Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(2,722)
- Faculty Publications (339)
- October 2020 (Revised March 2022)
- Supplement
The What Works Centre: Using Behavioral Science to Improve Social Worker Well-being (B)
By: Ashley V. Whillans and Shibeal O'Flaherty
This case describes the experiences of Michael Sanders—the Chief Executive of the What Works Center for Children’s Social Care—as he led the design and implementation of a program of research aimed at improving the social care system in the United Kingdom (UK) at the... 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
- September 2020
- Case
Drinkworks: Home Bar by Keurig
By: Sunil Gupta, Jonathan Levav and Julia Kelley
In the summer of 2018, Drinkworks CEO Nathaniel Davis needed to make a number of go-to-market decisions ahead of his company’s upcoming product launch. Formed through a joint venture between Keurig Dr. Pepper and Anheuser-Busch InBev, Drinkworks had developed an... View Details
Keywords: Marketing; Marketing Strategy; Product Marketing; Product Launch; Product Positioning; Markets; Bids and Bidding; Demand and Consumers; Consumer Behavior; Market Design; Distribution; Distribution Channels; Product; Product Design; Product Development; Business Model; Customers; Customer Value and Value Chain; Decision Making; Decisions; Goods and Commodities; Innovation and Invention; Technological Innovation; Business or Company Management; Growth and Development Strategy; Research; Research and Development; Strategy; Adoption; Competitive Advantage; Segmentation; Information Technology; Information Infrastructure; Value; Value Creation; Food and Beverage Industry; Consumer Products Industry; North and Central America; United States
- 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
- August 2020
- Article
Does Spending Money on Others Promote Happiness? A Registered Replication Report
By: Lara B. Aknin, Elizabeth W. Dunn, Jason Proulx, Iris Lok and Michael I. Norton
Research indicates that spending money on others—prosocial spending—leads to greater happiness than spending money on oneself (e.g., Dunn, Aknin, & Norton, 2008, 2014). These findings have received widespread attention because they offer insight into why people engage... View Details
- July 2020
- Case
Mortgage Backed Securities and the Covid-19 Pandemic
By: Emil N. Siriwardane, Luis M. Viceira and Dean Xu
In April 2020, global financial markets were still reeling as the COVID-19 pandemic spread rapidly across the world. Global equity markets had initially fallen by 30% in response to the pandemic, and high-yield credit markets had dropped by nearly 20%. In contrast,... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
When Do Experts Listen to Other Experts? The Role of Negative Information in Expert Evaluations for Novel Projects
By: Jacqueline N. Lane, Misha Teplitskiy, Gary Gray, Hardeep Ranu, Michael Menietti, Eva C. Guinan and Karim R. Lakhani
The evaluation of novel projects lies at the heart of scientific and technological innovation, and yet literature suggests that this process is subject to inconsistency and potential biases. This paper investigates the role of information sharing among experts as the... 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
- July 2020
- Article
The Role of Interdependence in the Microfoundations of Organization Design: Task, Goal, and Knowledge Interdependence
By: Marlo Raveendran (formerly Goetting), Luciana Silvestri and Ranjay Gulati
Interdependence is a core concept in organization design, yet one that has remained consistently understudied. Current notions of interdependence remain rooted in seminal works, produced at a time when managers’ near-perfect understanding of the task at hand drove the... View Details
- March 2020
- Case
A Tower for the People: 425 Park Avenue
By: John Macomber, Joseph G. Allen and Emily Jones
Healthy buildings and superior air quality are increasingly important since people now spend so much time indoors. Indoor spaces drive performance and productivity. Commercial real estate landlords and investors are responding to the demands of sophisticated tenants... View Details
- March 2020
- Article
A Revolution in Economics? It's Just Getting Started...
By: Shawn A. Cole, William Pariente and Anja Sautmann
We have each experienced thrills and pain while supporting the mission of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, which facilitated many of the experiments described in the 2019 Nobel Prize citation. J-PAL in many ways seeks to fulfill what Angrist and Pischke... View Details
- March 2020
- Article
Is This My Group or Not? The Role of Ensemble Coding of Emotional Expressions in Group Categorization
By: Amit Goldenberg, Timothy D. Sweeny, Emmanuel Shpigel and James J. Gross
When exposed to others’ emotional responses, people often make rapid decisions as to whether these others are members of their group or not. These group categorization decisions have been shown to be extremely important to understanding group behavior. Yet, despite... View Details
- March 2020
- Article
Organizing Knowledge Production Teams Within Firms for Innovation
By: Vikas A. Aggarwal, David H. Hsu and Andy Wu
How should firms organize their pool of inventive human capital for firm-level innovation? While access to diverse knowledge may aid knowledge recombination, which can facilitate innovation, prior literature has focused primarily on one way of achieving that: diversity... View Details
- March 2020
- Article
Which Early Withdrawal Penalty Attracts the Most Deposits to a Commitment Savings Account?
By: John Beshears, James J. Choi, Christopher Harris, David Laibson, Brigitte C. Madrian and Jung Sakong
Previous research has shown that some people voluntarily use commitment contracts that restrict their own choice sets. We study how people divide money between two accounts: a liquid account that permits unrestricted withdrawals and a commitment account that is... View Details
- Article
Designing Social Networks: Joint Tasks and the Formation and Endurance of Network Ties
By: Sharique Hasan and Rembrand Koning
Can managers influence the formation of organizational networks? In this article, we evaluate the effect of joint tasks on the creation of network ties with data from a novel field experiment with 112 aspiring entrepreneurs. During the study, we randomized individuals... View Details
- 2020
- Article
Fast Exact Matrix Completion: A Unified Optimization Framework for Matrix Completion
By: Dimitris Bertsimas and Michael Lingzhi Li
We formulate the problem of matrix completion with and without side information as a non-convex optimization problem. We design fastImpute based on non-convex gradient descent and show it converges to a global minimum that is guaranteed to recover closely the... View Details
Keywords: Mathematical Methods
- 2019
- Article
Configurations of Extremal Type II Codes via Harmonic Weight Enumerators
By: Noam D. Elkies and Scott Duke Kominers
We prove configuration results for extremal Type II codes, analogous to the configuration results of Ozeki and of the second author for extremal Type II lattices. Specifically, we show that for n ∈{8,24,32,48,56,72,96} every extremal Type II code of length n is... View Details
Keywords: Mathematical Methods
- November 2019
- Article
Full Substitutability
By: John William Hatfield, Scott Duke Kominers, Alexandru Nichifor, Michael Ostrovsky and Alexander Westkamp
Various forms of substitutability are essential for establishing the existence of equilibria and other useful properties in diverse settings such as matching, auctions, and exchange economies with indivisible goods. We extend earlier models’ definitions of... View Details
- October 14, 2019
- Article
The Truth About Open Offices: There Are Reasons Why They Don't Produce the Desired Interactions
By: Ethan Bernstein and Ben Waber
It’s never been easier for workers to collaborate—or so it seems. Open, flexible, activity-based spaces are displacing cubicles, making people more visible. Messaging is displacing phone calls, making people more accessible. Enterprise social media such as Slack and... View Details