Publications
Publications
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- Faculty Publications (72)
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- Working Paper
Visual Uniqueness in Peer-to-Peer Marketplaces: Machine Learning Model Development, Validation, and Application
By: Flora Feng, Charis Li and Shunyuan Zhang
Peer-to-peer (P2P) marketplaces have seen exponential growth in recent years featured by unique offerings from individual providers. Despite the perceived value of uniqueness, scalable quantification of visual uniqueness in P2P platforms like Airbnb has been largely... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Firm Visibility and Acquisition Likelihood: Evidence from Seeking Alpha Coverage
By: Pu Gu, Benjamin Yost and Yuan Zou
This study investigates whether social media coverage influences a firm’s likelihood of being acquired. Specifically, we hypothesize that coverage of a firm on the Seeking Alpha platform raises its visibility to potential acquirers and M&A advisers (i.e., investment... View Details
- June 2023
- Exercise
Clash of Two Giants Simulation Exercise Instructions
By: Feng Zhu and Marco Iansiti
Many markets are organized around platforms that connect consumers with complimentary applications and services. These platforms are two-sided because both sides - consumers and those providing applications or services - need access to the same platform to interact. A... View Details
- March–April 2023
- Article
Market Segmentation Trees
By: Ali Aouad, Adam Elmachtoub, Kris J. Ferreira and Ryan McNellis
Problem definition: We seek to provide an interpretable framework for segmenting users in a population for personalized decision making. Methodology/results: We propose a general methodology, market segmentation trees (MSTs), for learning market... View Details
- February 2024
- Article
An Economic Framework for Vaccine Prioritization
By: Mohammad Akbarpour, Eric Budish, Piotr Dworczak and Scott Duke Kominers
We propose an economic framework for determining the optimal allocation of a scarce supply of vaccines that become gradually available during a public health crisis, such as the Covid-19 pandemic. Agents differ in observable and unobservable characteristics, and the... View Details
- 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
- 2023
- Working Paper
The International Price of Remote Work
By: Agostina Brinatti, Alberto Cavallo, Javier Cravino and Andres Drenik
We study how the price of remote work is determined in a globalized labor market using data from a large web-based job platform, where workers from around the world compete for remote jobs. Despite the global nature of the platform, we find that remote wages are higher... View Details
- 2021
- Working Paper
Deep Learning for Two-Sided Matching
By: Sai Srivatsa Ravindranatha, Zhe Feng, Shira Li, Jonathan Ma, Scott Duke Kominers and David Parkes
We initiate the use of a multi-layer neural network to model two-sided matching and to explore the design space between strategy-proofness and stability. It is well known that both properties cannot be achieved simultaneously but the efficient frontier in this design... View Details
- July 2021
- Article
Outsourcing Tasks Online: Matching Supply and Demand on Peer-to-Peer Internet Platforms
By: Zoë Cullen and Chiara Farronato
We study the growth of online peer-to-peer markets. Using data from TaskRabbit, an expanding marketplace for domestic tasks at the time of our study, we show that growth varies considerably across cities. To disentangle the potential drivers of growth, we look... View Details
- May 2021
- Article
Stability, Strategy-Proofness, and Cumulative Offer Mechanisms
By: John William Hatfield, Scott Duke Kominers and Alexander Westkamp
We consider the setting of many-to-one matching with contracts, where firms may demand multiple contracts, but each worker desires at most one contract. We introduce three novel conditions—observable substitutability, observable size monotonicity, and... View Details
- April 2021 (Revised July 2021)
- Case
StockX: The Stock Market of Things (Abridged)
By: Chiara Farronato, John J. Horton, Annelena Lobb and Julia Kelley
Founded in 2015 by Dan Gilbert, Josh Luber, and Greg Schwartz, StockX was an online platform where users could buy and sell unworn luxury and limited-edition sneakers. Sneaker resale prices often fluctuated over time based on supply and demand, creating a robust... View Details
Keywords: Markets; Auctions; Bids and Bidding; Demand and Consumers; Consumer Behavior; Analytics and Data Science; Market Design; Digital Platforms; Market Transactions; Marketplace Matching; Supply and Industry; Analysis; Price; Product Marketing; Product Launch; Apparel and Accessories Industry; Fashion Industry; North and Central America; United States; Michigan; Detroit
- February 2021
- Article
Trust and Disintermediation: Evidence from an Online Freelance Marketplace
By: Grace Gu and Feng Zhu
As an intermediary improves trust between the two sides of its market to facilitate matching and transactions, it faces an increased risk of disintermediation: with sufficient trust, the two sides may circumvent the intermediary to avoid the intermediary’s fees. In... View Details
- January 2021 (Revised March 2022)
- Case
Brigad: The Future of Work
By: Nien-he Hsieh, Elena Corsi and Daniela Beyersdorfer
In 2019 Florent Malbranche, CEO and co-founder of the French tech startup Brigad, pondered the next growth steps. Founded in 2015, Brigad’s objective was two-fold: to help restaurants and bars find qualified staff for punctual shifts, and to make it easier for... View Details
- August 2020
- Article
Lone Wolves in Competitive Equilibria
By: Ravi Jagadeesan, Scott Duke Kominers and Ross Rheingans-Yoo
This paper develops a class of equilibrium-independent predictions of competitive equilibrium with indivisibilities. Specifically, we prove an analogue of the “Lone Wolf Theorem” of classical matching theory, showing that when utility is perfectly transferable, any... View Details
- March 2020
- Supplement
Poppy (B)
By: Thomas R. Eisenmann, Scott Duke Kominers, Jeff Huizinga and Allison Ciechanover
Avni Patel Thompson, founder and CEO of Poppy, an online marketplace for on-demand childcare, revisits the venture's final months, and discusses the steps she took in the wake of the shutdown. This case explores experiments the company conducted to refine its original... View Details
- February 2020 (Revised April 2021)
- Case
StockX: The Stock Market of Things
By: Chiara Farronato, John J. Horton, Annelena Lobb and Julia Kelley
Founded in 2015 by Dan Gilbert, Josh Luber, and Greg Schwartz, StockX was an online platform where users could buy and sell unworn luxury and limited-edition sneakers. Sneaker resale prices often fluctuated over time based on supply and demand, creating a robust... View Details
Keywords: Markets; Auctions; Bids and Bidding; Demand and Consumers; Consumer Behavior; Analytics and Data Science; Market Design; Digital Platforms; Market Transactions; Marketplace Matching; Supply and Industry; Analysis; Price; Product Marketing; Product Launch; Apparel and Accessories Industry; Fashion Industry; North and Central America; United States; Michigan; Detroit
- January 2020
- Case
Lunchclub: Algorithmic Networking
By: Scott Duke Kominers and George Gonzalez
Algorithmic networking startup Lunchclub coordinates in-person meetings between professionals who would have been unlikely to meet. The company faces marketplace design, growth, and monetization challenges: The executive team has to refine Lunchclub's marketplace... View Details
- December 2019
- Article
Costly Concessions: An Empirical Framework for Matching with Imperfectly Transferable Utility
By: Alfred Galichon, Scott Duke Kominers and Simon Weber
We introduce an empirical framework for models of matching with imperfectly transferable utility and unobserved heterogeneity in tastes. Our framework allows us to characterize matching equilibrium in a flexible way that includes as special cases the classic fully- and... View Details
- September 2019 (Revised August 2020)
- Case
Engineering an Inclusive Bioeconomy
By: Tarun Khanna, Raffaella Sadun and Susie L. Ma
In 2019, entrepreneur Juan Carlos Castilla-Rubio was developing a project he hoped could generate and share wealth from the natural resources of the Amazon without destroying those resources. His idea, called Earth Bank of Codes (EBC), would create a library of the... View Details
Keywords: Decision Making; Development Economics; Entrepreneurship; Innovation and Invention; Intellectual Property; Emerging Markets; Market Design; Marketplace Matching; Science; Genetics; Natural Environment; Environmental Sustainability; Climate Change; Social Enterprise; Strategy; Strategic Planning; Information Technology; Ownership; Social Psychology; Trust; Society; Biotechnology Industry; South America; Amazon Basin
- September 2019
- Article
Optimizing Reserves in School Choice: A Dynamic Programming Approach
By: Franklyn Wang, Ravi Jagadeesan and Scott Duke Kominers
We introduce a new model of school choice with reserves in which a social planner is constrained by a limited supply of reserve seats and tries to find an optimal matching according to a social welfare function. We construct the optimal distribution of reserves via a... View Details