Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(1,134)
- Faculty Publications (225)
- May 2017
- Article
Agent-based Modeling: A Guide for Social Psychologists
By: Joshua Conrad Jackson, David Rand, Kevin Lewis, Michael I. Norton and Kurt Gray
Agent-based modeling is a longstanding but underused method that allows researchers to simulate artificial worlds for hypothesis testing and theory building. Agent-based models (ABMs) offer unprecedented control and statistical power by allowing researchers to... View Details
- Article
Are Online and Offline Prices Similar? Evidence from Large Multi-Channel Retailers
By: Alberto Cavallo
Online prices are increasingly used for measurement and research applications, yet little is known about their relation to prices in physical stores, where most retail transactions occur. I conduct the first large-scale comparison of prices simultaneously collected... View Details
- September 2016
- Case
Hotel Vertu: Analyzing the Opportunity in the Boutique Hotel Industry
By: Howard H. Stevenson and Michael J. Roberts DBA
Two soon-to-be MBA graduates are considering a business opportunity in the boutique hotel industry. Having found a seemingly attractive property in Savannah, Georgia, Yvonne D'Arcy and Elisabeth Whiting face questions about career issues, planning, financing, and the... View Details
- Fall 2016
- Article
The Impact of Supplier Inventory Service Level on Retailer Demand
By: Nathan Craig, Nicole DeHoratius and Ananth Raman
To set inventory service levels, suppliers must understand how changes in inventory service level affect demand. We build on prior research, which uses analytical models and laboratory experiments to study the impact of a supplier’s service level on demand from... View Details
- August 2016
- Article
Independent Directors' Dissent on Boards: Evidence from Listed Companies in China
By: Juan Ma and Tarun Khanna
In this paper, we examine the circumstances under which so-called "independent" directors voice their independent views on public boards in a sample of Chinese firms. First, we ask why independent directors dissent, i.e. how they justify such dissent to public... View Details
- Article
Beyond Statistics: The Economic Content of Risk Scores
By: Liran Einav, Amy Finkelstein, Raymond Kluender and Paul Schrimpf
"Big data" and statistical techniques to score potential transactions have transformed insurance and credit markets. In this paper, we observe that these widely-used statistical scores summarize a much richer heterogeneity, and may be endogenous to the context in which... View Details
- Article
Learning from Potentially Biased Statistics: Household Inflation Perceptions and Expectations in Argentina
By: Alberto Cavallo, Guillermo Cruces and Ricardo Perez-Truglia
When forming expectations, households may be influenced by perceived bias in the information they receive. In this paper, we study how individuals learn from potentially biased statistics using data from both a natural experiment and a survey experiment during a... View Details
- Spring 2016
- Article
The Billion Prices Project: Using Online Prices for Inflation Measurement and Research
By: Alberto Cavallo and Roberto Rigobon
New data-gathering techniques, often referred to as “Big Data” have the potential to improve statistics and empirical research in economics. In this paper we describe our work with online data at the Billion Prices Project at MIT and discuss key lessons for both... View Details
- 2016
- Article
Penalized Fast Subset Scanning
By: Skyler Speakman, Sriram Somanchi, Edward McFowland III and Daniel B. Neill
We present the penalized fast subset scan (PFSS), a new and general framework for scalable and accurate pattern detection. PFSS enables exact and efficient identification of the most anomalous subsets of the data, as measured by a likelihood ratio scan statistic.... View Details
- 2016
- Article
Does volunteering improve well-being?
By: A.V. Whillans, Scott C. Seider, Lihan Chen, Ryan J. Dwyer, Sarah Novick, Kathryn J. Gramigna, Brittany A. Mitchell, Victoria Savalei, Sally S. Dickerson and Elizabeth W. Dunn
Does volunteering causally improve well-being? To empirically test this question, we examined one instantiation of volunteering that is common at post-secondary institutions across North America: community service learning (CSL). CSL is a form of experiential learning... View Details
- 2015
- Working Paper
Financial Patent Quality: Finance Patents After State Street
By: Josh Lerner, Andrew Speen, Mark Baker and Ann Leamon
In the past two decades, patents of inventions related to financial services ("finance patents"), as well as litigation around these patents, have surged. One of the repeated concerns voiced by academics and practitioners alike has been about the quality of these... View Details
- October 2015 (Revised October 2016)
- Case
Building Watson: Not So Elementary, My Dear! (Abridged)
By: Willy C. Shih
This case is set inside IBM Research's efforts to build a computer that can successfully take on human challengers playing the game show Jeopardy! It opens with the machine named Watson offering the incorrect answer "Toronto" to a seemingly simple question during the... View Details
- August 2015 (Revised January 2017)
- Technical Note
From Correlation to Causation
By: Feng Zhu and Karim R. Lakhani
To make sound business decisions, managers must be comfortable with the concepts of correlation and causation. This background note provides an overview of correlation and causation using examples and explains why the former does not imply the latter. It also describes... View Details
- August 2015 (Revised May 2017)
- Case
TSG Hoffenheim: Football in the Age of Analytics
By: Feng Zhu, Karim R. Lakhani, Sascha L. Schmidt and Kerry Herman
In 2015, Dietmar Hopp, owner of Germany's Bundesliga football team TSG Hoffenheim and co-founder of the global enterprise software company SAP, was considering how to ensure long-term sustainability and competitiveness for TSG Hoffenheim. While historically a small... View Details
- 2015
- Article
Testing Strategy with Multiple Performance Measures: Evidence from a Balanced Scorecard at Store24
We analyze balanced scorecard data from a convenience store chain, Store24, during the implementation of an innovative, but ultimately unsuccessful, strategy. Quarterly strategic reviews, based in part on the firm's balanced scorecard, led executives at Store24 to... View Details
- 2015
- Working Paper
Lost in the Clouds: The Impact of Changing Property Rights on Investment in Cloud Computing Ventures
By: Josh Lerner and Greg Rafert
Our analysis seeks to understand the impact of changing allocations of property rights on investment in new firms. We focus on the Cartoon Network, et al. v. Cablevision decision in the U.S., which narrowed the protection enjoyed by content creators (e.g., movie... View Details
- Article
De Gustibus non est Taxandum: Heterogeneity in Preferences and Optimal Redistribution
By: Benjamin B Lockwood and Matthew Weinzierl
The prominent but unproven intuition that preference heterogeneity reduces redistribution in a standard optimal tax model is shown to hold under the plausible condition that the distribution of preferences for consumption relative to leisure rises, in terms of... View Details
- 2015
- Article
Scalable Detection of Anomalous Patterns With Connectivity Constraints
By: Skyler Speakman, Edward McFowland III and Daniel B. Neill
We present GraphScan, a novel method for detecting arbitrarily shaped connected clusters in graph or network data. Given a graph structure, data observed at each node, and a score function defining the anomalousness of a set of nodes, GraphScan can efficiently and... View Details
- 2015
- Chapter
Negotiations: Statistical Aspects
'Negotiation analysis' seeks to develop prescriptive theory and useful advice for negotiators and third parties. It generally emphasizes the parties' underlying interests, alternatives to negotiated agreement, approaches to productively manage the inherent tension... View Details
- 2015
- Chapter
Optimal Process Control of Symbolic Transfer Functions
By: Christopher Griffin and Elisabeth Paulson
Transfer function modeling is a standard technique in classical Linear Time Invariant and Statistical Process Control. The work of Box and Jenkins was seminal in developing methods for identifying parameters associated with classical (r, s, k) transfer functions.... View Details