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Publications
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- Faculty Publications (657)
- August 2022 (Revised March 2023)
- Technical Note
Real Estate iBuying
By: Michael Luca, Jesse M. Shapiro and Julia Kelley
This note provides an overview of real estate iBuying, or instant buying, a business model that involves buying homes and then reselling them at a profit. Introduced in the mid-2010s, iBuying streamlined the process of selling a home by offering instant, all-cash... View Details
- 2022
- Book
Making Meritocracy: Lessons from China and India, from Antiquity to the Present
By: Tarun Khanna and Michael Szonyi
How do societies identify and promote merit? Enabling all people to fulfill their potential, and ensuring the selection of competent and capable leaders are central challenges for any society. These are not new concerns. Scholars, educators, and political and economic... View Details
- August 2022 (Revised October 2022)
- Case
Sian Flowers: Fresher by Sea?
By: Willy C. Shih, Michael W. Toffel and Pippa Tubman Armerding
The setting for this case is the Sian Flowers, a company headquartered in Kitengela, Kenya that exports roses to predominantly Europe. Because cut flowers have a limited shelf life and consumers want them to retain their appearance for as long as possible, Sian or its... View Details
- July 2022
- Case
David Crane’s Clean(er) Energy Strategy at NRG
By: George Serafeim, Michael W. Toffel and Tom Quinn
In 2015, David Crane was the CEO of NRG, the second-largest energy producer in the United States. NRG got most of its power from fossil fuels, but Crane – hired as CEO in 2003 as NRG emerged from bankruptcy – had invested heavily in alternative energy, loudly... View Details
- July 2022 (Revised October 2022)
- Case
Nestlé, Shared Value and KitKat Diplomacy
By: Geoffrey G. Jones and Sabine Pitteloud
The case revolves around the decision on March 23, 2022 by Mark Schneider, the chief executive of Swiss-based Nestlé, to withdraw the emblematic Kit Kat chocolate bar from sales in Russia in response to the invasion of Ukraine in the previous month, although not its... View Details
- Winter 2022
- Article
Determinants of Small Business Reopening Decisions After COVID Restrictions Were Lifted
By: Dylan Balla-Elliott, Zoë B. Cullen, Edward L. Glaeser, Michael Luca and Christopher Stanton
The COVID-19 pandemic led to dramatic economic disruptions, including government-imposed restrictions that temporarily shuttered millions of American businesses. We use a nation-wide survey of thousands of small business owners to establish three main facts about... View Details
- 2022
- Article
Regulatory Treatment of Changes in Fair Value and the Composition of Banks' Investment Portfolios
By: Michael Iselin, Jung Koo Kang and Joshua Madsen
In their implementation of Basel III, U.S. bank regulators are again including changes in the fair value of available-for-sale (AFS) debt securities in Tier 1 capital, but only for the largest U.S. banks. This paper investigates a potential impact of expanding this... View Details
- June 2022
- Article
Conservatism Gets Funded? A Field Experiment on the Role of Negative Information in Novel Project Evaluation
By: Jacqueline N. Lane, Misha Teplitskiy, Gary Gray, Hardeep Ranu, Michael Menietti, Eva C. Guinan and Karim R. Lakhani
The evaluation and selection of novel projects lies at the heart of scientific and technological innovation, and yet there are persistent concerns about bias, such as conservatism. This paper investigates the role that the format of evaluation, specifically information... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
Are Experts Blinded by Feasibility?: Experimental Evidence from a NASA Robotics Challenge
By: Jacqueline N. Lane, Zoe Szajnfarber, Jason Crusan, Michael Menietti and Karim R. Lakhani
Resource allocation decisions play a dominant role in shaping a firm’s technological trajectory and competitive advantage. Recent work indicates that innovative firms and scientific institutions tend to exhibit an anti-novelty bias when evaluating new projects and... View Details
- May 2022
- Article
The Impact of COVID-19 on Digital Communication Patterns
By: Evan DeFilippis, Stephen Michael Impink, Madison Singell, Jeff Polzer and Raffaella Sadun
We explore the impact of COVID-19 on employees’ digital communication patterns through an event study of lockdowns in 16 large metropolitan areas in North America, Europe, and the Middle East. Using de-identified, aggregated meeting and email meta-data from 3,143,270... View Details
- May 2022
- Case
Executive Decision-Making at Zola
By: Amy C. Edmondson and Michael Roberto
In April 2020, Rachel Jarrett, President and COO of wedding technology company Zola, called a meeting with the organization’s key decision-makers. The company had previously launched three business expansions: a vendor marketplace, a wedding apparel division, and a... View Details
- Article
Early Withdrawal of Pandemic Unemployment Insurance: Effects on Earnings, Employment and Consumption
By: Kyle Coombs, Arindrajit Dube, Calvin Jahnke, Raymond Kluender, Suresh Naidu and Michael Stepner
In June 2021, 22 states ended all supplemental pandemic unemployment insurance (UI) benefits, eliminating benefits entirely for over 2 million workers and reducing benefits by $300 per week for over 1 million workers. Using anonymous bank transaction data and a... View Details
- April 2022
- Case
Mastercard: Creating a World Beyond Cash
In late 2021, Mastercard CEO Michael Miebach and Chairman and former CEO Ajaypal “Ajay” Banga considered how Mastercard could best position itself for continued success in the years to come. Since Mastercard’s initial public offering in 2006, the company had grown and... View Details
Keywords: Technological Innovation; Leadership; Leading Change; Organizational Culture; Business Strategy; Change; Change Management; Money; Cash; Credit; Financial Institutions; Banks and Banking; Central Banking; Financial Instruments; Credit Cards; Financial Markets; Globalization; Innovation and Invention; Innovation and Management; Innovation Strategy; Leadership Style; Competitive Advantage; Corporate Strategy; Diversification; Information Technology; Banking Industry; Financial Services Industry; North and Central America; United States; New York (state, US)
- April 2022
- Article
Consumers Value Effort over Ease When Caring for Close Others
By: Ximena Garcia-Rada, Mary Steffel, Elanor F. Williams and Michael I. Norton
Many products and services are designed to make caregiving easier, from premade meals for feeding families to robo-cribs that automatically rock babies to sleep. Yet, using these products may come with a cost: consumers may feel they have not exerted enough effort.... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
THEMIS: A Framework for Cost-Benefit Analysis of COVID-19 Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions
By: Dimitris Bertsimas, Michael Lingzhi Li and Saksham Soni
Since December 2019, the world has been ravaged by the COVID-19 pandemic, with over 150 million confirmed cases and 3 million confirmed deaths worldwide. To combat the spread of COVID-19, governments have issued unprecedented non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs),... View Details
Keywords: COVID-19; Health Pandemics; Policy; Framework; Cost vs Benefits; Outcome or Result; United States; Germany; Brazil; Singapore; Spain
- March 31, 2022
- Article
Two Approaches to Capping Health Care Prices
By: Michael E. Chernew, Maximilian J. Pany and Leemore S. Dafny
High health care prices for the privately-insured contribute to high premiums, which put downward pressure on wages, and induce employers to reduce benefit generosity and charge employees more for coverage. As the average annual premium for family coverage currently... View Details
- March 2022 (Revised July 2022)
- Technical Note
Exploratory Data Analysis
This module note provides an overview of exploratory data analysis for an introduction to data science course. It begins by defining the term "data", and then describes the different types of data that companies work with (structured v. unstructured, categorical v.... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
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
- March 2022
- Article
Where to Locate COVID-19 Mass Vaccination Facilities?
By: Dimitris Bertsimas, Vassilis Digalakis Jr, Alexander Jacquillat, Michael Lingzhi Li and Alessandro Previero
The outbreak of COVID-19 led to a record-breaking race to develop a vaccine. However, the limited vaccine capacity creates another massive challenge: how to distribute vaccines to mitigate the near-end impact of the pandemic? In the United States in particular, the new... View Details
- Article
A 680,000-Person Megastudy of Nudges to Encourage Vaccination in Pharmacies
By: Katherine L. Milkman, Linnea Gandhi, Mitesh S. Patel, Heather N. Graci, Dena M. Gromet, Hung Ho, Joseph S. Kay, Timothy W. Lee, Jake Rothschild, Jonathan E. Bogard, Ilana Brody, Christopher F. Chabris, Edward Chang, Gretchen B. Chapman, Jennifer E. Dannals, Noah J. Goldstein, Amir Goren, Hal Hershfield, Alex Hirsch, Jillian Hmurovic, Samantha Horn, Dean Karlan, Ariella S. Kristal, Cait Lamberton, Michael N. Meyer, Allison H. Oakes, Maurice E. Schweitzer, Maheen Shermohammed, Jaochim H. Talloen, Caleb Warren, Ashley V. Whillans, Kuldeep N. Yadav, Julian J. Zlatev, Ron Berman, Chalanda N. Evans, Rahul Ladhania, Jens Ludwig, Nina Mazar, Sendhil Mullainathan, Christopher K. Snider, Jann Spiess, Eli Tsukayama, Lyle Ungar, Christophe Van den Bulte, Kevin G. Volpp and Angela L. Duckworth
Encouraging vaccination is a pressing policy problem. To assess whether text-based reminders can encourage pharmacy vaccination and what kinds of messages work best, we conducted a megastudy. We randomly assigned 689,693 Walmart pharmacy patients to receive one of 22... View Details