Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(3,791)
- Faculty Publications (479)
- February 2022
- Case
NFX Capital and Moov Technologies
By: Scott Duke Kominers and Nicole Tempest Keller
In July 2019, James Currier, a general partner at San Francisco-based NFX Ventures, was considering a seed stage investment of $1.5 million in Moov Technologies, a B2B marketplace for used industrial equipment. NFX was a venture capital firm focused on seed-stage... View Details
- January 2022
- Case
Somatus: Value-Based Kidney Care (A)
By: Ariel D. Stern, Robert S. Huckman and Sarah Mehta
When Dr. Ikenna Okezie founded Somatus, a value-based kidney care provider, his goal had been nothing short of transforming kidney care delivery in the United States. Rather than relying on dialysis, a costly and intensive treatment for late-stage kidney disease, the... View Details
- 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
- 2022
- Working Paper
TalkToModel: Explaining Machine Learning Models with Interactive Natural Language Conversations
By: Dylan Slack, Satyapriya Krishna, Himabindu Lakkaraju and Sameer Singh
Practitioners increasingly use machine learning (ML) models, yet they have become more complex and harder to understand. To address this issue, researchers have proposed techniques to explain model predictions. However, practitioners struggle to use explainability... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
The Fed and the Secular Decline in Interest Rates
In this paper I document a striking fact: a narrow window around Fed meetings fully captures the secular decline in U.S. Treasury yields since 1980. By contrast, yield movements outside this window are transitory and wash out over time. This is surprising because the... View Details
- December 2021 (Revised January 2023)
- Case
Katerra (A)
By: Lindsay N. Hyde, Thomas R. Eisenmann and Tom Quinn
In April 2020, Katerra executives struggled with a series of decisions that would determine the fate of one of the best-funded construction startups in history. Katerra was founded in 2015 by technology-industry executive Michael Marks and commercial real estate... View Details
- Article
Adaptive Machine Unlearning
By: Varun Gupta, Christopher Jung, Seth Neel, Aaron Roth, Saeed Sharifi-Malvajerdi and Chris Waites
Data deletion algorithms aim to remove the influence of deleted data points from trained models at a cheaper computational cost than fully retraining those models. However, for sequences of deletions, most prior work in the non-convex setting gives valid guarantees... View Details
- Article
Counterfactual Explanations Can Be Manipulated
By: Dylan Slack, Sophie Hilgard, Himabindu Lakkaraju and Sameer Singh
Counterfactual explanations are useful for both generating recourse and auditing fairness between groups. We seek to understand whether adversaries can manipulate counterfactual explanations in an algorithmic recourse setting: if counterfactual explanations indicate... View Details
- Winter 2021
- Article
Mobile Internet Usage and Usage-based Pricing
By: Jeffrey Prince and Shane Greenstein
Using data on mobile Internet usage of thousands of individuals, we provide some of the first analyses linking mobile usage to key demographics such as income. We find a reverse-U relationship between mobile Internet usage and income—notably different than the... View Details
- Article
Reliable Post hoc Explanations: Modeling Uncertainty in Explainability
By: Dylan Slack, Sophie Hilgard, Sameer Singh and Himabindu Lakkaraju
As black box explanations are increasingly being employed to establish model credibility in high stakes settings, it is important to ensure that these explanations are accurate and reliable. However, prior work demonstrates that explanations generated by... View Details
- 2021
- Article
ThreeDWorld: A Platform for Interactive Multi-Modal Physical Simulation
By: Chuang Gan, Jeremy Schwartz, Seth Alter, Damian Mrowca, Martin Schrimpf, James Traer, Julian De Freitas, Jonas Kubilius, Abhishek Bhandwaldar, Nick Haber, Megumi Sano, Kuno Kim, Elias Wang, Michael Lingelbach, Aidan Curtis, Kevin Feigelis, Daniel M. Bear, Dan Gutfreund, David Cox, Antonio Torralba, James J. DiCarlo, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Josh H. McDermott and Daniel L.K. Yamins
We introduce ThreeDWorld (TDW), a platform for interactive multi-modal physical simulation. TDW enables simulation of high-fidelity sensory data and physical interactions between mobile agents and objects in rich 3D environments. Unique properties include: real-time... View Details
- November 2021
- Article
Ratings, Reviews, and the Marketing of New Products
By: Itay P. Fainmesser, Dominique Olié Lauga and Elie Ofek
We study how user-generated content (UGC) about new products impacts a firm's advertising and pricing decisions and the effect on profits and market dynamics. We construct a two-period model where consumers value quality and are heterogeneous in their taste for the new... View Details
- October 2021 (Revised December 2021)
- Case
Customer-Centric Design with Artificial Intelligence: Commonwealth Bank
By: Karim R. Lakhani, Yael Grushka-Cockayne, Jin Hyun Paik and Steven Randazzo
As Commonwealth Bank (CommBank) CEO Matt Comyn delivered the full financial year results in August 2021 over videoconference, it took less than two minutes for him to make his first mention of the organization's Customer Engagement Engine (CEE), the AI-driven customer... View Details
- October 2021 (Revised September 2022)
- Case
GoPro: Becoming a Subscription Hero
By: Elie Ofek, Marco Bertini and Nicole Tempest Keller
In 2021, Nick Woodman, founder and CEO of GoPro, was reviewing the company’s subscription offering, considering whether to extend it beyond benefits that were directly related to the company’s iconic camera. Founded in 2002, GoPro had gained renown for its innovative... View Details
- October 2021 (Revised May 2023)
- Case
Project Maji: Pricing Water in Sub-Saharan Africa
By: Elie Ofek, Marco Bertini, Dilyana Karadzhova Botha and Esel Çekin
In July 2021, Sunil Lalvani, founder and CEO of Project Maji, a non-profit social enterprise headquartered in Dubai that had already provided sustainable, clean water solutions to 80,000 people living in rural communities across Ghana and Kenya, was facing an important... View Details
- October 2021
- Article
Can Self-Regulation Save Digital Platforms?
By: Michael A. Cusumano, Annabelle Gawer and David B. Yoffie
This article explores some of the critical challenges facing self-regulation and the regulatory environment for digital platforms. We examine several historical examples of firms and industries that attempted self-regulation before the Internet. All dealt with similar... View Details
- September 2021
- Article
Diagnostic Bubbles
By: Pedro Bordalo, Nicola Gennaioli, Spencer Yongwook Kwon and Andrei Shleifer
We introduce diagnostic expectations into a standard setting of price formation in which investors learn about the fundamental value of an asset and trade it. We study the interaction of diagnostic expectations with two well-known mechanisms: learning from prices and... View Details
- Article
Party-State Capitalism in China
By: Margaret Pearson, Meg Rithmire and Kellee Tsai
The “state capitalism” model, in which the state retains a dominant role as owner or investor-shareholder amidst the presence of markets and private firms, has received increasing attention, with China cited as the main exemplar. Yet as models evolve, so has China’s... View Details
Keywords: Economic Policy; Communism; Capitalism; State Capitalism; Economic Systems; Economics; Policy; China
- Article
What Evolution Can Teach Us About Innovation
By: Noubar Afeyan and Gary P. Pisano
Many people believe that the process for achieving breakthrough innovations is chaotic, random, and unmanageable. But that view is flawed, the authors argue. Breakthroughs can be systematically generated using a process modeled on the principles that drive evolution in... View Details
- August 2021
- Article
Multiple Imputation Using Gaussian Copulas
By: F.M. Hollenbach, I. Bojinov, S. Minhas, N.W. Metternich, M.D. Ward and A. Volfovsky
Missing observations are pervasive throughout empirical research, especially in the social sciences. Despite multiple approaches to dealing adequately with missing data, many scholars still fail to address this vital issue. In this paper, we present a simple-to-use... View Details