Publications

Educators

May 2023
Article

How Do Campaigns Shape Vote Choice? Multi-Country Evidence from 62 Elections and 56 TV Debates

By: Caroline Le Pennec and Vincent Pons

We use two-round survey data from 62 elections in 10 countries since 1952 to study the formation of vote choice, beliefs, and policy preferences and assess how televised debates contribute to this process. Our data include 253,000 observations. We compare the... View Details

Keywords: Political Debates; TV Debates; Voting; Political Elections; Decision Choices and Conditions

2023
Working Paper

Efficient Discovery of Heterogeneous Quantile Treatment Effects in Randomized Experiments via Anomalous Pattern Detection

By: Edward McFowland III, Sriram Somanchi and Daniel B. Neill

In the recent literature on estimating heterogeneous treatment effects, each proposed method makes its own set of restrictive assumptions about the intervention’s effects and which subpopulations to explicitly estimate. Moreover, the majority of the literature provides... View Details

Keywords: Causal Inference; Program Evaluation; Algorithms; Distributional Average Treatment Effect; Treatment Effect Subset Scan; Heterogeneous Treatment Effects

2019
Working Paper

Real Exchange Rate Behavior: New Evidence from Matched Retail Goods

By: Alberto Cavallo, Brent Neiman and Roberto Rigobon

We use a dataset containing daily prices for thousands of matched retail products in nine countries to study tradable-goods real exchange rates. Prices were collected from the websites of large multi-channel retailers and then carefully matched into narrowly-deﬁned... View Details

Keywords: Purchasing Power Parity; Online Prices; Real Exchange Rate; Macroeconomics; Currency Exchange Rate; Price; Internet and the Web

2017
Working Paper

The Rise of American Ingenuity: Innovation and Inventors of the Golden Age

By: Ufuk Akcigit, John Grigsby and Tom Nicholas

We examine the golden age of U.S. innovation by undertaking a major data collection exercise linking inventors from historical U.S. patents to Federal Censuses between 1880 and 1940 and to regional economic aggregates. We provide a theoretical framework to motivate the... View Details

Keywords: Economic Development; Patents; Economic Growth; Innovation and Invention; Demographics

Article

Guilt Enhances the Sense of Control and Drives Risky Judgments

By: Maryam Kouchaki, Christopher Oveis and F. Gino

The present studies investigate the hypothesis that guilt influences risk-taking by enhancing one's sense of control. Across multiple inductions of guilt, we demonstrate that experimentally induced guilt enhances optimism about risks for the self (Study 1), preferences... View Details

Keywords: Risk and Uncertainty; Behavior; Emotions

Tatiana Sandino is the Arthur Lowes Dickinson Professor of Business Administration in the Accounting and Management Unit, most recently teaching and undertaking the role of course head for the required first-year MBA course Financial Reporting and Control. She has... View Details

Keywords: retailing; service industry

Research Summary

Shift Auctions

Shift Auctions are a new labor-market institution, enabled by the internet, whereby workers bid for overtime shifts via descending auctions. The goal of shift auctions is to enable efficient and flexible utilization of a firms own human resources when staffing... View Details

July 13, 2023
Article

Threads Foreshadows a Big—and Surprising—Shift in Social Media

By: Scott Duke Kominers and Liang Wu

Threads, Meta’s Twitter competitor, has become the fastest downloaded app in history. One of the reasons for this is because it allows users to port over their profiles and follows from the already popular social media platform Instagram, also owned by Meta—a feature... View Details

Keywords: Decentralization; Twitter; Facebook; Instagram; Crypto Economy; Blockchain; Network; Industrial Organization; Competition; Open Innovation; Open Platforms; Open Source Innovation; Social Networks; Social Media; Applications and Software; Information Technology Industry

Register to Read

February 2005 (Revised November 2016)
Background Note

Forecasting the Adoption of a New Product

By: Elie Ofek

Provides tools and methodologies that allow forecasting demand for innovative new products. Highlights the Bass model—the theory behind it and ways to determine its parameters. Provides a detailed example of how to use the Bass model to forecast demand for satellite... View Details

Keywords: Forecasting and Prediction; Innovation and Invention; Marketing; Demand and Consumers; Mathematical Methods; Competition

Educators

04 Oct 2018
News

A Harvard professor’s suggestions for fixing the broken H-1B visa system

06 Mar 2017
News

When America Was Most Innovative, and Why

Research Summary

Overview

By: John A. Deighton

Professor Deighton conducts research at the intersection of information technology and marketing. He is interested in the complementary uses of human and artificial intelligence and creativity in areas such as advertising, content creation, and online retailing. He... View Details

February 2021
Technical Note

Probability Distributions

By: Michael Parzen and Paul Hamilton

This technical note introduces students to the concept of random variables, and from there the normal and binomial distributions. After a brief introduction to random variables, the note describes the standard properties of the normal distribution: a single peak, and a... View Details

Keywords: Analysis; Risk and Uncertainty; Theory; Analytics and Data Science

Educators

03 Jan 2017
First Look

January 3, 2017

Winter 2017 MIT Sloan Management Review Why Big Data Isn't Enough By: Chai, Sen, and Willy C. Shih Abstract—There is a growing belief that sophisticated algorithms can explore huge databases and find relationships independent of any... View Details

Keywords: Carmen Nobel

Summer 2025
Article

Time Well Spent: A New Way to Value Time Could Change Your Life

By: Leslie Perlow and Salvatore J Affinito

When individuals engage in fulfilling activities outside of work, they perform better on the job, but simply encouraging work-life balance doesn’t help with hour-by-hour time management. A new tool for measuring the subjective value of time for individuals as it varies... View Details

Keywords: Well-being; Work-Life Balance; Time Management

December 2005
Article

Understanding Firm, Physician and Consumer Choice Behavior in the Pharmaceutical Industry

This paper argues that the pharmaceutical industry represents an exciting opportunity to carry out academic research. The nature of the industry allows researchers to answer new questions, develop new methodologies for answering these questions as well as to apply... View Details

Keywords: Opportunities; Consumer Behavior; Research; Pharmaceutical Industry