Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(624)
- Faculty Publications (415)
- Winter 2017
- Article
Why Big Data Isn't Enough
By: Sen Chai and Willy C. Shih
There is a growing belief that sophisticated algorithms can explore huge databases and find relationships independent of any preconceived hypotheses. But in businesses that involve scientific research and technological innovation, this approach is misguided and... View Details
- 18 Nov 2016
- Conference Presentation
Rawlsian Fairness for Machine Learning
By: Matthew Joseph, Michael J. Kearns, Jamie Morgenstern, Seth Neel and Aaron Leon Roth
Motivated by concerns that automated decision-making procedures can unintentionally lead to discriminatory behavior, we study a technical definition of fairness modeled after John Rawls' notion of "fair equality of opportunity". In the context of a simple model of... View Details
- 2016
- Working Paper
Refugee Resettlement
By: David Delacretaz, Scott Duke Kominers and Alexander Teytelboym
Over 100,000 refugees are permanently resettled from refugee camps to hosting
countries every year. Nevertheless, refugee resettlement processes in most countries
are ad hoc, accounting for neither the priorities of hosting communities nor the preferences of refugees... View Details
- Article
Crowdsourcing City Government: Using Tournaments to Improve Inspection Accuracy
By: Edward Glaeser, Andrew Hillis, Scott Duke Kominers and Michael Luca
The proliferation of big data makes it possible to better target city services like hygiene inspections, but city governments rarely have the in-house talent needed for developing prediction algorithms. Cities could hire consultants, but a cheaper alternative is to... 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
- January 2016
- Article
Zooming In: A Practical Manual for Identifying Geographic Clusters
By: Juan Alcacer and Minyuan Zhao
This paper takes a close look at the reasons, procedures, and results of cluster identification methods. Despite being a popular research topic in strategy, economics, and sociology, geographic clusters are often studied with little consideration given to the... View Details
Keywords: Mathematical Methods
- Article
Formal Measures in Informal Management: Can a Balanced Scorecard Change a Culture?
By: Robert Gibbons and Robert S. Kaplan
Agency theorists, historically, have analyzed what kinds of performance measures should be used in formal incentive contracts. For example, after Kaplan-Norton proposed a balanced scorecard of both financial and non-financial measures, some envisioned its role only in... View Details
- 2015
- Working Paper
Configurations of Extremal Type II Codes
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
- Article
Aztec Castles and the dP3 Quiver
By: Megan Leoni, Gregg Musiker, Seth Neel and Paxton Turner
Bipartite, periodic, planar graphs known as brane tilings can be associated to a large class of quivers. This paper will explore new algebraic properties of the well-studied del Pezzo 3 (dP3) quiver and geometric properties of its corresponding brane tiling. In... View Details
- 2014
- Working Paper
Non-Adherence in Health Care: A Positive and Normative Analysis
By: Mark Egan and Tomas J. Philipson
Non-adherence in health care results when a patient does not initiate or continue care that a provider has recommended. Previous research identifies non-adherence as a major source of waste in US health care, totaling approximately 2.3% of GDP, and have proposed a... View Details
- Article
Asymptotic Improvements of Lower Bounds for the Least Common Multiples of Arithmetic Progressions
By: Daniel M. Kane and Scott Duke Kominers
For relatively prime positive integers and r, we consider the least common multiple L_n:=\mathop{\textrm{lcm}}(u_0,u_1,\dots, u_n) of the finite arithmetic progression \{u_k:=u_0+kr\}_{k=0}^n. We derive new lower bounds on L_n that improve upon those obtained... View Details
Keywords: Mathematical Methods
- October 2013
- Article
How Much to Make and How Much to Buy? An Analysis of Optimal Plural Sourcing Strategies
By: Phanish Puranam, Ranjay Gulati and Sourav Bhattacharya
While many theories of the firm seek to explain when firms make rather than buy, in practice, firms often make and buy the same input—they engage in plural sourcing. We argue that explaining the mix of external procurement and internal sourcing for the same input... View Details
- 2013
- Working Paper
Applying Random Coefficient Models to Strategy Research: Testing for Firm Heterogeneity, Predicting Firm-Specific Coefficients, and Estimating Strategy Trade-Offs
By: Juan Alcacer, Wilbur Chung, Ashton Hawk and Goncalo Pacheco-de-Almeida
Although Strategy research aims to understand how firm actions have differential effects on performance, most empirical research estimates the average effects of these actions across firms. This paper promotes Random Coefficients Models (RCMs) as an ideal empirical... View Details
- 2013
- Working Paper
Where do the Most Active Customers Originate and How Can Firms Keep Them Engaged?
By: Clarence Lee, E. Ofek and Thomas Steenburgh
In this paper, we study how firms offering Web services can acquire and develop an active customer base. We focus on two basic questions. First, how does the method of customer acquisition affect the way customers use the service to meet their own needs and to interact... View Details
- June 2013 (Revised November 2022)
- Exercise
Competition Simulator Exercise
In the Competition Simulator Exercise, students explore through trial and error some important economic foundations of competitive strategy and managerial economics. In particular, the nine simulator exercises let students explore horizontal differentiation with and... View Details
Keywords: Competition; Economics; Game Theory; Competitive Strategy; Learning; Mathematical Methods; Analysis
- April 2013
- Case
Managing with Analytics at Procter & Gamble
By: Thomas H. Davenport, Marco Iansiti and Alain Serels
Senior management at P&G has put a strong emphasis on using data to make "better, smarter, real-time business decisions." The Global Business Services (GBS) organization has developed tools, systems and processes to provide managers throughout P&G with direct access to... View Details
- 2013
- Chapter
Weighted Generating Functions for Type II Lattices and Codes
By: Noam D. Elkies and Scott Duke Kominers
We give a new structural development of harmonic polynomials on Hamming space, and harmonic weight enumerators of binary linear codes, that parallels one approach to harmonic polynomials on Euclidean space and weighted theta functions of Euclidean lattices. Namely, we... View Details
Keywords: Mathematical Methods
- Article
Assent-maximizing Social Choice
By: Katherine A. Baldiga and Jerry R. Green
We take a decision theoretic approach to the classic social choice problem, using data on the frequency of choice problems to compute social choice functions. We define a family of social choice rules that depend on the population's preferences and on the probability... View Details
- December 2012
- Case
Delwarca Software Remote Support Unit
By: Roy D. Shapiro and Paul E. Morrison
Delwarca Software provides business software to large corporate clients around the world. The firm serves customers who prefer to assemble corporate solutions using a combination of software programs from various suppliers rather than implementing a single enterprise... View Details
- 2014
- Working Paper
Search-Based Peer Firms: Aggregating Investor Perceptions Through Internet Co-Searches
By: Charles M.C. Lee, Paul Ma and Charles C.Y. Wang
Applying a "co-search" algorithm to Internet traffic at the SEC's EDGAR web-site, we develop a novel method for identifying economically-related peer firms and for measuring their relative importance. Our results show that firms appearing in chronologically adjacent... View Details