Lunchclub: Algorithmic Networking

Scott Duke Kominers; George  Gonzalez

Case | HBS Case Collection | January 2020

Lunchclub: Algorithmic Networking

by Scott Duke Kominers and George Gonzalez

Abstract

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 strategy, and determine whether the company should continue to focus on its current use cases and geographical hubs or expand the platform's scale and scope. And while Lunchclub unlocks significant value by brokering new connections, the team still has to identify whom to charge and how.

Keywords: monetization strategy; Business Startups; Marketplace Matching; Market Design; Growth and Development Strategy; Information Industry;

Language: English

Format: Print

14 pages

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Citation:

Kominers, Scott Duke, and George Gonzalez. "Lunchclub: Algorithmic Networking." Harvard Business School Case 820-051, January 2020.

Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2020

On the Representativeness of Voter Turnout

Louis Kaplow and Scott Duke Kominers

Prominent theory research on voting uses models in which expected pivotality drives voters' turnout decisions and hence determines voting outcomes. It is recognized, however, that such work is at odds with Downs's paradox: in practice, many individuals turn out for reasons unrelated to pivotality, and their votes overwhelm the forces analyzed in pivotality-based models. Accordingly, we examine a complementary model of large-N elections at the opposite end of the spectrum, where pivotality effects vanish and turnout is driven entirely by individuals' direct costs and benefits from the act of voting itself. Under certain conditions, the level of turnout is irrelevant to representativeness and thus to voting outcomes. Under others, “anything is possible"; starting with any given distribution of preferences in the underlying population, there can arise any other distribution of preferences in the turnout set and thus any outcome within the range of the voting mechanism. Particular skews in terms of representativeness are characterized. The introduction of noise in the relationship between underlying preferences and individuals' direct costs and benefits from voting produces, in the limit, fully representative turnout. To illustrate the potential disconnect between the level of turnout (a focus of much empirical literature) and representativeness, we present a simple example in which, as noise increases, the turnout level monotonically falls yet representativeness monotonically rises.

Citation:

Kaplow, Louis, and Scott Duke Kominers. "On the Representativeness of Voter Turnout." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 20-097, March 2020. View Details

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