Elisabeth C. Paulson
Assistant Professor of Business Administration
Assistant Professor of Business Administration
Technology and Operations Management
Elisabeth Paulson is an Assistant Professor of Business Administration in the Technology and Operations Management Unit at Harvard Business School. She teaches the first year course on Technology and Operations Management in the required curriculum.
Professor Paulson's research is in the area of operations for social good. In particular, she designs analytical methods and algorithms for allocating scarce resources efficiently and fairly to improve social outcomes. Much of her work draws on tools from optimization, machine learning, mathematical modeling, and statistics.
Professor Paulson's research is grounded in her close collaborations with nonprofits and governmental agencies, with current emphases in the areas of immigration and food policy. Her work in food policy addresses the design and optimization of interventions for creating better access to, and consumption of, fresh food. Her work on immigration focuses on designing algorithms to support data-driven geographic assignment of refugees and asylum seekers within host countries.
Prior to joining HBS, Professor Paulson was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Immigration Policy Lab at Stanford University, where she remains a Faculty Affiliate. She received her PhD in Operations Research from MIT in 2021, supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Elisabeth received her B.S. in Math, B.S. in Statistics, and M.A. in Math from the Pennsylvania State University.
For more information, please visit:
https://elisabethpaulson.github.io/
Professor Paulson's research is in the area of operations for social good. In particular, she designs analytical methods and algorithms for allocating scarce resources efficiently and fairly to improve social outcomes. Much of her work draws on tools from optimization, machine learning, mathematical modeling, and statistics.
Professor Paulson's research is grounded in her close collaborations with nonprofits and governmental agencies, with current emphases in the areas of immigration and food policy. Her work in food policy addresses the design and optimization of interventions for creating better access to, and consumption of, fresh food. Her work on immigration focuses on designing algorithms to support data-driven geographic assignment of refugees and asylum seekers within host countries.
Prior to joining HBS, Professor Paulson was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Immigration Policy Lab at Stanford University, where she remains a Faculty Affiliate. She received her PhD in Operations Research from MIT in 2021, supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Elisabeth received her B.S. in Math, B.S. in Statistics, and M.A. in Math from the Pennsylvania State University.
For more information, please visit:
https://elisabethpaulson.github.io/
- Journal Articles
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- Bansak, Kirk, Elisabeth Paulson, and Dominik Rothenhäusler. "Learning Under Random Distributional Shifts." Proceedings of the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS) 27th (2024). View Details
- Bansak, Kirk, and Elisabeth Paulson. "Outcome-Driven Dynamic Refugee Assignment with Allocation Balancing." Operations Research 72, no. 6 (November–December 2024): 2375–2390. View Details
- Paulson, Elisabeth, and Christopher Griffin. "Better Timing of Cyber Conflict." In Proceedings of the Third ASE International Conference on Cyber Security. Los Angeles, CA: Academy of Science and Engineering, 2014. View Details
- Paulson, Elisabeth, and Christopher Griffin. "Deriving an Optimally Deceptive Policy in Two-Player Iterated Games." In Proceedings of 2016 American Control Conference. IEEE Press, 2016. (Developed with Booz Allen Hamilton.) View Details
- Griffin, Christopher, and Elisabeth Paulson. "Optimal Process Control of Symbolic Transfer Functions." In Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Feedback Computing. IEEE, 2015. View Details
- Paulson, Elisabeth C., Igor Linkov, and Jeffrey Keisler. "A Game Theoretic Model for Resource Allocation Among Countermeasures with Multiple Attributes." European Journal of Operational Research 252, no. 2 (July 16, 2016): 610–622. View Details
- Chen, Lu, Donovan Guittieres, Retsef Levi, Elisabeth Paulson, Georgia Perakis, Nicholas Renegar, and Stacy Springs. "Public Health Risks Arising from Food Supply Chains: Challenges and Opportunities." Special Issue on OR Models for Developmental Studies. Naval Research Logistics Quarterly 68, no. 8 (2021): 1098–1112. View Details
- Paulson, Elisabeth, and Christopher Griffin. "Cooperation Can Emerge in Prisoner’s Dilemma from a Multi-species Predator Prey Replicator Dynamic." Mathematical Biosciences 278 (August 2016): 56–62. View Details
- Working Papers
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- Freund, Daniel, Thodoris Lykouris, Elisabeth Paulson, Bradley Sturt, and Wentao Weng. "Group Fairness in Dynamic Refugee Assignment." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 23-047, February 2023. View Details
- Levi, Retsef, Elisabeth Paulson, and Georgia Perakis. "Optimal Interventions for Increasing Healthy Food Consumption Among Low Income Households." MIT Sloan Research Paper, No. 6053-19, November 2019. View Details
- Harsha, Pavithra, Ashish Jagmohan, Retsef Levi, Elisabeth Paulson, and Georgia Perakis. "Reverse Information Sharing: Reducing Costs in Supply Chains with Yield Uncertainty." MIT Sloan Research Paper, No. 6172-20, October 2020. View Details
- Levi, Retsef, Elisabeth Paulson, and Georgia Perakis. "Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Consumption: The Impact of Access and Value." MIT Sloan Research Paper, No. 5389-18, October 2020. View Details
- Cases and Teaching Materials
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- Paulson, Elisabeth, and Michael W. Toffel. "Market by Met Council: Revolutionizing Food Pantries in the Digital Age." Harvard Business School Case 624-060, May 2024. (Revised May 2024.) View Details
- Areas of Interest
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- analytics
- machine learning
- nonprofit
- operations management
- decision-making
- government and business
- incentives
- service management
- sustainability
- agriculture
- federal government
- grocery
- nonprofit industry
- state government
- Europe
- North America
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