts. View Details
- Article
Matching in Networks with Bilateral Contracts: Corrigendum
By: John William Hatfield, Ravi Jagadeesan and Scott Duke Kominers
Hatfield and Kominers (2012) introduced a model of matching in networks with bilateral contracts and showed that stable outcomes exist in supply chains when firms' preferences over contracts are fully substitutable. Hatfield and Kominers (2012) also asserted that in... View Details
- Article
Oracle Efficient Private Non-Convex Optimization
By: Seth Neel, Aaron Leon Roth, Giuseppe Vietri and Zhiwei Steven Wu
One of the most effective algorithms for differentially private learning and optimization is objective perturbation. This technique augments a given optimization problem (e.g. deriving from an ERM problem) with a random linear term, and then exactly solves it.... View Details
- Article
Active World Model Learning with Progress Curiosity
By: Kuno Kim, Megumi Sano, Julian De Freitas, Nick Haber and Daniel Yamins
World models are self-supervised predictive models of how the world evolves. Humans learn world models by curiously exploring their environment, in the process acquiring compact abstractions of high bandwidth sensory inputs, the ability to plan across long temporal... View Details
- 2021
- Conference Presentation
An Algorithmic Framework for Fairness Elicitation
By: Christopher Jung, Michael J. Kearns, Seth Neel, Aaron Leon Roth, Logan Stapleton and Zhiwei Steven Wu
We consider settings in which the right notion of fairness is not captured by simple mathematical definitions (such as equality of error rates across groups), but might be more complex and nuanced and thus require elicitation from individual or collective stakeholders.... View Details
- May 2020
- Article
Identifying Sources of Inefficiency in Health Care
By: Amitabh Chandra and Douglas O. Staiger
In medicine, the reasons for variation in treatment rates across hospitals serving similar patients are not well understood. Some interpret this variation as unwarranted and push standardization of care as a way of reducing allocative inefficiency. However, an... View Details
- May 2020
- Article
Inventory Auditing and Replenishment Using Point-of-Sales Data
By: Achal Bassamboo, Antonio Moreno and Ioannis Stamatopoulos
Spoilage, expiration, damage due to employee/customer handling, employee theft, and customer shoplifting usually are not reflected in inventory records. As a result, records often report phantom inventory, i.e., units of good not available for sale. We derive an... View Details