Publications

Purchase

September 1994
Case

BayFunds

By: Alvin J. Silk, Lisa Klein Pearo and Jamie Harper

In June, 1994, the Senior Vice President of BayBank's Investment Management Group is preparing a strategic plan for her organization's line of mutual funds. Sixteen months earlier, BayBank, Massachusetts's leading retail bank, had entered the mutual fund business by... View Details

Keywords: Banks and Banking; Marketing Strategy; Brands and Branding; Investment Funds; Product Marketing; Integration; Financial Services Industry

Educators

Purchase

June 2021
Article

Making Marketplaces Safe: Dominant Individual Rationality and Applications to Market Design

By: Benjamin N. Roth and Ran I. Shorrer

Often market designers cannot force agents to join a marketplace rather than using pre-existing institutions. We propose a new desideratum for marketplace design that guarantees the safety of participation: Dominant Individual Rationality (DIR). A marketplace is DIR if... View Details

Keywords: Dominant Individual Rationality; Market Design; Safety

SSRN

18 Mar 2008
First Look

First Look: March 18, 2008

Working PapersWhere Does It Go? Spending by the Financially Constrained Authors:Shawn A. Cole, John Thompson, and Peter Tufano Abstract In this paper, we analyze the spending decisions of over 1.5 million Americans who vary in their... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

Article

Mitigating Bias in Adaptive Data Gathering via Differential Privacy

By: Seth Neel and Aaron Leon Roth

Data that is gathered adaptively—via bandit algorithms, for example—exhibits bias. This is true both when gathering simple numeric valued data—the empirical means kept track of by stochastic bandit algorithms are biased downwards—and when gathering more complicated... View Details

Keywords: Bandit Algorithms; Bias; Analytics and Data Science; Mathematical Methods; Theory

30 Jun 2009
First Look

First Look: June 30

theorists differ as to whether exploitation undermines or enhances exploration. The debate reflects a gap—the missing theoretical mechanism by which organizations break free of old routines and discover new ones. We propose that the... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

14 Aug 2017
Conference Presentation

A Convex Framework for Fair Regression

By: Richard Berk, Hoda Heidari, Shahin Jabbari, Matthew Joseph, Michael J. Kearns, Jamie Morgenstern, Seth Neel and Aaron Roth

We introduce a flexible family of fairness regularizers for (linear and logistic) regression problems. These regularizers all enjoy convexity, permitting fast optimization, and they span the range from notions of group fairness to strong individual fairness. By varying... View Details

Keywords: Regression Models; Machine Learning; Fairness; Framework; Mathematical Methods

2023
Working Paper

Market Design and Maintenance

Because no marketplace operates in isolation from the larger world, marketplace designs may need to adapt to changes in the larger environments. I discuss such changes in connection with the labor markets for new doctors, new Ph.D. economists, and for kidney exchange... View Details

Keywords: Market Design

Register to Read

1982
Article

The Economics of Matching: Stability and Incentives

Keywords: Balance and Stability; Motivation and Incentives; Economics

13 Nov 2012
First Look

First Look: November 13

paid forward in kind, greed was paid forward more than generosity. This asymmetry was driven by negative affect, such that a positive affect intervention disrupted the tendency to pay greed forward. Implications for models of generalized... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

2008
Working Paper

Economic Factors Underlying the Unbundling of Advertising Agency Services

By: Mohammad Arzaghi, Ernst R. Berndt, James C. Davis and Alvin J. Silk

This paper addresses a longstanding puzzle involving the unbundling of services that has occurredover more than two decades in the U.S. advertising agency industry: How can the shift from the bundling to the unbundling of services be explained and what accounts for the... View Details

Keywords: Transformation; Framework; Service Operations; Decisions; Relationships; Price; Diversification; Geography; Cost; Advertising Industry; United States

24 Feb 2009
First Look

First Look: February 24, 2009

not only experience project-level success with the implementation of new work practices, but also organizational-level success as indicated by overall measures of performance. We tested our hypothesis in a longitudinal study of 23... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

2013
Article

How Concentrated Is the U.S. Advertising and Marketing Services Industry? Myth vs. Reality

By: Alvin J. Silk and Charles King III

We analyze changes in concentration levels in the U.S. Advertising and Marketing Services industry using data from the U.S. Census Bureau's quinquennial Economic Census and the Service Annual Survey. These data, heretofore largely ignored, allow us to redress some of... View Details

Keywords: Concentration Levels; Data; U.S. Census Bureau’s Quinquennial Economic Census And The Service Annual Survey; Measurement Problems; Herfindahl-Hirschman Index; Concentration Ratios; Advertising; Advertising Industry; North and Central America

Purchase

2008
Working Paper

The Internalization of Advertising Services: An Inter-Industry Analysis

By: Sharon Horsky, Steven C. Michael and Alvin J. Silk

The common perception appears to be that vertical integration of advertising services is more the exception than the rule in the U.S. advertising industry. This study investigates the extent of such outsourcing and examines inter-industry variation in the use of... View Details

Keywords: Advertising; Cost; Analytics and Data Science; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques; Service Operations; Creativity; Perception; Vertical Integration; Information Technology; Advertising Industry; United States

Research Summary

For further information, please go to my Game Theory,Experimental Economics, and Market Design Page. View Details

2013
Chapter

In 100 Years

2010
Working Paper

The Job Market for New Economists: A Market Design Perspective

By: Peter A. Coles, John Cawley, Phillip B. Levine, Muriel Niederle, Alvin E. Roth and John J. Siegfried

This paper provides an overview of the market for new Ph.D. economists. It describes the role of the American Economic Association (AEA) in the market and focuses in particular on two mechanisms adopted in recent years at the suggestion of our committee. First, job... View Details

Keywords: Cost Management; Information; Surveys; Jobs and Positions; Job Interviews; Job Search; Emerging Markets; Digital Platforms; Service Operations; Internet and the Web

July 2018
Article

Marketplaces, Markets, and Market Design

Marketplaces are often small parts of large markets, and both markets and marketplaces come in many varieties. Market design seeks to understand what marketplaces must accomplish to enable different kinds of markets. Marketplaces can have varying degrees of success,... View Details

Keywords: Labor Market; Pricing; Market Design; Markets; Economics