Market Design - Publications - Faculty & Research

12 Jun 2006
Research & Ideas

The Promise of Channel Stewardship

Most company distribution systems are designed ad-hoc when needed, and serve neither value chain partners nor end users well—just look at the frustrating new-car buying process set up by American auto makers. At the same time, says... View Details

Keywords: by V. Kasturi Rangan & Marie Bell; Consumer Products

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

Keywords: Substitutability; Mathematical Methods; Auctions; Market Design

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30 Apr 2008
Sharpening Your Skills

Sharpening Your Skills: Brand Management

personality? How should I think about brand dilution? Does Branding Work For Business-to-business Marketing? B2B Branding: Does it Work? Does it make sense for B2B companies to take a cue from consumer companies and invest in brand awareness? Many B2B CEOs say no, but... View Details

Keywords: by Staff; Sports; Publishing; Auto

January 2021
Article

Chain Stability in Trading Networks

By: John William Hatfield, Scott Duke Kominers, Alexandru Nichifor, Michael Ostrovsky and Alexander Westkamp

We show that in general trading networks with bilateral contracts, a suitably adapted chain stability concept (Ostrovsky, 2008) is equivalent to stability (Hatfield and Kominers, 2012; Hatfield et al., 2013) if all agents' preferences are fully substitutable and... View Details

Keywords: Matching; Trading Networks; Chain Stability; Stability; Competitive Equilibria; Full Substitutability; Laws Of Aggregate Supply And Demand; Contracts; Market Design; Balance and Stability

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Article

Matching in Networks with Bilateral Contracts

By: John William Hatfield and Scott Duke Kominers

We introduce a model in which firms trade goods via bilateral contracts which specify a buyer, a seller, and the terms of the exchange. This setting subsumes (many-to-many) matching with contracts, as well as supply chain matching. When firms' relationships do not... View Details

Keywords: Contracts; Market Design; Marketplace Matching; Supply Chain

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2015
Working Paper

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' canonical definitions of... View Details

Keywords: Market Design; Balance and Stability

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18 Apr 2005
Research & Ideas

Selling Luxury to Everyone

shifting," she said. Panelist Rory Tahari, creative director and brand designer for Elie Tahari, Ltd.—and wife of designer Elie Tahari—said she saw a clear trend toward higher expectations from... View Details

Keywords: by Julie Jette; Consumer Products

07 Jul 2003
Research & Ideas

The Organizational Model for Open Source

foundations with formal boards and designated roles and responsibilities. Now there is a wide range of foundations that are emerging. At one end of the continuum are nonprofit foundations that act as little more than legal shells to hold... View Details

Keywords: by Mallory Stark

February 9, 2024
Article

The Rise of Consumer Crypto

By: Steve Kaczynski and Scott Duke Kominers

Although non-fungible tokens are often misunderstood and even derided, they remain a general and flexible solution for establishing and tracking ownership in the digital domain. As a superior solution to existing technology in many areas of the consumer economy, their... View Details

Keywords: Cryptocurrency; Crypto Economy; NFTs; Non-fungible Tokens; Internet Of Everything; Market Design; Technological Innovation; Demand and Consumers; Web Services Industry

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July 2012
Article

Discrete Choice Cannot Generate Demand That Is Additively Separable in Own Price

By: Sonia Jaffe and Scott Duke Kominers

We show that in a unit demand discrete choice framework with at least three goods, demand cannot be additively separable in own price. This result sharpens the analogous result of Jaffe and Weyl (2010) in the case of linear demand and has implications for testing of... View Details

Keywords: Discrete Choice; Unit Demand; Separable Demand; Linear Demand; Demand and Consumers; Market Design; Mathematical Methods; Economics

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01 Jun 2015
News

3-Minute Briefing: Rehito “Ray” Hatoyama (MBA 2008)

where anyone can contribute to create a “win-win” business together. When I joined Sanrio in 2008, our market cap was about $500 million. Now it’s closer to $3.5 billion, with $750 million in sales and an operating profit just over $200... View Details

Keywords: Julia Hanna; Hello Kitty; Special Design Services; Special Design Services; Special Design Services

August 1989 (Revised October 2003)
Case

Fan Pier

By: William J. Poorvu and Katherine Sweetman

The owner of the Fan Pier site in South Boston has been found legally responsible for blocking the efforts of his development partner in attaining the approval necessary to build the $800 million megaproject they had planned together. It was believed that the owner... View Details

Keywords: Partners and Partnerships; Law; Projects; Design; Organizational Design; Marketing Strategy; Government and Politics; Property; Real Estate Industry; Boston

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Student-Profile

Ta-Wei "David" Huang

management and using causal inference / machine learning tools to solve marketing problems.” It was this motivation that led him to pursue a Ph.D. Initially, David’s familiarity with HBS was limited to the MBA program but he quickly... View Details

01 Sep 2016
News

Clay Christensen on Competing Against Luck

have not taught managers and marketers we have a problem, and so, if you think that more data will solve the problem of what is not in the data, then we are misleading people in a serious way. How would cars work as an example of a job... View Details

February 21, 2024
Article

The NFT Staircase: How Digital Ownership Benefits Brands and Consumers

By: Scott Duke Kominers and Steve Kaczynski

One of our goals with our new book, The Everything Token: How NFTs and Web3 Will Transform the Way We Buy, Sell, and Create, is to unlock the power of nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, for business. National and international brands are already using NFTs in some of... View Details

Keywords: Non-fungible Tokens; NFTs; Brand; Brand Building; Digitization; Metaverse; Tokenization; Crypto Economy; Blockchain; Market Design; Brands and Branding; Value Creation

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31 May 2023
Research & Ideas

With Predictive Analytics, Companies Can Tap the Ultimate Opportunity: Customers’ Routines

If knowing what customers need is marketing gold, pinpointing exactly when they need it may just be platinum. Services that become part of a customer’s routine may deliver advantages beyond repeat business for a company, Harvard Business... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne; Transportation

06 May 2002
Research & Ideas

A Toolkit for Customer Innovation

pace of change in many markets accelerates and as some industries move toward serving "markets of one," the cost of understanding and responding to customers' needs can easily spiral out of control. In the course of studying... View Details

Keywords: by Stefan Thomke & Eric Von Hippel

19 Jul 2004
Research & Ideas

Why Innovations Sit on the Shelf

wasn't the issue—the division still had the superior technology overall. Nor was talent a problem—Becton Dickinson continued to retain the skilled engineers that had made it the leader in its field. The organization's design didn't seem... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Beer, Russell Eisenstat & Derek Schrader

31 Mar 2002
Research & Ideas

You’re Wasting Your Employees! What You Can Do About It

definition, competency-based strategies are dependent on people: Scarce knowledge and expertise drive new-product development, and personal relationships with key clients are at the core of flexible market responsiveness. In short, people... View Details

Keywords: by Christopher A. Bartlett & Sumantra Ghoshal