by Alexander MacKay - Publications - Faculty & Research

July 2023
Article

Takahashi-Alexander Revisited: Modeling Private Equity Portfolio Outcomes Using Historical Simulations

By: Dawson Beutler, Alex Billias, Sam Holt, Josh Lerner and TzuHwan Seet

In 2001, Dean Takahashi and Seth Alexander of the Yale University Investments Office developed a deterministic model for estimating future cash flows and valuations for the Yale endowment’s private equity portfolio. Their model, which is simple and intuitive, is still... View Details

Keywords: Forecasting and Prediction; Investment Portfolio; Analytics and Data Science

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13 Sep 2012
Research & Ideas

Why Public Companies Underinvest in the Future

Investment Behavior of Public and Private Firms," written by Farre-Mensa with New York University's John Asker and Alexander Ljungqvist, details how and why public and private companies differ when it... View Details

Keywords: by Maggie Starvish

SoundCloud: Subscription Streaming?

Established in 2007, by early 2014 SoundCloud already boasted the second largest number of active music listeners among all streaming services and was recognized as the go-to platform for new artists. Yet, its founders Alexander Ljung and Eric Wahlforss were... View Details

02 Apr 2010
What Do You Think?

Why Are Fewer and Fewer U.S. Employees Satisfied With Their Jobs?

focus on employees and more on business and profitability." Phil Clark posited that knowledge work that deals with intangible results and hard-to-pinpoint accomplishments "just isn't as satisfying" as work used to be. John View Details

Keywords: by Jim Heskett

02 Sep 2002
What Do You Think?

What Can Business Schools Do to Avoid Bad Apples?

might be taken in admissions to sort out the "bad apples," the primary responsibility of business schools is to provide a place where ethics and values can be discussed by all, rather than just those clearing some admissions... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

Research Summary

Overview

Professor MacKay combines theory and measurement to deliver new insights about price competition and consumer preferences. In current and published papers, his research addresses how strategic pricing decisions may be influenced by algorithms, long-term contracts,... View Details

Keywords: Price Effects; Competition Policy; Algorithms; Online Competition; Dynamic Pricing; Beliefs; Preferences; Preference Heterogeneity; Preference Measurement; Competition; Microeconomics; Strategy; Integration; Cooperation

21 Aug 2000
Research & Ideas

Faculty Research Looks to Latin America

country." [We were then able to cross-check data for blocks which had Jewish institutions versus blocks that did not.] "What is crucial is that we can obtain an estimate of by how much the police presence deters crime."... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

07 Nov 2011
Research & Ideas

The Forgotten Book that Helped Shape the Modern Economy

assuring the Continent's competitive development, and that international emulation was a major vehicle of this process. This is something of which "founding fathers" from Alexander Hamilton to Manuel Belgrano were all too aware,... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

25 Jul 2022
News

Online pricing algorithms are gaming the system, and could mean you pay more

05 Jul 2006
Research & Ideas

The Accidental Innovator

accidents. A surprising number of important discoveries and inventions are associated with stories about spillage, breakage, and other manner of unintended action that led to valuable, though unexpected, outcomes. Probably the most famous is View Details

Keywords: by Sarah Jane Gilbert

19 Feb 2007
Research & Ideas

Inexperienced Investors and Market Bubbles

MacKay observed in 1852, "even chimney-sweeps and old clotheswomen dabbled in tulips." These days it's not just chimney-sweeps who are lured to investment heartbreak. New research suggests that even professional fund managers—if... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Financial Services

05 Apr 2004
What Do You Think?

Should We Brace Ourselves for Another Era of M&A Value Destruction?

Summing Up In the end, M&A is about buying more volume. It is a flawed process, invented by brokers, lawyers, and super-sized, ego-based CEOs." With this comment, Ellis Baxter summed up the thinking of the majority of those... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

05 Aug 2010
What Do You Think?

What Is Customer Opinion Good For?

Summing Up Customer inputs to the product development process count, but in different ways and at different times, according to many responding to this month's column. As Alexander Gat put it, competing and pioneering products "should... View Details

Keywords: by Jim Heskett; Technology

01 Aug 2008
What Do You Think?

Has the Time Come for “Stretch” in Management?

be." It raises the question, would we know a stretch goal when we see it? Perhaps the best response to that question was from Sujeet Prabhu, who commented that "Stretch goals are goals (which), if achieved by your competitors,... View Details

Keywords: by Jim Heskett

Research Summary

Good cop, Bad Cop: Complementarities between Debt and Equity in Disciplining Management

Joint work with Alexander Gümbel, Saïd Business School and Lincoln College Oxford

In this paper we examine how the quantity of information generated about firm... View Details

06 Nov 2000
Research & Ideas

The Determinants of Corporate Venture Capital Success

them—potentially, at least—a strategic edge that private funds lack. These differences—good and bad—are illustrated by the case of Xerox Technology Ventures (XTV). The case, write Gompers and Lerner, "highlights the fact... View Details

Keywords: by Paul Gompers & Josh Lerner

February 2016 (Revised July 2017)
Case

Race, Justice, and the Jury System in Postbellum Virginia

By: David Moss and Dean Grodzins

In December 1877, an all-white grand jury in Patrick County, Virginia, indicted two black teenagers, Lee and Burwell Reynolds, for killing a white man. After a series of trials, an all-white trial jury convicted Lee of second-degree murder and sentenced him to prison.... View Details

Keywords: Rights; Courts and Trials; Fairness; Race; Government and Politics; History; Virginia

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19 Sep 2017
First Look

First Look at New Research and Ideas, September 19

increased by 0.75 percentage points, increasing sales dispersion. Calibrating conventional inventory-ordering models, we show that to respond optimally to the observed increase in dispersion, the retailer would need to increase its cycle... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

13 May 2002
Book

Bringing the Master Passions to Work

accounts is also the telltale sign of the desire to impress by expressing—to control other minds through erudition, wit, and eloquence. We can seize others "by their minds" with our justificatory strategies. We get them to see... View Details

Keywords: by Mihnea C. Moldoveanu & Nitin Nohria

The Founders and Finance

In 1776 the United States government started out on a shoestring and quickly went bankrupt fighting its War of Independence against Britain. At the war’s end, the national government owed tremendous sums to foreign creditors and its own citizens. But lacking... View Details

Publications