Publications
Publications
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- December 2024
- Case
Core Innovation Capital: Investing in Fintech for Good
In 2017, Arjan Schütte, founder of Core Innovation Capital, faced a decision on whether to invest in Hugo Insurance, an auto insurance startup. Core, an early-stage social impact VC firm, focused on “fintech for good,” by investing in financial services for low- to... View Details
- December 2024
- Supplement
Core Innovation Capital: Investing in Fintech for Good (B)
In 2017, Core Innovation Capital invested $725,000 in Hugo Insurance, a pay-as-you-drive auto insurance startup targeting the non-standard market. Core followed with $300,000 in 2019 during a Seed II round. By 2022, Hugo founder, David Bergendahl, sought $10 million in... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Categorical Processing in a Complex World
By: Marco Sammon, Thomas Graeber and Christopher Roth
In real-world news environments, quantitative information is rarely presented in isolation; it is characterized through qualitative comparisons with various reference levels. Company earnings, for example, are commonly compared to analyst forecasts, previous earnings,... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Lost in Transmission
By: Thomas Graeber, Shakked Noy and Christopher Roth
For many decisions, people rely on information received from others by word of mouth. How does the process of verbal transmission distort economic information? In our experiments, participants listen to audio recordings containing economic forecasts and are paid to... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Market Design and Maintenance
By: Alvin E. Roth
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
- 2022
- Working Paper
Stories, Statistics and Memory
By: Thomas Graeber, Christopher Roth and Florian Zimmermann
For most decisions, we rely on information encountered over the course of days,
months or years. We consume this information in various forms, including abstract
summaries of multiple data points – statistics – and contextualized anecdotes about
individual instances... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Do Collusive Norms Maximize Profits? Evidence From a Vegetable Market Experiment in India
By: Abhijit Banerjee, Greg Fischer, Dean Karlan, Matt Lowe and Benjamin N. Roth
Social norms have been shown to facilitate anti-competitive behavior in decentralized markets.
We demonstrate that these norms can also reduce aggregate profits. First, we present
descriptive evidence of competition-suppressing norms in Kolkata vegetable markets.... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
Social Protection and Social Distancing During the Pandemic: Mobile Money Transfers in Ghana
By: Dean Karlan, Matt Lowe, Robert Osei, Isaac Osei-Akoto, Benjamin N. Roth and Christopher Udry
We study the impact of mobile money transfers to a representative sample of low-income
Ghanaians during the COVID-19 pandemic. The announcement of the upcoming transfers
affects neither consumption, well-being, nor social distancing. Once disbursed,... View Details
- December 2021
- Article
India's Food Supply Chain during the Pandemic
By: Matt Lowe, G.V. Nadhanael and Benjamin N. Roth
We document the impact of India’s COVID-19 lockdown on the food supply chain. Food arrivals in wholesale markets dropped by 69% in the three weeks following the lockdown and wholesale prices rose by 8%. Six weeks after the lockdown began, volumes and prices had fully... View Details
Keywords: COVID-19; Supply Chain; Health Pandemics; Food; Policy; System Shocks; Food and Beverage Industry; India
- September 2021
- Article
Kidney Exchange: An Operations Perspective
By: Itai Ashlagi and Alvin E. Roth
Many patients in need of a kidney transplant have a willing but incompatible (or poorly matched) living donor. Kidney exchange programs arrange exchanges among such patient-donor pairs, in cycles and chains of exchange, so each patient receives a compatible kidney.... View Details
- July 2021
- Case
A Close Shave at Squire
In 2020, just after closing a $34 million Series B financing round, Dave Salvant and Songe LaRon consider how to adjust their business, Squire Technologies, to the new realities posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Their barbershop technology, including tools to run a shop... View Details
- 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
- Mar 2021
- Conference Presentation
Descent-to-Delete: Gradient-Based Methods for Machine Unlearning
By: Seth Neel, Aaron Leon Roth and Saeed Sharifi-Malvajerdi
We study the data deletion problem for convex models. By leveraging techniques from convex optimization and reservoir sampling, we give the first data deletion algorithms that are able to handle an arbitrarily long sequence of adversarial updates while promising both... View Details
- 2021
- Working Paper
Kidney Exchange: An Operations Perspective
By: Itai Ashlagi and Alvin E. Roth
Many patients in need of a kidney transplant have a willing but incompatible (or poorly matched) living donor. Kidney exchange programs arrange exchanges among such patient-donor pairs, in cycles and chains of exchange, so each patient receives a compatible kidney.... View Details
- Oct 2020
- Conference Presentation
Optimal, Truthful, and Private Securities Lending
By: Emily Diana, Michael J. Kearns, Seth Neel and Aaron Leon Roth
We consider a fundamental dynamic allocation problem motivated by the problem of securities lending in financial markets, the mechanism underlying the short selling of stocks. A lender would like to distribute a finite number of identical copies of some scarce resource... View Details
- 2020
- Chapter
Building Emergency Savings Through Employer-Sponsored Rainy-Day Savings Accounts
By: John Beshears, James J. Choi, J. Mark Iwry, David C. John, David Laibson and Brigitte C. Madrian
Roughly half of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. When financial shocks occur during their working life, many of these households tap into their retirement savings accounts. We explore the practical considerations and challenges associated with helping households... View Details
- February 2020 (Revised March 2020)
- Case
Prime Coalition: Catalytic Capital for Climate Innovation
By: Ramana Nanda, Benjamin N. Roth and Olivia Hull
With long development timelines and high risk, new energy technologies were often left to languish in the “valley of death,” unable to raise enough funds to bring a product to market. In 2014, Sarah Kearney founded the nonprofit Prime Coalition to solve this problem.... View Details
Keywords: Energy Conservation; Renewable Energy; Social Entrepreneurship; Venture Capital; Investment; Innovation and Invention; Technological Innovation; Mission and Purpose; Science-Based Business; Nonprofit Organizations; Social Enterprise; Energy Industry; Technology Industry; Green Technology Industry; United States
- 2021
- Working Paper
Impact Investing: A Theory of Financing Social Enterprises
By: Benjamin N. Roth
I present a model of financing social enterprises to delineate the role of impact investors relative to “pure” philanthropists. I characterize the optimal scale and structure of a social enterprise when financed by grants, and when financed by investments. Impact... View Details
- Article
How to Use Heuristics for Differential Privacy
By: Seth Neel, Aaron Leon Roth and Zhiwei Steven Wu
We develop theory for using heuristics to solve computationally hard problems in differential privacy. Heuristic approaches have enjoyed tremendous success in machine learning, for which performance can be empirically evaluated. However, privacy guarantees cannot be... View Details
- Article
The Role of Interactivity in Local Differential Privacy
By: Matthew Joseph, Jieming Mao, Seth Neel and Aaron Leon Roth
We study the power of interactivity in local differential privacy. First, we focus on the difference between fully interactive and sequentially interactive protocols. Sequentially interactive protocols may query users adaptively in sequence, but they cannot return to... View Details