Publications

16 Nov 2021
News

Can Massachusetts General Brigham Diversify Its Community of Innovators?

2023
Working Paper

Design-Based Confidence Sequences: A General Approach to Risk Mitigation in Online Experimentation

By: Dae Woong Ham, Michael Lindon, Martin Tingley and Iavor Bojinov

Randomized experiments have become the standard method for companies to evaluate the performance of new products or services. In addition to augmenting managers’ decision-making, experimentation mitigates risk by limiting the proportion of customers exposed to... View Details

Keywords: Performance Evaluation; Research and Development; Analytics and Data Science; Consumer Behavior

SSRN

Randomized experiments have become the standard method for companies to evaluate the performance of new products or services. In addition to augmenting managers' decision-making, experimentation mitigates risk by limiting the proportion of customers exposed to... 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

June 2020
Article

Parallel Play: Startups, Nascent Markets, and the Effective Design of a Business Model

By: Rory McDonald and Kathleen Eisenhardt

Prior research advances several explanations for entrepreneurial success in nascent markets but leaves a key imperative unexplored: the business model. By studying five ventures in the same nascent market, we develop a novel theoretical framework for understanding how... View Details

Keywords: Search; Legitimacy; Organizational Innovation; Organizational Learning; Mechanisms And Processes; Institutional Entrepreneurship; Qualitative Methods; Business Model Design; Business Model; Business Startups; Entrepreneurship; Emerging Markets; Adaptation; Competition; Strategy

Web

Case Method - Research Resources | Baker Library | Bloomberg Center | Harvard Business School

Skip to Main Content Exhibition Home Exhibition Business Education & The Case Method The General Shoe Company, 1921 Case Writing & Industry Expansion of the Case Method The... View Details

October 2022
Article

How Leaders with Divergent Visions Generate Novel Strategy: Navigating the Paradox of Preservation and Modernization in Swiss Watchmaking

By: Ryan Raffaelli, Rich DeJordy and Rory M. McDonald

How do leaders with divergent visions for their organization come together to create a novel strategy? This paper employs paradox as a lens to investigate how leader-dyads can integrate opposing strategies to produce a new, generative approach. Drawing on a qualitative... View Details

Keywords: Strategic Paradoxes; Senior Leaders; Organizational Reinvention; Leadership; Technological Innovation; Innovation and Management; Innovation Strategy; Change; Manufacturing Industry; Consumer Products Industry; Switzerland

Article

Pattern Detection in the Activation Space for Identifying Synthesized Content

By: Celia Cintas, Skyler Speakman, Girmaw Abebe Tadesse, Victor Akinwande, Edward McFowland III and Komminist Weldemariam

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have recently achieved unprecedented success in photo-realistic image synthesis from low-dimensional random noise. The ability to synthesize high-quality content at a large scale brings potential risks as the generated samples may... View Details

Keywords: Subset Scanning; Generative Models; Synthetic Content Detection

Register to Read

2018
Working Paper

Bayesian Ensembles of Binary-Event Forecasts: When Is It Appropriate to Extremize or Anti-Extremize?

By: Kenneth C. Lichtendahl Jr., Yael Grushka-Cockayne, Victor Richmond R. Jose and Robert L. Winkler

Many organizations face critical decisions that rely on forecasts of binary events. In these situations, organizations often gather forecasts from multiple experts or models and average those forecasts to produce a single aggregate forecast. Because the average... View Details

Keywords: Forecast Aggregation; Linear Opinion Pool; Generalized Additive Model; Generalized Linear Model; Stacking.; Forecasting and Prediction

SSRN

July 2012
Article

Discrete Choice Cannot Generate Demand That Is Additively Separable in Own Price

By: Sonia Jaffe and Scott Duke Kominers

We show that in a unit demand discrete choice framework with at least three goods, demand cannot be additively separable in own price. This result sharpens the analogous result of Jaffe and Weyl (2010) in the case of linear demand and has implications for testing of... View Details

Keywords: Discrete Choice; Unit Demand; Separable Demand; Linear Demand; Demand and Consumers; Market Design; Mathematical Methods; Economics

Purchase

Web

HBS & the Case Method - Message From the Director | Baker Library | Bloomberg Center | Harvard Business School

Skip to Main Content Exhibition Home Exhibition Business Education & The Case Method The General Shoe Company, 1921 Case Writing & Industry Expansion of the Case Method The... View Details

March 2025
Article

Novice Risk Work: How Juniors Coaching Seniors on Emerging Technologies Such as Generative AI Can Lead to Learning Failures

By: Katherine C. Kellogg, Hila Lifshitz-Assaf, Steven Randazzo, Ethan Mollick, Fabrizio Dell'Acqua, Edward McFowland III, François Candelon and Karim R. Lakhani

The literature on communities of practice demonstrates that a proven way for senior professionals to upskill themselves in the use of new technologies that undermine existing expertise is to learn from junior professionals. It notes that juniors may be better able... View Details

Keywords: Rank and Position; Competency and Skills; Technology Adoption; Experience and Expertise; AI and Machine Learning

January 2019
Supplement

Understanding the Brand Equity of Nestlé Crunch Bar (B): Data Analysis

By: Jill Avery and Gerald Zaltman

In early 2018, Nestlé announced the sale of its U.S. candy-making division and a select collection of 20 of its confectionery brands, including the Nestlé Crunch Bar, to Ferrero SpA for $2.8 billion. Luckily, an old consumer research study on the Nestlé Crunch Bar... View Details

Purchase

Article

Eliminating Unintended Bias in Personalized Policies Using Bias-Eliminating Adapted Trees (BEAT)

By: Eva Ascarza and Ayelet Israeli

An inherent risk of algorithmic personalization is disproportionate targeting of individuals from certain groups (or demographic characteristics such as gender or race), even when the decision maker does not intend to discriminate based on those “protected”... View Details

Keywords: Algorithm Bias; Personalization; Targeting; Generalized Random Forests (GRF); Discrimination; Customization and Personalization; Decision Making; Fairness; Mathematical Methods

November 2020 (Revised March 2022)
Teaching Note

Social Salary Setting at Spiber

By: Ashley Whillans and John Beshears

Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 920-050. The case tells the story of Spiber, a Japanese technology start-up company. To reflect the company’s values, the leadership team implemented a new and unique salary-setting process: each employee had the authority to choose their... View Details

Keywords: Compensation; General Management; Employee Benefits; Incentives; Motivation; Compensation and Benefits; Fairness; Motivation and Incentives; Management; Happiness; Negotiation; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues; Japan