Scott Duke Kominers

Scott Duke Kominers - Faculty & Research - Harvard Business School

Scott Duke Kominers is the MBA Class of 1960 Associate Professor of Business Administration in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit, as well as a Faculty Affiliate of the Harvard Department of Economics and the Harvard Center of Mathematical Sciences and Applications, an Associate of the Harvard Center for Research on Computation and Society, and a Research Economist at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He teaches the MBA elective course “Making Markets” (M²) and a doctoral course on market design. He also serves as an Associate Editor for Management Science and Journal of Mechanism and Institution Design, and periodically writes for Bloomberg Opinion.

Please see Professor Kominers’s personal website at www.scottkom.com.

Professor Kominers’s research focuses on market design, developing economic analysis that provides practical solutions to real-world problems. He works at all stages of the economic design process—building underlying theory and technology, identifying new design applications, and working with practitioners to implement solutions to market failures. He also advises companies engaged in marketplace development and design, such as Calibra. He is Vice-Chair of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Economics and Computation (SIGecom), serves on the National Leadership Council of the Society for Science & the Public, and co-leads one of the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity global working groups on inequality.

Professor Kominers has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Star Family Fund, the William F. Milton Fund, and the Oxford Martin School, among others. He received the AMS-MAA-SIAM Frank and Brennie Morgan Prize in 2010, was named a Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow in 2015, and won the Star Family Prize for Excellence in Advising in 2016 and a Webby Award in 2018.

After receiving his AB summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in mathematics (with a minor in ethnomusicology) at Harvard University in 2009, Professor Kominers earned his AM and PhD in Business Economics at Harvard, in 2010 and 2011, respectively. From 2011-2013, he was the inaugural Research Scholar at the Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics at the University of Chicago; then from 2013-2017, he was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.

Professor Kominers uses his knowledge of math and music to motivate students in the classroom.

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Journal Articles

Article | Journal of Political Economy | Forthcoming

Collusion in Markets with Syndication

John William Hatfield, Scott Duke Kominers, Richard Lowery and Jordan M. Barry

Markets for IPOs and debt issuances are syndicated, in the sense that a bidder who wins a contract may invite losing bidders to join a syndicate that together fulfills the contract. We show that in markets with syndication, standard intuitions from industrial organization can be reversed: Collusion may become easier as market concentration falls, and market entry may in fact facilitate collusion. In particular, price collusion can be sustained by a strategy in which firms refuse to join the syndicate of any firm that deviates from the collusive price. Our results thus can rationalize the apparently contradictory empirical facts that the market for IPO underwriting exhibits seemingly collusive pricing despite its low level of market concentration.

Keywords: collusion; antitrust; IPO underwriting; Syndication; ＂Repeated games＂; Markets;

Citation:
Hatfield, John William, Scott Duke Kominers, Richard Lowery, and Jordan M. Barry. "Collusion in Markets with Syndication." Journal of Political Economy (forthcoming). View Details

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Article | Review of Economic Studies | Forthcoming

Stability, Strategy-Proofness, and Cumulative Offer Mechanisms

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 non-manipulatability—and show that when these conditions are satisfied, the cumulative offer mechanism is the unique mechanism that is stable and strategy-proof (for workers). Moreover, when the choice function of some firm fails any of our three conditions, one can construct unit-demand choice functions for the other firms such that no stable and strategy-proof mechanism exists. In the final part of the paper, we characterize the class of choice functions for which the cumulative offer mechanism is guaranteed to yield a stable outcome.

Keywords: Matching with Contracts; stability; Strategy-proofness; Substitutability; Size monotonicity; Cumulative offer mechanism; Marketplace Matching; Balance and Stability;

Citation:
Hatfield, John William, Scott Duke Kominers, and Alexander Westkamp. "Stability, Strategy-Proofness, and Cumulative Offer Mechanisms." Review of Economic Studies (forthcoming). View Details

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Article | Theoretical Economics | Forthcoming

Chain Stability in Trading Networks

John William Hatfield, Scott Duke Kominers, Alexandru Nichifor, Michael Ostrovsky and Alexander Westkamp

We show that in general trading networks with bilateral contracts, a suitably adapted chain stability concept (Ostrovsky, 2008) is equivalent to stability (Hatfield and Kominers, 2012; Hatfield et al., 2013) if all agents' preferences are fully substitutable and satisfy the Laws of Aggregate Supply and Demand. Furthermore, in the special case of trading networks with transferable utility, an outcome is consistent with competitive equilibrium if and only if it is not blocked by any chain of contracts.

Keywords: Competitive equilibrium; Contracts; Market Design; Balance and Stability;

Citation:
Hatfield, John William, Scott Duke Kominers, Alexandru Nichifor, Michael Ostrovsky, and Alexander Westkamp. "Chain Stability in Trading Networks." Theoretical Economics (forthcoming). View Details

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Article | International Economic Review | Forthcoming

Taxation in Matching Markets

Arnaud Dupuy, Alfred Galichon, Sonia Jaffe and Scott Duke Kominers

We analyze the effects of taxation in two-sided matching markets, i.e. markets in which all agents have heterogeneous preferences over potential partners. In matching markets, taxes can generate inefficiency on the allocative margin by changing who is matched to whom, even if the number of workers at each firm is unaffected. While the allocative inefficiency of taxation need not be monotonic in the level of the tax when transfers flow in both directions, we show that it is weakly increasing in the tax rate for markets in which workers refuse to match without a positive wage. We introduce a renormalization that allows for an equivalence between markets with taxation and markets without taxation but with adjusted match values. We use our equivalence to show additional properties of matching markets with taxation and to adapt existing econometric methods to such markets. We then estimate the preferences in the college-coach US football matching market and show through simulations of tax reforms that the true deadweight loss can differ dramatically from that measured without accounting for the preference heterogeneity of the matching market. In addition to highlighting the potential for allocative distortions from taxation, our model provides a continuous link between canonical models of matching with and without transfers.

Citation:
Dupuy, Arnaud, Alfred Galichon, Sonia Jaffe, and Scott Duke Kominers. "Taxation in Matching Markets." International Economic Review (forthcoming). View Details

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Article | Journal of Mathematical Economics | Forthcoming

Comparative Statics for Size-Dependent Discounts in Matching Markets

David Delacretaz, Scott Duke Kominers and Alexandru Nichifor

We prove a natural comparative static for many-to-many matching markets in which agents’ choice functions exhibit size-dependent discounts: reducing the extent to which some agent discounts additional partners leads to improved outcomes for the agents on the other side of the market, and worsened outcomes for the agents on the same side of the market. Our argument draws upon recently developed methods bringing tools from choice theory into matching.

Citation:
Delacretaz, David, Scott Duke Kominers, and Alexandru Nichifor. "Comparative Statics for Size-Dependent Discounts in Matching Markets." Journal of Mathematical Economics (forthcoming). View Details

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Article | William & Mary Law Review | Forthcoming

To Thine Own Self Be True? Incentive Problems in Personalized Law

John William Hatfield, Scott Duke Kominers and Jordan M. Barry

Recent years have seen an explosion of scholarship on “personalized law.” Commentators foresee a world in which regulators armed with big data and machine learning techniques determine the optimal legal rule for every regulated party, then instantaneously disseminate their decisions via smartphones and other “smart” devices. They envision a legal utopia in which every fact pattern is assigned society’s preferred legal treatment in real time. But regulation is a dynamic process; regulated parties react to law. They change their behavior to pursue their preferred outcomes—which often diverge from society’s—and they will continue to do so under personalized law. As a result, they will provide regulators with incomplete or inaccurate information. They will attempt to manipulate the algorithms underlying personalized laws by taking actions intended to disguise their true characteristics. Personalized law can also (unintentionally) encourage regulated parties to act in socially undesirable ways, a phenomenon known as moral hazard. Moreover, regulators seeking to combat these dynamics will face significant constraints. Regulators will have imperfect information, both because of privacy concerns and because regulated parties and intermediaries will muddle regulators’ data. They may lack the authority or the political will to respond to regulated parties’ behavior. The transparency requirements of a democratic society may hinder their ability to thwart gamesmanship. Concerns about unintended consequences may further lower regulators’ willingness to personalize law. Taken together, these dynamics will limit personalized law’s ability to optimally match facts to legal outcomes. Personalized law may be a step forward, but it will not produce the utopian outcomes that some envision.

Keywords: personalized law; regulation; regulatory avoidance; regulatory arbitrage; law and economics; law and technology; law and artificial intelligence; futurism; moral hazard; elicitation; signaling; privacy; Law; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Technology;

Citation:
Hatfield, John William, Scott Duke Kominers, and Jordan M. Barry. "To Thine Own Self Be True? Incentive Problems in Personalized Law." William & Mary Law Review (forthcoming). View Details

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Article | Social Choice and Welfare | Forthcoming

Lone Wolves in Competitive Equilibria

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 agent who does not participate in trade in one competitive equilibrium must receive her autarky payoff in every competitive equilibrium. Our results extend to approximate equilibria and to settings in which utility is only approximately transferable.

Keywords: indivisibilities; matching; Lone Wolf Theorem; Marketplace Matching; Theory;

Citation:

Jagadeesan, Ravi, Scott Duke Kominers, and Ross Rheingans-Yoo. "Lone Wolves in Competitive Equilibria." Social Choice and Welfare (forthcoming). View Details

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Article | Journal of Economic Literature | Forthcoming

The Parable of the Auctioneer: Complexity in Paul R. Milgrom's Discovering Prices

Scott Duke Kominers and Alexander Teytelboym

Designing marketplaces in complex settings requires both novel economic theory and real-world engineering, often drawing upon ideas from fields such as computer science and operations research. In Discovering Prices, Milgrom (2017) explains the theory and design of the United States “Incentive Auction” that reallocated wireless spectrum licenses from television broadcasters to telecoms. Milgrom’s account teaches us how economic designers can grapple with complexity both in theory and in practice. Along the way, we come to understand several different types of complexity that can arise in market design.

Keywords: pricing; design; Auctions; Market Design; Complexity;

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke, and Alexander Teytelboym. "The Parable of the Auctioneer: Complexity in Paul R. Milgrom's Discovering Prices." Journal of Economic Literature (forthcoming). View Details

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Article | Journal de Théorie des Nombres de Bordeaux

Configurations of Extremal Type II Codes via Harmonic Weight Enumerators

Noam D. Elkies and Scott Duke Kominers

We prove configuration results for extremal Type II codes, analogous to the configuration results of Ozeki and of the second author for extremal Type II lattices. Specifically, we show that for n ∈{8,24,32,48,56,72,96} every extremal Type II code of length n is generated by its codewords of minimal weight. Where Ozeki and Kominers used spherical harmonics and weighted theta functions, we use discrete harmonic polynomials and harmonic weight enumerators. Along the way we introduce "t12-designs" as a discrete analog of Venkov's spherical designs of the same name.

Keywords: Mathematical Methods;

Citation:
Elkies, Noam D., and Scott Duke Kominers. "Configurations of Extremal Type II Codes via Harmonic Weight Enumerators." Journal de Théorie des Nombres de Bordeaux 31, no. 3 (2019): 679–688. View Details

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Article | Journal of Political Economy

Costly Concessions: An Empirical Framework for Matching with Imperfectly Transferable Utility

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 non-transferable utility models, collective models, and settings with taxes on transfers, deadweight losses, and risk aversion. We allow for the introduction of a very general class of unobserved heterogeneity on agents' preferences. Under minimal assumptions, we show existence and uniqueness of equilibrium. We provide two algorithms to compute the equilibria in our model. The first algorithm operates under any structure of heterogeneity in preferences. The second algorithm is more efficient, but applies only in the case when random utilities are logit. We show that the log-likelihood of the model has a particularly simple expression and we compute its derivatives. As an application, we build a model of marriage with two-sided preferences over the partner type and private consumption. We estimate our model using the 2013 "Living Costs and Food Survey" database.

Keywords: sorting; matching; Marriage Market; intrahousehold allocation; Imperfectly Transferable Utility; Marketplace Matching; Mathematical Methods;

Citation:
Galichon, Alfred, Scott Duke Kominers, and Simon Weber. "Costly Concessions: An Empirical Framework for Matching with Imperfectly Transferable Utility." Journal of Political Economy 127, no. 6 (December 2019): 2875–2925. View Details

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Article | Management Science

Patent Trolls: Evidence from Targeted Firms

Lauren Cohen, Umit Gurun and Scott Duke Kominers

We provide the first large-sample evidence on the behavior and impact of nonpracticing entities (NPEs) in the intellectual-property space. We find that, on average, NPEs appear to behave as opportunistic “patent trolls.” NPEs sue cash-rich firms and target cash in business segments unrelated to alleged infringement at essentially the same frequency as they target cash in segments related to alleged infringement. By contrast, cash is neither a key driver of intellectual-property lawsuits by practicing entities (e.g., IBM and Intel) nor of any other type of litigation against firms. We find further suggestive evidence of NPE opportunism: targeting of firms that have reduced ability to defend themselves, repeated assertions of lower-quality patents, increased assertion activity nearing patent expiration, and forum shopping. We find, moreover, that NPE litigation has a real negative impact on innovation at targeted firms: firms substantially reduce their innovative activity after settling with NPEs (or losing to them in court). Meanwhile, we neither find any markers of significant NPE pass-through to end innovators nor of a positive impact of NPEs on innovation in the industries in which they are most prevalent.

Keywords: Patent trolls; patents; innovation; Patents; Lawsuits and Litigation; Ethics; Innovation and Invention;

Citation:
Cohen, Lauren, Umit Gurun, and Scott Duke Kominers. "Patent Trolls: Evidence from Targeted Firms." Management Science 65, no. 12 (December 2019): 5461–5486. (Cited in the United States Federal Trade Commission Report on Patent Assertion Entities, 2016.) View Details

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Article | Theoretical Economics

Full Substitutability

John William Hatfield, Scott Duke Kominers, Alexandru Nichifor, Michael Ostrovsky and Alexander Westkamp

Various forms of substitutability are essential for establishing the existence of equilibria and other useful properties in diverse settings such as matching, auctions, and exchange economies with indivisible goods. We extend earlier models’ definitions of substitutability to settings in which each agent can be both a buyer in some transactions and a seller in others and show that all these definitions are equivalent. We then introduce a new class of substitutable preferences that allows us to model intermediaries with production capacity. We also prove that substitutability is preserved under economically important transformations such as trade endowments, mergers, and limited liability.

Keywords: Substitutability; Mathematical Methods; Auctions; Market Design;

Citation:
Hatfield, John William, Scott Duke Kominers, Alexandru Nichifor, Michael Ostrovsky, and Alexander Westkamp. "Full Substitutability." Theoretical Economics 14, no. 4 (November 2019): 1535–1590. View Details

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Article | Operations Research Letters

Optimizing Reserves in School Choice: A Dynamic Programming Approach

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 quartic-time dynamic programming algorithm. Due to the modular nature of the dynamic program, the mechanism is strategy-proof for reserve-eligible students.

Keywords: matching; reserves; dynamic programming; Marketplace Matching; Mathematical Methods;

Citation:

Wang, Franklyn, Ravi Jagadeesan, and Scott Duke Kominers. "Optimizing Reserves in School Choice: A Dynamic Programming Approach." Operations Research Letters 47, no. 5 (September 2019): 438–446. View Details

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Article | Journal of Political Economy

Reserve Design: Unintended Consequences and the Demise of Boston's Walk Zones

Umut Dur, Scott Duke Kominers, Parag A. Pathak and Tayfun Sönmez

Admissions policies often use reserves to grant certain applicants higher priority for some (but not all) available seats. Boston’s school choice system, for example, reserved half of each school’s seats for local neighborhood applicants while leaving the other half for open competition. This paper shows that in the presence of reserves, the effect of the precedence order (i.e., the order in which different types of seats are filled) on distributional objectives is comparable to the effect of adjusting reserve sizes. Either lowering the precedence order positions of reserve seats at a school or increasing the number of reserve seats weakly increases reserve-group assignment at that school. Using data from Boston, we show that reserve and precedence adjustments have similar quantitative effects. Our results illustrate that policies about precedence, heretofore underexplored, are inseparable from other aspects of admissions policy. Moreover, our findings explain the puzzling empirical fact that despite careful attention to the importance of neighborhood priority, Boston’s implementation of its 50-50 reserve–open seat split was nearly identical to the outcome of a counterfactual system without any reserves. Transparency about these issues—in particular, how precedence unintentionally undermined the intended admissions policy—led to the elimination of Boston’s walk zones.

Keywords: Neighborhoods; Equal access; School Choice; Affirmative Action; Desegregation; Marketplace Matching; Fairness; Local Range; Education; Policy;

Citation:

Dur, Umut, Scott Duke Kominers, Parag A. Pathak, and Tayfun Sönmez. "Reserve Design: Unintended Consequences and the Demise of Boston's Walk Zones." Journal of Political Economy 126, no. 6 (December 2018): 2457–2479. View Details

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Article | Journal of Political Economy

A Theory of Intergenerational Mobility

Gary Becker, Scott Duke Kominers, Kevin Murphy and Jorg L. Spenkuch

We develop a model of intergenerational resource transmission that emphasizes the link between cross-sectional inequality and intergenerational mobility. By drawing on first principles of human capital theory, we derive several novel results. In particular, we show that, even in a world with perfect capital markets and without differences in innate ability, wealthy parents invest, on average, more in their offspring than poorer ones. As a result, persistence of economic status is higher at the top of the income distribution than in the middle. Successive generations of the same family may even cease to regress towards the mean. Moreover, we demonstrate that government interventions intended to ameliorate inequality may in fact lower intergenerational mobility—even when they do not directly favor the rich. Lastly, we consider how mobility is affected by changes in the marketplace.

Keywords: intergenerational mobility; inequality; human capital; complementarities; Equality and Inequality; Human Capital; Income; Family and Family Relationships;

Citation:
Becker, Gary, Scott Duke Kominers, Kevin Murphy, and Jorg L. Spenkuch. "A Theory of Intergenerational Mobility." Journal of Political Economy 126, no. S1 (October 2018): S7–S25. View Details

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Article | ACM SIGecom Exchanges

Good Markets (Really Do) Make Good Neighbors

Scott Duke Kominers

This article gives a (very) brief exposition of what market design is, along with four examples of market design in action. Loosely themed after Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Wall,” the examples demonstrate ways in which market design can break barriers—physical, political, and/or metaphorical. Each example also illustrates one of four broader classes of ways that market design can create positive change: marketplace mechanism (re-)design, information provision, (re-)shaping the extensive margin, and market(place) creation.

Keywords: Market Design; Economics; Theory; Change; Society;

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke. "Good Markets (Really Do) Make Good Neighbors." ACM SIGecom Exchanges 16, no. 2 (June 2018). View Details

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Article | Games and Economic Behavior

Strategy-Proofness of Worker-Optimal Matching with Continuously Transferable Utility

Ravi Jagadeesan, Scott Duke Kominers and Ross Rheingans-Yoo

We give a direct proof of one-sided strategy-proofness for worker-firm matching under continuously transferable utility. A new “Lone Wolf” theorem (Jagadeesan et al., 2017) for settings with transferable utility allows us to adapt the method of proving one-sided strategy-proofness that is typically used in settings with discrete transfers.

Keywords: matching; Strategy-proofness; Lone Wolf Theorem; Rural Hospitals Theorem; Mechanism design; Marketplace Matching;

Citation:
Jagadeesan, Ravi, Scott Duke Kominers, and Ross Rheingans-Yoo. "Strategy-Proofness of Worker-Optimal Matching with Continuously Transferable Utility." Games and Economic Behavior 108 (March 2018): 287–294. View Details

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Article | Operations Research Letters

Orienteering for Electioneering

Jonah Kallenbach, Robert Kleinberg and Scott Duke Kominers

In this paper, we introduce a combinatorial optimization problem that models the investment decision a political candidate faces when treating his or her opponents’ campaign plans as given. Our formulation accounts for both the time cost of traveling between districts and the time expended while campaigning within districts. We describe a polynomial-time algorithm that computes a (2 + ∈)-approximation to the optimal solution of a discrete version of our problem by reducing the problem to another combinatorial optimization problem known as Orienteering.

Keywords: Political Elections; Resource Allocation; Time Management; Analysis;

Citation:
Kallenbach, Jonah, Robert Kleinberg, and Scott Duke Kominers. "Orienteering for Electioneering." Operations Research Letters 46, no. 2 (March 2018): 205–210. View Details

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Article | Economic Inquiry

Big Data and Big Cities: The Promises and Limitations of Improved Measures of Urban Life

Edward L. Glaeser, Scott Duke Kominers, Michael Luca and Nikhil Naik

New, "big" data sources allow measurement of city characteristics and outcome variables at higher frequencies and finer geographic scales than ever before. However, big data will not solve large urban social science questions on its own. Big data has the most value for the study of cities when it allows measurement of the previously opaque, or when it can be coupled with exogenous shocks to people or place. We describe a number of new urban data sources and illustrate how they can be used to improve the study and function of cities. We first show how Google Street View images can be used to predict income in New York City, suggesting that similar image data can be used to map wealth and poverty in previously unmeasured areas of the developing world. We then discuss how survey techniques can be improved to better measure willingness to pay for urban amenities. Finally, we explain how Internet data is being used to improve the quality of city services.

Keywords: Data and Data Sets; Urban Scope; City;

Citation:

Glaeser, Edward L., Scott Duke Kominers, Michael Luca, and Nikhil Naik. "Big Data and Big Cities: The Promises and Limitations of Improved Measures of Urban Life." Economic Inquiry 56, no. 1 (January 2018): 114–137. View Details

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Article | Oxford Review of Economic Policy

An Invitation to Market Design

Scott Duke Kominers, Alexander Teytelboym and Vincent P. Crawford

Market design seeks to translate economic theory and analysis into practical solutions to real-world problems. By redesigning both the rules that guide market transactions and the infrastructure that enables those transactions to take place, market designers can address a broad range of market failures. In this paper, we illustrate the process and power of market design through three examples: the design of medical residency matching programs, a scrip system to allocate food donations to food banks, and the recent "Incentive Auction" that reallocated wireless spectrum from television broadcasters to telecoms. Our lead examples show how effective market design can encourage participation, reduce gaming, and aggregate information in order to improve liquidity, efficiency, and equity in markets. We also discuss a number of fruitful applications of market design in other areas of economic and public policy.

Keywords: matching; auctions; trading; scrip; liquidity; efficiency; equity; allocation rules; marketplaces; market design; Market Design; Marketplace Matching; Auctions;

Citation:

Kominers, Scott Duke, Alexander Teytelboym, and Vincent P. Crawford. "An Invitation to Market Design." Oxford Review of Economic Policy 33, no. 4 (Winter 2017): 541–571. View Details

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Article | Boston University Law Review

"Troll" Check? A Proposal for Administrative Review of Patent Litigation

Lauren Cohen, John Golden, Umit Gurun and Scott Duke Kominers

The patent system is commonly justified as a way to promote social welfare and, more specifically, technological progress. For years, however, there has been concern that patent litigation is undermining, rather than furthering, these goals. Particularly in the United States, the time, cost, and complications of patent suits provide openings for opportunistic assertions of infringement. This article proposes a way to address information problems that facilitate opportunistic assertion: an automatic process of administrative review at the threshold of infringement lawsuits in U.S. district courts. The results of this review would be nonbinding but admissible in later court proceedings. Whether conducted by an independent Patent Litigation Review Board or a division of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, such review would (1) help discourage—or bring to an earlier and less costly end—relatively weak patent-infringement lawsuits; (2) strengthen the litigation and bargaining positions of patentees with especially robust cases; (3) flag weaknesses in litigation positions to the benefit of private parties and the courts; and (4) provide policymakers with information that facilitates evaluation and adjustment of patent-system performance. This article uses multiple economic models to show the likely benefits of early stage administrative review. Nonetheless, because of the fluid and complex nature of the patent litigation landscape, this article proposes that the review process initially be adopted on a pilot basis.

Keywords: Patent trolls; Patents; Lawsuits and Litigation;

Citation:
Cohen, Lauren, John Golden, Umit Gurun, and Scott Duke Kominers. "Troll" Check? A Proposal for Administrative Review of Patent Litigation. Boston University Law Review 97, no. 5 (October 2017): 1775–1841. View Details

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Article | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

Computer Vision Uncovers Predictors of Physical Urban Change

Nikhil Naik, Scott Duke Kominers, Ramesh Raskar, Edward L. Glaeser and César A. Hidalgo

Which neighborhoods experience physical improvements? In this paper, we introduce a computer vision method to measure changes in the physical appearances of neighborhoods from time-series street-level imagery. We connect changes in the physical appearance of five U.S. cities with economic and demographic data and find three factors that predict neighborhood improvement. First, neighborhoods that are densely populated by college-educated adults are more likely to experience physical improvements—an observation that is compatible with the economic literature linking human capital and local success. Second, neighborhoods with better initial appearances experience, on average, larger positive improvements—an observation that is consistent with “tipping” theories of urban change. Third, neighborhood improvement correlates positively with physical proximity to the central business district and to other physically attractive neighborhoods—an observation that is consistent with the “invasion” theories of urban sociology. Together, our results provide support for three classical theories of urban change and illustrate the value of using computer vision methods and street-level imagery to understand the physical dynamics of cities.

Keywords: urban economics; gentrification; urban studies; computer vision; nieghborhood effects; Urban Development; Situation or Environment; Demographics; Economics; Change;

Citation:

Naik, Nikhil, Scott Duke Kominers, Ramesh Raskar, Edward L. Glaeser, and César A. Hidalgo. "Computer Vision Uncovers Predictors of Physical Urban Change." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 114, no. 29 (July 18, 2017). View Details

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Article | Harvard Business Review (website)

Patent Trolling Isn't Dead—It's Just Moving to Delaware

Lauren Cohen, Umit G. Gurun and Scott Duke Kominers

Citation:
Cohen, Lauren, Umit G. Gurun, and Scott Duke Kominers. "Patent Trolling Isn't Dead—It's Just Moving to Delaware." Harvard Business Review (website) (June 28, 2017). View Details

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Article | Public Choice

Who Will Vote Quadratically? Voter Turnout and Votes Cast Under Quadratic Voting

Louis Kaplow and Scott Duke Kominers

Who will vote quadratically in large-N elections under quadratic voting (QV)? First, who will vote? Although the core QV literature assumes that everyone votes, turnout is endogenous. Drawing on other work, we consider the representativeness of endogenously determined turnout under QV. Second, who will vote quadratically? Conditional on turning out, we examine reasons that, in large-N elections, the number of votes that an individual casts may deviate substantially from that under pure, rational QV equilibrium play. Because turnout itself is driven by other factors, the same determinants may inﬂuence how voters who do turn out choose the quantity of votes to cast. Independently, the number of votes actually cast may deviate dramatically from pure QV predictions because of the complex and reﬁned nature of equilibrium play. Most plausibly, voting behavior and outcomes would be determined predominately by social and psychological forces, would exhibit few of the features emphasized in the analysis of hyper-rational equilibrium play,and would have consequential properties that require a different research agenda to bring into focus. Some of our analysis also has implications for voting behavior under other procedures, including one person, one vote.

Keywords: voting; voting turnout; Paradox of voting; Quadratic voting; Pivotality; Elections; Voting; Political Elections; Mathematical Methods;

Citation:
Kaplow, Louis, and Scott Duke Kominers. "Who Will Vote Quadratically? Voter Turnout and Votes Cast Under Quadratic Voting." Special Issue on Quadratic Voting and the Public Good. Public Choice 172, nos. 1-2 (July 2017): 125–149. View Details

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Article | American Economic Review

Stable and Strategy-Proof Matching with Flexible Allotments

John William Hatfield, Scott Duke Kominers and Alexander Westkamp

We introduce a framework of matching with flexible allotments that can be used to model firms with cross-division hiring restrictions. Our framework also allows us to nest some prior models of matching with distributional constraints. Building upon our recent work on observable substitutability, we show that multi-division choice functions with flexible allotments enable stable and strategy-proof matching; these results illustrate the value of clearly mapping when stable and strategy-proof matching is possible.

Keywords: Balance and Stability; Mathematical Methods;

Citation:

Hatfield, John William, Scott Duke Kominers, and Alexander Westkamp. "Stable and Strategy-Proof Matching with Flexible Allotments." American Economic Review 107, no. 5 (May 2017): 214–219. View Details

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Article | Games and Economic Behavior

Contract Design and Stability in Many-to-Many Matching

John William Hatfield and Scott Duke Kominers

We develop a model of many-to-many matching with contracts that subsumes as special cases many-to-many matching markets and buyer/seller markets with heterogeneous and indivisible goods. In our setting, substitutable preferences are sufficient to guarantee the existence of stable outcomes; moreover, in contrast to results for the setting of many-to-one matching with contracts, if any agent’s preferences are not substitutable, then the existence of a stable outcome cannot be guaranteed. In many-to-many matching with contracts, a new market design issue arises: the design of the contract language can impact the set of stable outcomes. Bundling contractual primitives encourages substitutability of agents’ preferences over contracts and makes stable outcomes more likely to exist; however, bundling also makes the contractual language less expressive. Consequently, we see that, in choosing contract language, market designers face a tradeoff between expressiveness and stability.

Keywords: Many-to-Many Matching; stability; Substitutes; Contract Design; Contracts; Marketplace Matching; Balance and Stability;

Citation:

Hatfield, John William, and Scott Duke Kominers. "Contract Design and Stability in Many-to-Many Matching." Games and Economic Behavior 101 (January 2017): 78–97. View Details

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Article | Theoretical Economics

Matching with Slot-Specific Priorities: Theory

Scott Duke Kominers and Tayfun Sönmez

We introduce a two-sided, many-to-one matching with contracts model in which agents with unit demand match to branches that may have multiple slots available to accept contracts. Each slot has its own linear priority order over contracts; a branch chooses contracts by filling its slots sequentially, according to an order of precedence. We demonstrate that in these matching markets with slot-specific priorities, branches’ choice functions may not satisfy the substitutability conditions typically crucial for matching with contracts. Despite this complication, we are able to show that stable outcomes exist in the slot-specific priorities framework and can be found by a cumulative offer mechanism that is strategy proof and respects unambiguous improvements in priority.

Keywords: market design; Matching with Contracts; stability; Strategy-proofness; School Choice; Affirmative Action; Airline Seat Upgrades; Contracts; Market Design; Marketplace Matching; Balance and Stability;

Citation:

Kominers, Scott Duke, and Tayfun Sönmez. "Matching with Slot-Specific Priorities: Theory." Theoretical Economics 11, no. 2 (May 2016): 683–710. View Details

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Article | American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings

Crowdsourcing City Government: Using Tournaments to Improve Inspection Accuracy

Edward Glaeser, Andrew Hillis, Scott Duke Kominers and Michael Luca

The proliferation of big data makes it possible to better target city services like hygiene inspections, but city governments rarely have the in-house talent needed for developing prediction algorithms. Cities could hire consultants, but a cheaper alternative is to crowdsource competence by making data public and offering a reward for the best algorithm. A simple model suggests that open tournaments dominate consulting contracts when cities can tolerate risk and when there is enough labor with low opportunity costs. We also report on an inexpensive Boston-based restaurant tournament, which yielded algorithms that proved reasonably accurate when tested "out-of-sample" on hygiene inspections.

Keywords: user-generated content; operations; tournaments; policy-making; Machine learning; online platforms; Data and Data Sets; Mathematical Methods; City; Infrastructure; Business Processes; Government and Politics;

Citation:

Glaeser, Edward, Andrew Hillis, Scott Duke Kominers, and Michael Luca. "Crowdsourcing City Government: Using Tournaments to Improve Inspection Accuracy." American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings 106, no. 5 (May 2016): 114–118. View Details

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Article | Marketing Letters

To Groupon or Not to Groupon: The Profitability of Deep Discounts

Benjamin Edelman, Sonia Jaffe and Scott Duke Kominers

We examine the profitability and implications of online discount vouchers, a relatively new marketing tool that offers consumers large discounts when they prepay for participating firms' goods and services. Within a model of repeat experience good purchase, we examine two mechanisms by which a discount voucher service can benefit affiliated firms: price discrimination and advertising. For vouchers to provide successful price discrimination, the valuations of consumers who have access to vouchers must generally be lower than those of consumers who do not have access to vouchers. Offering vouchers tends to be more profitable for firms which are patient or relatively unknown, and for firms with low marginal costs. Extensions to our model accommodate the possibilities of multiple voucher purchases and firm price re-optimization. Despite the potential benefits of online discount vouchers to certain firms in certain circumstances, our analysis reveals the narrow conditions in which vouchers are likely to increase firm profits.

Keywords: voucher discounts; Groupon; experience goods; repeat purchase; Online Technology; Marketing Strategy; Marketing Communications;

Citation:

Edelman, Benjamin, Sonia Jaffe, and Scott Duke Kominers. "To Groupon or Not to Groupon: The Profitability of Deep Discounts." Marketing Letters 27, no. 1 (March 2016): 39–53. (First circulated in June 2011. Featured in Working Knowledge: Is Groupon Good for Retailers? Excerpted in HBR Blogs: To Groupon or Not To Groupon: New Research on Voucher Profitability.) View Details

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Article | Science

The Growing Problem of Patent Trolling

Lauren Cohen, Umit Gurun and Scott Duke Kominers

The last decade has seen a sharp rise in patent litigation in the U.S., with 2015 having one of the highest patent lawsuit counts on record. In theory, this could be a consequence of growth in the commercialization of technology and innovation—patent lawsuits increase as more firms turn to intellectual property (IP) protection to safeguard their competitive advantages. However, the majority of recent patent litigation is driven by nonpracticing entities (NPEs), firms that generate no products but instead amass patent portfolios for the sake of enforcing IP rights afforded therein. We discuss new, large-sample evidence adding to a growing literature suggesting that NPEs—in particular, large patent aggregators—on average act as "patent trolls," suing cash-rich firms seemingly irrespective of actual patent infringement. This has a negative impact on future innovation activity at targeted firms. These results suggest a need to check the power of NPEs through changes in U.S. IP policy, in particular to screen out trolling early in the litigation process.

Keywords: Patent Aggregators; patent litigation; patent pools; Patent trolls; Patents; Lawsuits and Litigation; United States;

Citation:
Cohen, Lauren, Umit Gurun, and Scott Duke Kominers. "The Growing Problem of Patent Trolling." Science 352, no. 6285 (April 29, 2016): 521–522. (Explanatory Video.) View Details

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Article | Review of Economics and Statistics

Agglomerative Forces and Cluster Shapes

William R. Kerr and Scott Duke Kominers

We model spatial clusters of similar firms. Our model highlights how agglomerative forces lead to localized, individual connections among firms, while interaction costs generate a defined distance over which attraction forces operate. Overlapping firm interactions yield agglomeration clusters that are much larger than the underlying agglomerative forces themselves. Empirically, we demonstrate that our model's assumptions are present in the structure of technology and labor flows within Silicon Valley. Our model further identifies how the lengths over which agglomerative forces operate influence the shapes and sizes of industrial clusters; we confirm these predictions using variations across patent technology clusters.

Keywords: agglomeration; clusters; networks; industrial organization; Silicon Valley; entrepreneurship; Technology Flows; patents; Networks; Technology; Industry Clusters; Entrepreneurship; California;

Citation:
Kerr, William R., and Scott Duke Kominers. "Agglomerative Forces and Cluster Shapes." Review of Economics and Statistics 97, no. 4 (October 2015): 877–899. View Details

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Article | Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association

Design and Implementation of a Privacy Preserving Electronic Health Record Linkage Tool in Chicago

Abel Kho, John Cashy, Kathryn Jackson, Adam Pah, Satyender Goel, Jorn Boehnke, John Eric Humphries, Scott Duke Kominers and et al.

Objective
To design and implement a tool that creates a secure, privacy preserving linkage of electronic health record (EHR) data across multiple sites in a large metropolitan area in the United States (Chicago, IL), for use in clinical research.
Methods
The authors developed and distributed a software application that performs standardized data cleaning, preprocessing, and hashing of patient identifiers to remove all protected health information. The application creates seeded hash code combinations of patient identifiers using a Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act compliant SHA-512 algorithm that minimizes re-identification risk. The authors subsequently linked individual records using a central honest broker with an algorithm that assigns weights to hash combinations in order to generate high specificity matches.
Results
The software application successfully linked and de-duplicated 7 million records across 6 institutions, resulting in a cohort of 5 million unique records. Using a manually reconciled set of 11 292 patients as a gold standard, the software achieved a sensitivity of 96% and a specificity of 100%, with a majority of the missed matches accounted for by patients with both a missing social security number and last name change. Using 3 disease examples, it is demonstrated that the software can reduce duplication of patient records across sites by as much as 28%.
Conclusions
Software that standardizes the assignment of a unique seeded hash identifier merged through an agreed upon third-party honest broker can enable large-scale secure linkage of EHR data for epidemiologic and public health research. The software algorithm can improve future epidemiologic research by providing more comprehensive data given that patients may make use of multiple healthcare systems.

Keywords: Information; Customers; Safety; Rights; Ethics; Entrepreneurship; Health Care and Treatment; Health Industry; Chicago;

Citation:
Kho, Abel, John Cashy, Kathryn Jackson, Adam Pah, Satyender Goel, Jorn Boehnke, John Eric Humphries, Scott Duke Kominers, and et al. "Design and Implementation of a Privacy Preserving Electronic Health Record Linkage Tool in Chicago." Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association 22, no. 5 (September 2015): 1072–1080. View Details

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Article | Journal of Economic Theory

Multilateral Matching

John William Hatfield and Scott Duke Kominers

We introduce a matching model in which agents engage in joint ventures via multilateral contracts. This approach allows us to consider production complementarities previously outside the scope of matching theory. We show analogues of the first and second welfare theorems and, when agents' utilities are concave in venture participation, show that competitive equilibria exist, correspond to stable outcomes, and yield core outcomes. Competitive equilibria exist in our setting even when externalities are present.

Keywords: matching; networks; joint ventures; stability; Competitive equilibrium; Core; Networks; Competition; Joint Ventures; Balance and Stability; Groups and Teams; Entrepreneurship;

Citation:
Hatfield, John William, and Scott Duke Kominers. "Multilateral Matching." Journal of Economic Theory 156 (March 2015): 175–206. View Details

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Article | ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation

Convergence of Position Auctions under Myopic Best-Response Dynamics

Matthew Cary, Aparna Das, Benjamin Edelman, Ioannis Giotis, Kurtis Heimerl, Anna Karlin, Scott Duke Kominers, Claire Mathieu and Michael Schwarz

We study the dynamics of multi-round position auctions, considering both the case of exogenous click-through rates and the case in which click-through rates are determined by an endogenous consumer search process. In both contexts, we demonstrate that the dynamic auctions converge to their associated static, envy-free equilibria. Furthermore, convergence is efficient, and the entry of low-quality advertisers does not slow convergence. Because our approach predominantly relies on assumptions common in the sponsored search literature, our results suggest that dynamic position auctions converge more generally.

Keywords: sponsored search; advertising; google; equilibrium selection; Online Advertising; Advertising Industry;

Citation:

Cary, Matthew, Aparna Das, Benjamin Edelman, Ioannis Giotis, Kurtis Heimerl, Anna Karlin, Scott Duke Kominers, Claire Mathieu, and Michael Schwarz. "Convergence of Position Auctions under Myopic Best-Response Dynamics." ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation 2, no. 3 (July 2014): 1–20. View Details

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Article | Pediatric Blood & Cancer

Patterns of Failure after Involved Field Radiation Therapy for Pediatric and Young Adult Hodgkin Lymphoma

Minh-Phuong Huynh-Le, Amanda J. Walker, Scott Duke Kominers, Ido Paz-Priel, Moody D. Wharam and Stephanie A. Terezakis

Involved field radiation therapy (IFRT) is integral in curative therapy for Hodgkin lymphoma (HL), although primarily used in patients with intermediate/high‐risk HL. We present failure patterns and clinical outcomes in a cohort of pediatric and young adult patients with HL treated with IFRT at the Johns Hopkins Hospital.

Keywords: hematology/oncology; Hodgkin lymphoma; involved field radiation therapy; Health Disorders; Health Care and Treatment;

Citation:
Huynh-Le, Minh-Phuong, Amanda J. Walker, Scott Duke Kominers, Ido Paz-Priel, Moody D. Wharam, and Stephanie A. Terezakis. "Patterns of Failure after Involved Field Radiation Therapy for Pediatric and Young Adult Hodgkin Lymphoma." Pediatric Blood & Cancer 61, no. 7 (July 2014). View Details

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Article | American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings

Investment Incentives in Labor Market Matching

John William Hatfield, Fuhito Kojima and Scott Duke Kominers

We provide an illustration of how the design of labor market clearing mechanisms can affect incentives for human capital acquisition. Specifically, we extend the labor market matching model (with discrete transfers) of Kelso and Crawford (1982) to incorporate the possibility that agents may invest in human capital before matching. We show that in this setting, the worker-optimal stable matching mechanism incentivizes workers to make (nearly) efficient human capital investments. En route to our main result, we show that so long as the space of salaries is sufficiently rich, every stable outcome in the Kelso and Crawford (1982) setting is approximately efficient.

Keywords: Human Capital; Marketplace Matching;

Citation:
Hatfield, John William, Fuhito Kojima, and Scott Duke Kominers. "Investment Incentives in Labor Market Matching." American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings 104, no. 5 (May 2014): 436–441. View Details

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Article | Journal of Economic Theory

Delayed-Response Strategies in Repeated Games with Observation Lags

Drew Fudenberg, Yuhta Ishii and Scott Duke Kominers

We extend the folk theorem of repeated games to two settings in which players' information about others' play arrives with stochastic lags. In our first model, signals are almost-perfect if and when they do arrive, that is, each player either observes an almost-perfect signal of period-t play with some lag or else never sees a signal of period-t play. The second model has the same lag structure, but the information structure corresponds to a lagged form of imperfect public monitoring, and players are allowed to communicate via cheap-talk messages at the end of each period. In each case, we construct equilibria in “delayed-response strategies,” which ensure that players wait long enough to respond to signals that with high probability all relevant signals are received before players respond. To do so, we extend past work on private monitoring to obtain folk theorems despite the small residual amount of private information.

Keywords: ＂Repeated games＂; Folk theorem; Private monitoring; Observation lag; Game Theory;

Citation:

Fudenberg, Drew, Yuhta Ishii, and Scott Duke Kominers. "Delayed-Response Strategies in Repeated Games with Observation Lags." Journal of Economic Theory 150 (March 2014): 487–514. View Details

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Article | Canadian Mathematical Bulletin

Asymptotic Improvements of Lower Bounds for the Least Common Multiples of Arithmetic Progressions

Daniel M. Kane and Scott Duke Kominers

For relatively prime positive integers and r, we consider the least common multiple L_n:=\mathop{\textrm{lcm}}(u_0,u_1,\dots, u_n) of the finite arithmetic progression \{u_k:=u_0+kr\}_{k=0}^n. We derive new lower bounds on L_n that improve upon those obtained previously when either u_0 or n is large. When r is prime, our best bound is sharp up to a factor of n+1 for u_0 properly chosen, and is also nearly sharp as n\to\infty.

Keywords: Mathematical Methods;

Citation:
Kane, Daniel M., and Scott Duke Kominers. "Asymptotic Improvements of Lower Bounds for the Least Common Multiples of Arithmetic Progressions." Canadian Mathematical Bulletin 57, no. 3 (September 2014): 551–561. View Details

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Article | Journal of Political Economy

Stability and Competitive Equilibrium in Trading Networks

John William Hatfield, Scott Duke Kominers, Alexandru Nichifor, Michael Ostrovsky and Alexander Westkamp

We introduce a model in which agents in a network can trade via bilateral contracts. We find that when continuous transfers are allowed and utilities are quasi-linear, the full substitutability of preferences is sufficient to guarantee the existence of stable outcomes for any underlying network structure. Furthermore, the set of stable outcomes is essentially equivalent to the set of competitive equilibria, and all stable outcomes are in the core and are efficient. By contrast, for any domain of preferences strictly larger than that of full substitutability, the existence of stable outcomes and competitive equilibria cannot be guaranteed.

Keywords: Balance and Stability; Markets;

Citation:
Hatfield, John William, Scott Duke Kominers, Alexandru Nichifor, Michael Ostrovsky, and Alexander Westkamp. "Stability and Competitive Equilibrium in Trading Networks." Journal of Political Economy 121, no. 5 (October 2013): 966–1001. View Details

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Article | Virginia Law Review

On Derivatives Markets and Social Welfare: A Theory of Empty Voting and Hidden Ownership

Jordan M. Barry, John William Hatfield and Scott Duke Kominers

In the past twenty-five years, derivatives markets have grown exponentially. Large, modern derivatives markets increasingly enable investors to hold economic interests in corporations without owning voting rights, and vice versa. This leads to both empty voters—investors whose voting rights in a corporation exceed their economic interests— and hidden owners—investors whose economic interests exceed their voting rights.
We present formal analysis that shows how, when financial markets are opaque, empty voting and hidden ownership can render financial markets unpredictable, unstable, and inefficient. By contrast, we show that when financial markets are transparent, empty voting and hidden ownership have dramatically different effects: they follow predictable patterns, encourage stable outcomes, and promote efficiency. Our analysis lends insight into the operation of securities markets in general and derivatives markets in particular. It also provides a new justification for a robust mandatory disclosure regime and facilitates analysis of proposed substantive securities regulations.

Keywords: Voting; Corporate Disclosure; Financial Markets; Ownership;

Citation:
Barry, Jordan M., John William Hatfield, and Scott Duke Kominers. "On Derivatives Markets and Social Welfare: A Theory of Empty Voting and Hidden Ownership." Virginia Law Review 99, no. 6 (October 2013): 1103–1168. View Details

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Article | Economics Letters

Vacancies in Supply Chain Networks

John William Hatfield and Scott Duke Kominers

We use the supply chain matching framework to study the effects of firm exit. We show that the exit of an initial supplier or end consumer has monotonic effects on the welfare of initial suppliers and end consumers but may simultaneously have positive and negative effects on intermediaries. Furthermore, we demonstrate that there are no clear comparative statics for the effects of intermediary exit on the welfare of other firms; most surprisingly, intermediary exit may diminish the welfare of other firms at the same level of the supply chain.

Keywords: matching; networks; stability; Vacancy chains; Market Entry and Exit; Supply Chain;

Citation:
Hatfield, John William, and Scott Duke Kominers. "Vacancies in Supply Chain Networks." Economics Letters 119, no. 3 (June 2013): 354–357. View Details

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Article | Journal de Théorie des Nombres de Bordeaux

Minimal S-Universality Criteria May Vary in Size

Noam D. Elkies, Daniel M. Kane and Scott Duke Kominers

In this note, we give simple examples of sets $\mathcal{S}$ of quadratic forms that have minimal $\mathcal{S}$-universality criteria of multiple cardinalities. This answers a question of Kim, Kim, and Oh [KKO05] in the negative.

Citation:

Elkies, Noam D., Daniel M. Kane, and Scott Duke Kominers. "Minimal S-Universality Criteria May Vary in Size." Journal de Théorie des Nombres de Bordeaux 25, no. 3 (2013): 557–563. View Details

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Article | American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings

Holdout in the Assembly of Complements: A Problem for Market Design

Scott Duke Kominers and E. Glen Weyl

Holdout problems prevent private (voluntary and self-financing) assembly of complementary goods—such as land or dispersed spectrum—from many self-interested sellers. While mechanisms that fully respect sellers' property rights cannot alleviate these holdout problems, traditional solutions, such as the use of coercive government powers of "eminent domain" to expropriate property, can encourage wasteful and unfair assemblies. We discuss the problems holdout creates for the efficient operation of markets and how previous approaches have used regulated coercion to address these challenges. We then investigate when encouraging competition can partially or fully substitute for coercion, focusing particularly on questions of spectrum allocation.

Keywords: Governance; Market Design; Property;

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke, and E. Glen Weyl. "Holdout in the Assembly of Complements: A Problem for Market Design." American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings 102, no. 3 (May 2012): 360–365. View Details

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Article | Games and Economic Behavior

On the Correspondence of Contracts to Salaries in (Many-to-Many) Matching

Scott Duke Kominers

In this note, I extend the work of Echenique (2012) to show that a model of many-to-many matching with contracts may be embedded into a model of many-to-many matching with wage bargaining whenever (1) all agentsʼ preferences are substitutable and (2) the matching with contracts model is unitary, in the sense that every contractual relationship between a given firm–worker pair is specified in a single contract. Conversely, I show that unitarity is essentially necessary for the embedding result.

Keywords: Many-to-Many Matching; stability; Substitutes; Contract Design; Unitarity; Market Design; Contracts; Marketplace Matching; Balance and Stability; Economics;

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke. "On the Correspondence of Contracts to Salaries in (Many-to-Many) Matching." Games and Economic Behavior 75, no. 2 (July 2012): 984–989. View Details

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Article | Games and Economic Behavior

Testing Substitutability

John William Hatfield, Nicole Immorlica and Scott Duke Kominers

We provide an algorithm for testing the substitutability of a length-N preference relation over a set of contracts X in time O(|X|3⋅N3). Access to the preference relation is essential for this result: We show that a substitutability-testing algorithm with access only to an agentʼs choice function must make an expected number of queries exponential in |X|. An analogous result obtains when the agentʼs preferences are quasilinear in a numeraire and the algorithm only has access to the agentʼs underlying valuation function.

Keywords: Substitutability; matching; Communication complexity; Preference elicitation; Marketplace Matching; Communication; Mathematical Methods; Economics;

Citation:
Hatfield, John William, Nicole Immorlica, and Scott Duke Kominers. "Testing Substitutability." Games and Economic Behavior 75, no. 2 (July 2012): 639–645. View Details

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Article | Economics Letters

Discrete Choice Cannot Generate Demand That Is Additively Separable in Own Price

Sonia Jaffe and Scott Duke Kominers

We show that in a unit demand discrete choice framework with at least three goods, demand cannot be additively separable in own price. This result sharpens the analogous result of Jaffe and Weyl (2010) in the case of linear demand and has implications for testing of the discrete choice assumption, out-of-sample prediction, and welfare analysis.

Keywords: Discrete choice; Unit demand; Separable demand; Linear demand; Demand and Consumers; Market Design; Mathematical Methods; Economics;

Citation:
Jaffe, Sonia, and Scott Duke Kominers. "Discrete Choice Cannot Generate Demand That Is Additively Separable in Own Price." Economics Letters 116, no. 1 (July 2012): 129–132. View Details

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Article | American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

Matching in Networks with Bilateral Contracts

John William Hatfield and Scott Duke Kominers

We introduce a model in which firms trade goods via bilateral contracts which specify a buyer, a seller, and the terms of the exchange. This setting subsumes (many-to-many) matching with contracts, as well as supply chain matching. When firms' relationships do not exhibit a supply chain structure, stable allocations need not exist. By contrast, in the presence of supply chain structure, a natural substitutability condition characterizes the maximal domain of firm preferences for which stable allocations are guaranteed to exist. Furthermore, the classical lattice structure, rural hospitals theorem, and one-sided strategy-proofness results all generalize to this setting. (JEL C78, D85, D86, L14)

Keywords: Contracts; Market Design; Marketplace Matching; Supply Chain;

Citation:
Hatfield, John William, and Scott Duke Kominers. "Matching in Networks with Bilateral Contracts." American Economic Journal: Microeconomics 4, no. 1 (February 2012): 176–208. View Details

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Article | Discrete & Computational Geometry

Hinged Dissections Exist

Timothy G. Abbott, Zachary Abel, David Charlton, Erik D. Demaine, Martin L. Demaine and Scott Duke Kominers

We prove that any finite collection of polygons of equal area has a common hinged dissection. That is, for any such collection of polygons there exists a chain of polygons hinged at vertices that can be folded in the plane continuously without self-intersection to form any polygon in the collection. This result settles the open problem about the existence of hinged dissections between pairs of polygons that goes back implicitly to 1864 and has been studied extensively in the past ten years. Our result generalizes and indeed builds upon the result from 1814 that polygons have common dissections (without hinges). Our proofs are constructive, giving explicit algorithms in all cases. For two planar polygons whose vertices lie on a rational grid, both the number of pieces and the running time required by our construction are pseudopolynomial. This bound is the best possible, even for unhinged dissections. Hinged dissections have possible applications to reconfigurable robotics, programmable matter, and nanomanufacturing.

Keywords: Folding; Reconfiguration; Hinge; Plygon; Refinement; Mathematical Methods;

Citation:
Abbott, Timothy G., Zachary Abel, David Charlton, Erik D. Demaine, Martin L. Demaine, and Scott Duke Kominers. "Hinged Dissections Exist." Discrete & Computational Geometry 47, no. 1 (January 2012): 150–186. View Details

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Article | ACM SIGecom Exchanges

Stability and Competitive Equilibrium in Matching Markets with Transfers

John William Hatfield and Scott Duke Kominers

This note surveys recent work in generalized matching theory, focusing on trading networks with transferable utility. In trading networks with a finite set of contractual opportunities, the substitutability of agents’ preferences is essential for the guaranteed existence of stable outcomes and the correspondence of stable outcomes with competitive equilibria. Closely analogous results hold when venture participation is continuously adjustable, but under a concavity condition on agents’ preferences which allows for some types of complementarity.

Keywords: matching; networks; joint ventures; stability; Competitive equilibrium; Core; efficiency; Economics; Theory;

Citation:
Hatfield, John William, and Scott Duke Kominers. "Stability and Competitive Equilibrium in Matching Markets with Transfers." ACM SIGecom Exchanges 10, no. 3 (December 2011). View Details

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Article | Graphs and Combinatorics

Every Large Point Set Contains Many Collinear Points or an Empty Pentagon

Zachary Abel, Brad Ballinger, Prosenjit Bose, Sébastien Collette, Vida Dujmović, Ferran Hurtado, Scott Duke Kominers, Stefan Langerman, Attila Pór and David Wood

We prove the following generalised empty pentagon theorem for every integer ℓ ≥ 2, every sufficiently large set of points in the plane contains ℓ collinear points or an empty pentagon. As an application, we settle the next open case of the “big line or big clique” conjecture of Kára, Pór, and Wood [Discrete Comput. Geom. 34(3):497–506, 2005].

Keywords: Erdős-Szekeres theorem; happy end problem; big line or big clique conjecture; empty quadrilateral; empty pentagon; empty hexagon;

Citation:
Abel, Zachary, Brad Ballinger, Prosenjit Bose, Sébastien Collette, Vida Dujmović, Ferran Hurtado, Scott Duke Kominers, Stefan Langerman, Attila Pór, and David Wood. "Every Large Point Set Contains Many Collinear Points or an Empty Pentagon." Graphs and Combinatorics 27, no. 1 (January 2011): 47–60. View Details

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Article | Archiv der Mathematik

A Constant Bound for the Periods of Parallel Chip-firing Games with Many Chips

Paul Myer Kominers and Scott Duke Kominers

We prove that any parallel chip-firing game on a graph G with at least 4|E(G)| − |V(G)| chips stabilizes, i.e., such a game has eventual period of length 1. Furthermore, we obtain a polynomial bound on the number of rounds before stabilization. This result is a counterpoint to previous results which showed that the eventual periods of parallel chip-firing games with few chips need not be polynomially bounded.

Keywords: chip-firing; Parallel chip-firing; stabilization;

Citation:
Kominers, Paul Myer, and Scott Duke Kominers. "A Constant Bound for the Periods of Parallel Chip-firing Games with Many Chips." Archiv der Mathematik 95, no. 1 (July 2010): 9–13. View Details

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Article | Rocky Mountain Journal of Mathematics

A Categorical Construction of Ultrafilters

Daniel Litt, Zachary Abel and Scott Duke Kominers

Citation:
Litt, Daniel, Zachary Abel, and Scott Duke Kominers. "A Categorical Construction of Ultrafilters." Rocky Mountain Journal of Mathematics 40, no. 5 (2010): 1611–1617. View Details

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Article | Mathematical Gazette

Irrational Roots Revisited

Scott Duke Kominers

Citation:

Kominers, Scott Duke. "Irrational Roots Revisited." Mathematical Gazette 94, no. 530 (July 2010): 303–304. View Details

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Article | Economics Letters

Information Can Wreck Cooperation: A Counterpoint to Kandori (1992)

Yuichiro Kamada and Scott Duke Kominers

Citation:
Kamada, Yuichiro, and Scott Duke Kominers. "Information Can Wreck Cooperation: A Counterpoint to Kandori (1992)." Economics Letters 107, no. 2 (May 2010): 112–114. View Details

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Article | Games and Economic Behavior

Matching with Preferences over Colleagues Solves Classical Matching

Scott Duke Kominers

In this note, we demonstrate that the problem of "many-to-one matching with (strict) preferences over colleagues" is actually more difficult than the classical many-to-one matching problem, "matching without preferences over colleagues." We give an explicit reduction of any problem of the latter type to a problem of the former type. This construction leads to the first algorithm which finds all stable matchings in the setting of "matching without preferences over colleagues," for any set of preferences. Our construction directly extends to generalized matching settings.

Keywords: Two-Sided Platforms; Balance and Stability; Mathematical Methods;

Citation:

Kominers, Scott Duke. "Matching with Preferences over Colleagues Solves Classical Matching." Games and Economic Behavior 68, no. 2 (March 2010): 773–780. View Details

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Article | SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics

On the Classification of Type II Codes of Length 24

Noam D. Elkies and Scott Duke Kominers

We give a new, purely coding-theoretic proof of Koch's criterion on the tetrad systems of Type II codes of length 24 using the theory of harmonic weight enumerators. This approach is inspired by Venkov's approach to the classification of the root systems of Type II lattices in R^{24}, and gives a new instance of the analogy between lattices and codes.

Keywords: Mathematical Methods;

Citation:

Elkies, Noam D., and Scott Duke Kominers. "On the Classification of Type II Codes of Length 24." SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics 23, no. 4 (2010). View Details

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Article | Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society

Further Improvements of Lower Bounds for the Least Common Multiples of Arithmetic Progressions

Shaofang Hong and Scott Duke Kominers

For relatively prime positive integers u_0 and r, we consider the arithmetic progression {u_k := u_0+k*r} (0 <= k <= n). Define L_n := lcm{u_0,u_1,...,u_n} and let a >= 2 be any integer. In this paper, we show that, for integers alpha,r >= a and n >= 2*alpha*r, we have L_n >= u_0*r^{alpha+a-2}*(r+1)^n. In particular, letting a = 2 yields an improvement to the best previous lower bound on L_n (obtained by Hong and Yang) for all but three choices of alpha,r >= 2.

Keywords: Mathematical Methods;

Citation:
Hong, Shaofang, and Scott Duke Kominers. "Further Improvements of Lower Bounds for the Least Common Multiples of Arithmetic Progressions." Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society 138, no. 3 (March 2010): 809–813. View Details

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Article | Mathematical Gazette

Improved Bounds on the Sizes of S.P Numbers

Paul Myer Kominers and Scott Duke Kominers

A number which is S.P in base r is a positive integer which is equal to the sum of its base-r digits multiplied by the product of its base-r digits. These numbers have been studied extensively in The Mathematical Gazette. Recently, Shah Ali obtained the first effective bound on the sizes of S.P numbers. Modifying Shah Ali's method, we obtain an improved bound on the number of digits in a base-r S.P number. Our bound is the first sharp bound found for the case r=2.

Keywords: Mathematical Methods;

Citation:

Kominers, Paul Myer, and Scott Duke Kominers. "Improved Bounds on the Sizes of S.P Numbers." Mathematical Gazette 94, no. 529 (March 2010): 127–129. View Details

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Article | Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society

Refined Configuration Results for Extremal Type II Lattices of Ranks 40 and 80

Noam D. Elkies and Scott Duke Kominers

We show that, if L is an extremal Type II lattice of rank 40 or 80, then L is generated by its vectors of norm min(L)+2. This sharpens earlier results of Ozeki, and the second author and Abel, which showed that such lattices L are generated by their vectors of norms min(L) and min(L)+2.

Keywords: Mathematical Methods;

Citation:
Elkies, Noam D., and Scott Duke Kominers. "Refined Configuration Results for Extremal Type II Lattices of Ranks 40 and 80." Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society 138, no. 1 (January 2010): 105–108. View Details

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Article | INTEGERS: Electronic Journal of Combinatorial Number Theory

On Congruence Conditions for Primality

Sherry Gong and Scott Duke Kominers

Citation:
Gong, Sherry, and Scott Duke Kominers. "On Congruence Conditions for Primality." A26. INTEGERS: Electronic Journal of Combinatorial Number Theory 10 (2010): 313–317. View Details

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Article | College Mathematics Journal

Finding Matrices that Satisfy Functional Equations

Scott Duke Kominers

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke. "Finding Matrices that Satisfy Functional Equations." College Mathematics Journal 40, no. 4 (September 2009): 289–292. (As part of "Classroom Capsules.") View Details

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Article | International Journal of Number Theory

Configurations of Extremal Even Unimodular Lattices

Scott Duke Kominers

We extend the results of Ozeki on the configurations of extremal even unimodular lattices. Specifically, we show that if L is such a lattice of rank 56, 72, or 96, then L is generated by its minimal-norm vectors.

Keywords: Mathematical Methods;

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke. "Configurations of Extremal Even Unimodular Lattices." International Journal of Number Theory 5, no. 3 (May 2009): 457–464. View Details

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Article | INTEGERS: Electronic Journal of Combinatorial Number Theory

On Universal Binary Hermitian Forms

Scott Duke Kominers

Earnest and Khosravani, Iwabuchi, and Kim and Park recently gave a complete classification of the universal binary Hermitian forms. We give a unified proof of the universalities of these Hermitian forms, relying upon Ramanujan's list of universal quadratic forms and the Bhargava-Hanke 290-Theorem. Our methods bypass the ad hoc arguments required in the original classification.

Keywords: Mathematical Methods;

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke. "On Universal Binary Hermitian Forms." A02. INTEGERS: Electronic Journal of Combinatorial Number Theory 9 (2009): 9–15. View Details

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Response | Gazette of the Australian Mathematical Society

A Correspondence Note on Myerson's 'Irrationality via Well-ordering'

Scott Duke Kominers

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke. "A Correspondence Note on Myerson's 'Irrationality via Well-ordering'." Gazette of the Australian Mathematical Society 36, no. 1 (March 2009): 53. View Details

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Article | Journal of the Society for American Music

Leonard Bernstein's Doodles: Reading Outside the Lines at the Library of Congress

Scott Duke Kominers

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke. "Leonard Bernstein's Doodles: Reading Outside the Lines at the Library of Congress." Special Issue on Leonard Bernstein in Boston. Journal of the Society for American Music 3, no. 1 (February 2009): 26–33. (As an appendix to "Leonard Bernstein's Jewish Boston: Cross-Disciplinary Research in the Classroom" by Carol J. Oja and Kay Kaufman Shelemay.) View Details

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Article | Journal de Théorie des Nombres de Bordeaux

Configurations of Rank-40r Extremal Even Unimodular Lattices (r=1,2,3)

Scott Duke Kominers and Zachary Abel

We show that if L is an extremal even unimodular lattice of rank 40r with r=1,2,3 then L is generated by its vectors of norms 4r and 4r+2. Our result is an extension of Ozeki's result for the case r=1.

Keywords: Mathematical Methods;

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke, and Zachary Abel. "Configurations of Rank-40r Extremal Even Unimodular Lattices (r=1,2,3)." Journal de Théorie des Nombres de Bordeaux 20, no. 2 (2008): 365–371. View Details

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Books

Book | 2011

Success with Science: The Winners' Guide to High School Research

Shiv Gaglani, Maria Elena De Obaldia, Scott Duke Kominers, Dayan Li and Carol Y. Suh

Do you want to develop useful skills, gain admission to top colleges, win scholarship money, excel at science competitions, and explore career options all while having fun? By reading this book and using the advice within it, you will learn how to formulate a research project idea, find people who can help you complete it, effectively present it to diverse audiences, and participate successfully in research competitions. Whether you are a freshman rookie with a vague interest in science or a senior veteran striving for first place at the Science Talent Search, this guide will help you make the most of your research experience. With its testimonials from high school students whose lives were positively changed by their research experiences, this guide also aims to motivate and empower students who otherwise would not pursue science and research opportunities. In doing so, this book also seeks to encourage more students to pursue science and technology.

Keywords: Science; Research;

Citation:
Gaglani, Shiv, Maria Elena De Obaldia, Scott Duke Kominers, Dayan Li, and Carol Y. Suh. Success with Science: The Winners' Guide to High School Research. Tucson, AZ: Research Corporation for Science Advancement, 2011. View Details

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Book Chapters

Chapter | Patent Assertion Entities and Competition Policy | 2017

Empirical Evidence on the Behavior and Impact of Patent Trolls: A Survey

Lauren Cohen, Umit Gurun and Scott Duke Kominers

We survey the empirical literature on non-practicing entity (NPE) litigation behavior and its consequences. We document both aggregate trends and cross-sectional differences amongst various types of NPEs. Survey evidence illustrates a number of ways in which NPEs can potentially act opportunistically and indicates at least some instances and consequences of observed NPE opportunism. Large-sample empirical work has recently begun corroborating and amplifying the findings from survey evidence. NPEs on average behave as "patent trolls." Indeed, NPEs hold and frequently litigate patents that are likely to be at least partially invalidated; moreover, NPEs target cash irrespective of its relation to alleged infringement. Cash-targeting is neither the main driver of practicing entity (PE) intellectual property (IP) litigation, nor of non-IP litigation against publicly traded firms. The empirical evidence suggests, however, that not all NPEs exhibit trolling behavior—the cash-targeting observed in the data is primarily the behavior of large patent aggregators, rather than small inventors. NPE patent trolling has a real negative impact on targeted firms, without any increase in innovation, technology transfer, or other counterbalancing benefits measured thus far.

Keywords: Patent trolls; NPEs; PAEs; innovation; patents; Patents; Lawsuits and Litigation; Innovation and Invention;

Citation:
Cohen, Lauren, Umit Gurun, and Scott Duke Kominers. "Empirical Evidence on the Behavior and Impact of Patent Trolls: A Survey." In Patent Assertion Entities and Competition Policy, edited by D. Daniel Sokol. Cambridge University Press, 2017. View Details

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Chapter | Quadratic and Higher Degree Forms | 2013

Weighted Generating Functions for Type II Lattices and Codes

Noam D. Elkies and Scott Duke Kominers

We give a new structural development of harmonic polynomials on Hamming space, and harmonic weight enumerators of binary linear codes, that parallels one approach to harmonic polynomials on Euclidean space and weighted theta functions of Euclidean lattices. Namely, we use the finite-dimensional representation theory of sl2sl2 to derive a decomposition theorem for the spaces of discrete homogeneous polynomials in terms of the spaces of discrete harmonic polynomials, and prove a generalized MacWilliams identity for harmonic weight enumerators. We then present several applications of harmonic weight enumerators, corresponding to some uses of weighted theta functions: an equivalent characterization of t-designs, the Assmus–Mattson Theorem in the case of extremal Type II codes, and configuration results for extremal Type II codes of lengths 8, 24, 32, 48, 56, 72, and 96.

Keywords: Mathematical Methods;

Citation:

Elkies, Noam D., and Scott Duke Kominers. "Weighted Generating Functions for Type II Lattices and Codes." In Quadratic and Higher Degree Forms. Vol. 31, edited by Alladi Krishnaswami, Manjul Bhargava, David Savitt, and Pham Huu Tiep, 63–108. Developments in Mathematics. Springer, 2013. View Details

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Conference Papers

Article | Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence

Ridesharing with Driver Location Preferences

Duncan Rheingans-Yoo, Scott Duke Kominers, Hongyao Ma and David C. Parkes

We study revenue-optimal pricing and driver compensation in ridesharing platforms when drivers have heterogeneous preferences over locations. If a platform ignores drivers' location preferences, it may make inefficient trip dispatches; moreover, drivers may strategize so as to route towards their preferred locations. In a model with stationary and continuous demand and supply, we present a mechanism that incentivizes drivers to both (i) report their location preferences truthfully and (ii) always provide service. In settings with unconstrained driver supply or symmetric demand patterns, our mechanism achieves (full-information) first-best revenue. Under supply constraints and unbalanced demand, we show via simulation that our mechanism improves over existing mechanisms and has performance close to the first best.

Keywords: ridesharing; pricing; Compensation and Benefits; Geographic Location; Market Design; Mathematical Methods;

Citation:
Rheingans-Yoo, Duncan, Scott Duke Kominers, Hongyao Ma, and David C. Parkes. "Ridesharing with Driver Location Preferences." Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (2019): 557–564. View Details

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Article | Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Economics and Computation

Allocation for Social Good: Auditing Mechanisms for Utility Maximization

Taylor Lundy, Alexander Wei, Hu Fu, Scott Duke Kominers and Kevin Leyton-Brown

Citation:
Lundy, Taylor, Alexander Wei, Hu Fu, Scott Duke Kominers, and Kevin Leyton-Brown. "Allocation for Social Good: Auditing Mechanisms for Utility Maximization." Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (2019): 785–803. View Details

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Article | Proceedings of the International Workshop on Internet and Network Economics

Course Allocation by Proxy Auction

Scott Duke Kominers, Mike Ruberry and Jonathan Ullman

Citation:

Kominers, Scott Duke, Mike Ruberry, and Jonathan Ullman. "Course Allocation by Proxy Auction." Proceedings of the International Workshop on Internet and Network Economics 6th (2010): 551–558. (Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 6484.) View Details

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Article | Proceedings of the Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms

Shape Replication Through Self-Assembly and RNase Enzymes

Zachary Abel, Nadia Benbernou, Mirela Damian, Erik D. Demaine, Robin Flatland, Scott Duke Kominers, Robert Schweller and Martin L. Demaine

Citation:
Abel, Zachary, Nadia Benbernou, Mirela Damian, Erik D. Demaine, Robin Flatland, Scott Duke Kominers, Robert Schweller, and Martin L. Demaine. "Shape Replication Through Self-Assembly and RNase Enzymes." Proceedings of the Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms 21st (2010): 1045–1064. View Details

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Working Papers

Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2020

Paying It Backward and Forward: Expanding Access to Convalescent Plasma Therapy Through Market Design

Scott Duke Kominers, Parag A. Pathak, Tayfun Sönmez and M. Utku Ünver

COVID-19 convalescent plasma (CCP) therapy is currently a leading treatment for COVID-19. At present, there is a shortage of CCP relative to demand. We develop and analyze a model of centralized CCP allocation that incorporates both donation and distribution. In order to increase CCP supply, we introduce a mechanism that utilizes two incentive schemes, respectively based on principles of “paying it backward" and “paying it forward." Under the first scheme, CCP donors obtain treatment vouchers that can be transferred to patients of their choosing. Under the latter scheme, patients obtain priority for CCP therapy in exchange for a future pledge to donate CCP if possible. We show that in steady-state, both principles generally increase overall treatment rates for all patients—not just those who are voucher-prioritized or pledged to donate. Our results also hold under certain conditions if a fraction of CCP is reserved for patients who participate in clinical trials. Finally, we examine the implications of pooling blood types on the efficiency and equity of CCP distribution.

Keywords: COVID-19; convalescent plasma; vouchers; Health Pandemics; Health Care and Treatment; Resource Allocation; Market Design;

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke, Parag A. Pathak, Tayfun Sönmez, and M. Utku Ünver. "Paying It Backward and Forward: Expanding Access to Convalescent Plasma Therapy Through Market Design." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 20-116, May 2020. View Details

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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.

Keywords: voter turnout; Paradox of voting; Pivotality; Elections; model; Voting; Behavior; Theory;

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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Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2020

Collusion in Brokered Markets

John William Hatfield, Scott Duke Kominers and Richard Lowery

The U.S. residential real estate agency market presents a puzzle for economic theory: commissions on real estate transactions have remained high for decades even though entry is frequent and costs are low. We model the real estate agency market, and other brokered markets, as a game in which brokers first post prices for customers and then choose which other agents to work with. We show that prices appreciably higher than competitive prices can be sustained (for a fixed discount factor) regardless of the number of brokers by using strategies that condition working with a broker on that broker’s posted prices.

Keywords: real estate; ＂Repeated games＂; collusion; antitrust; brokered markets; Game Theory; Real Estate Industry;

Citation:
Hatfield, John William, Scott Duke Kominers, and Richard Lowery. "Collusion in Brokered Markets." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 20-023, September 2019. (Revised March 2020.) View Details

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Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2020

To Infinity and Beyond: Scaling Economic Theories via Logical Compactness

Yannai A. Gonczarowski, Scott Duke Kominers and Ran I. Shorrer

Many economic-theoretic models incorporate finiteness assumptions that, while introduced for simplicity, play a real role in the analysis. Such assumptions introduce a conceptual problem, as results that rely on finiteness are often implicitly nonrobust; for example, they may rely on edge effects or artificial boundary conditions. Here, we present a unified method that enables us to remove finiteness assumptions, such as those on datasets, market sizes, and time horizons. We then apply our approach to a variety of revealed preference, matching, and exchange economy settings.

The key to our approach is Logical Compactness, a core result from Propositional Logic. Building on Logical Compactness, in a revealed-preference setting, we reprove Reny's infinite-data version of Afriat's theorem and (newly) prove an infinite-data version of McFadden and Richter's characterization of rationalizable stochastic datasets. In a matching setting, we reprove large-market existence results implied by Fleiner's analysis and prove both the strategy-proofness of the man-optimal stable mechanism in infinite markets and an infinite-market version of Nguyen and Vohra's existence result for near-feasible stable matchings with couples. In a trading-network setting, we prove that the Hatfield et al. result on the existence of Walrasian equilibria extends to infinite markets. Finally, we prove that Pereyra's existence result for dynamic two-sided matching markets extends to a doubly infinite time horizon.

Keywords: Markets; Analysis; Game Theory;

Citation:
Gonczarowski, Yannai A., Scott Duke Kominers, and Ran I. Shorrer. "To Infinity and Beyond: Scaling Economic Theories via Logical Compactness." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 19-127, June 2019. (Revised March 2020.) View Details

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Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2018

Bundling Incentives in (Many-to-Many) Matching with Contracts

Jonathan Ma and Scott Duke Kominers

In many-to-many matching with contracts, the way in which contracts are specified can affect the set of stable equilibrium outcomes. Consequently, agents may be incentivized to modify the set of contracts upfront. We consider one simple way in which agents may do so: unilateral bundling, in which a single agent links multiple contracts with the same counterparty together. We show that essentially no stable matching mechanism eliminates incentives for unilateral bundling. Moreover, we find that unilateral bundling can sometimes lead to Pareto improvement—and other times produces market power that makes one agent better off at the expense of others.

Keywords: Matching with Contracts; Contract Design; Bundling-proofness; Substitutability; Mathematical Methods;

Citation:
Ma, Jonathan, and Scott Duke Kominers. "Bundling Incentives in (Many-to-Many) Matching with Contracts." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 19-011, August 2018. View Details

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Working Paper | 2015

Strategy-Proofness, Investment Efficiency, and Marginal Returns: An Equivalence

John William Hatfield, Fuhito Kojima and Scott Duke Kominers

We show that a mechanism induces an agent to make efficient ex ante investment choices if and only if it rewards that agent with his marginal surplus; additionally, for an ex post efficient mechanism, these properties are equivalent to strategy-proofness for the agent. Our results extend to settings with uncertainty; moreover, they have analogs for mechanisms that are only approximately efficient and approximately incentive compatible. Among other applications, our results imply both that under the worker-optimal stable mechanism, workers are incentivized to make efficient human capital investments before entering the labor market, and that second-price auctions induce efficient bidder participation.

Keywords: Strategy-proofness; Investment efficiency; Providing marginal rewards; Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanisms; Mechanism design; Market Design; Human Capital;

Citation:
Hatfield, John William, Fuhito Kojima, and Scott Duke Kominers. "Strategy-Proofness, Investment Efficiency, and Marginal Returns: An Equivalence." Working Paper, January 2015. View Details

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Working Paper | 2016

Refugee Resettlement

David Delacretaz, Scott Duke Kominers and Alexander Teytelboym

Over 100,000 refugees are permanently resettled from refugee camps to hosting countries every year. Nevertheless, refugee resettlement processes in most countries are ad hoc, accounting for neither the priorities of hosting communities nor the preferences of refugees themselves. Building on models from two-sided matching theory, we introduce a new framework for matching with multidimensional constraints that models refugee families’ needs for multiple units of different services, as well as the service capacities of local areas. We propose several refugee resettlement mechanisms that can be used by hosting countries under various institutional and informational constraints. Our mechanisms can improve match efficiency, incentivize refugees to report where they would like to settle, and respect priorities of local areas thereby encouraging them to accept more refugees overall. Beyond the refugee resettlement context, our model has applications ranging from the allocation of daycare slots to the incorporation of complex diversity constraints in public school assignment.

Keywords: Refugees; Marketplace Matching; Mathematical Methods;

Citation:
Delacretaz, David, Scott Duke Kominers, and Alexander Teytelboym. "Refugee Resettlement." Working Paper, November 2016. View Details

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Working Paper | 2014

Hidden Substitutes

John William Hatfield and Scott Duke Kominers

In this paper, we show that preferences exhibiting some forms of complementarity in fact have an underlying substitutable structure. Specifically, we show that some preferences that are not substitutable in the setting of many-to-one matching with contracts become substitutable when an employer is allowed to sign multiple contracts with an individual worker. These substitutably completable preferences guarantee the existence of stable outcomes, even though stable outcomes are not guaranteed, in general, when complementarities are present. Our results imply the existence of a stable, strategy-proof mechanism for allocating workers with specialized skillsets; moreover, our results give new insight into the existing applications of matching with contracts to cadet–branch matching and the design of affirmative action programs.

Keywords: Many-to-One Matching; Many-to-Many Matching; stability; Substitutes; Matching with Contracts; Slot-Specific Priorities; Sherlock; Market Design; Contracts; Marketplace Matching; Balance and Stability;

Citation:
Hatfield, John William, and Scott Duke Kominers. "Hidden Substitutes." Working Paper, September 2014. View Details

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Working Paper | 2015

Shielded Innovation

Lauren Cohen, Umit Gurun and Scott Duke Kominers

We show that increased litigation risk has driven innovators to shield themselves by shifting innovation out of industry and into universities. We show both theoretically and empirically that litigation by Non-Practicing Entities (NPEs) pushes innovation to spaces with reduced litigation threat. Innovation has shifted into universities (and away from public and private firms) in exactly those industries with the most aggressive NPE litigation, precisely following extensive NPE litigation. The extent of innovation shielding is large and significant. An increase of 100 NPE lawsuits in an industry shifts up the university share of innovation by roughly 70% in subsequent years (t=5.34).

Keywords: Patent trolls; patents; NPEs; PAEs; innovation; Patents;

Citation:
Cohen, Lauren, Umit Gurun, and Scott Duke Kominers. "Shielded Innovation." Working Paper, June 2015. View Details

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Working Paper | 2016

Paying (for) Attention: The Impact of Information Processing Costs on Bayesian Inference

Scott Duke Kominers, Xiaosheng Mu and Alexander Peysakhovich

Human information processing is often modeled as costless Bayesian inference. However, research in psychology shows that attention is a computationally costly and potentially limited resource. We study a Bayesian individual for whom computing posterior beliefs is costly. Such an agent faces a tradeoff between economizing on attention costs and having more accurate beliefs. We show that even small processing costs can lead to significant departures from the standard costless processing model. There exist situations where beliefs can cycle persistently and never converge. In addition, when updating is costly, agents are more sensitive to signals about rare events than to signals about common events. Thus, these individuals can permanently overestimate the likelihood of rare events (e.g., the probability of a plane crash). There is a commonly held assumption in economics that individuals will converge to correct beliefs/optimal behavior given sufficient experience. Our results contribute to a growing literature in psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics suggesting that this assumption is both theoretically and empirically fragile.

Keywords: Behavior; Cognition and Thinking; Economics;

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke, Xiaosheng Mu, and Alexander Peysakhovich. "Paying (for) Attention: The Impact of Information Processing Costs on Bayesian Inference." Working Paper, February 2016. View Details

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Business and Opinion Writing (selected)

Article | Bloomberg Opinion

How to End the Plasma Shortage for Coronavirus Patients

Scott Duke Kominers

Those who have recovered from the virus will donate more blood if given the right incentives.

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke. "How to End the Plasma Shortage for Coronavirus Patients." Bloomberg Opinion (May 11, 2020). View Details

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Article | Bloomberg Opinion

Believe in Vaccine Bets Like Bill Gates's

Scott Duke Kominers

Commitment of public or private funds upfront speeds development, production, and distribution.

Keywords: coronavirus; vaccine; financing; Health Pandemics; Health Care and Treatment; Product Development; Production; Distribution;

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke. "Believe in Vaccine Bets Like Bill Gates's." Bloomberg Opinion (April 28, 2020). View Details

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Article | Bloomberg Opinion

Pandemic Shutdowns Work for the Economy, Too

Scott Duke Kominers

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke. "Pandemic Shutdowns Work for the Economy, Too." Bloomberg Opinion (March 27, 2020). View Details

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Article | Bloomberg Opinion

Patent Protection Should Take a Backseat in a Crisis

Scott Duke Kominers

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke. "Patent Protection Should Take a Backseat in a Crisis." Bloomberg Opinion (March 26, 2020). View Details

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Article | Bloomberg Opinion

Free Food Delivery for the Elderly Would Be Smart

Scott Duke Kominers

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke. "Free Food Delivery for the Elderly Would Be Smart." Bloomberg Opinion (March 24, 2020). View Details

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Article | Bloomberg Opinion

Keep Sanitizer Out of the Market's Invisible Hand

Scott Duke Kominers

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke. "Keep Sanitizer Out of the Market's Invisible Hand." Bloomberg Opinion (March 16, 2020). View Details

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Article | Bloomberg Opinion

Under Armour Dumped Its App, and Consumers Feel the Heartbreak

Scott Duke Kominers

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke. "Under Armour Dumped Its App, and Consumers Feel the Heartbreak." Bloomberg Opinion (February 5, 2020). View Details

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Article | Bloomberg Opinion

Food-Stamp Work Requirements Just Look Cruel

Scott Duke Kominers

The rule doesn’t help beneficiaries find the steady employment that doesn’t exist.

Keywords: Food; Employment; Welfare or Wellbeing; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms;

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke. "Food-Stamp Work Requirements Just Look Cruel." Bloomberg Opinion (January 27, 2020). View Details

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Article | Bloomberg Opinion

Fake AI People Won't Fix Online Dating

Scott Duke Kominers

Computer-generated images may inspire even more distrust and surely won’t lead to the love of a lifetime.

Keywords: artificial intelligence; dating services; Online Technology; Ethics;

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke. "Fake AI People Won't Fix Online Dating." Bloomberg Opinion (January 16, 2020). View Details

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Article | Bloomberg Opinion

Math Geeks Were in Their Glory in the 2010s

Scott Duke Kominers

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke. "Math Geeks Were in Their Glory in the 2010s." Bloomberg Opinion (December 31, 2019). View Details

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Article | Bloomberg Opinion

Twitter Begs Users to Target Themselves for Ads

Scott Duke Kominers

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke. "Twitter Begs Users to Target Themselves for Ads." Bloomberg Opinion (December 30, 2019). View Details

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Article | Bloomberg Opinion

United's Frequent-Flier Program Gets Some Game Theory

Scott Duke Kominers

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke. "United's Frequent-Flier Program Gets Some Game Theory." Bloomberg Opinion (December 13, 2019). View Details

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Article | Quartz

The Best Thing About Libra Is Often Overlooked—and Its Creators Explain Why

Christian Catalini and Scott Kominers

Citation:
Catalini, Christian, and Scott Kominers. "The Best Thing About Libra Is Often Overlooked—and Its Creators Explain Why." Quartz (October 18, 2019). View Details

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Article | Bloomberg Opinion

Starbucks Stores That Only Accept Mobile Orders Sure Beat the Line

Scott Duke Kominers

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke. "Starbucks Stores That Only Accept Mobile Orders Sure Beat the Line." Bloomberg Opinion (October 12, 2019). View Details

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Article | Bloomberg Opinion

People Make It So Hard to Ditch Plastic Straws

Scott Duke Kominers

Rarely has a minor consumer product received more vilification than the plastic straw. As a symbol of human wastefulness and our careless disregard for the environment, straws are the near-perfect villain. You use a plastic straw once and toss it, but it stays with us forever, sitting in a landfill, floating in the sea or harming wildlife. That's why some local governments like that of New York City have stopped allowing them, along with other single-use plastics. This seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do, even though plastic straws comprise only a small part of the total volume of plastic disposed of each year.

Keywords: Environmental Sustainability; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Consumer Behavior;

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke. "People Make It So Hard to Ditch Plastic Straws." Bloomberg Opinion (July 15, 2019). View Details

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Article | Bloomberg Opinion

Uber Must Go Slow When Drivers Rate Riders

Scott Duke Kominers

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke. "Uber Must Go Slow When Drivers Rate Riders." Bloomberg Opinion (June 13, 2019). View Details

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Article | Bloomberg Opinion

Twitter Is Showing More Ads Instead of Better Ideas

Scott Duke Kominers

A social media company that doesn’t know much about its users needs to work harder on its business model.

Keywords: social media; Twitter; Business Model; Advertising; Strategy;

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke. "Twitter Is Showing More Ads Instead of Better Ideas." Bloomberg Opinion (May 30, 2019). View Details

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Article | Bloomberg Opinion

You Might Be a Robot. This Is Not a Joke.

Scott Duke Kominers

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke. "You Might Be a Robot. This Is Not a Joke." Bloomberg Opinion (March 14, 2019). View Details

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Article | Bloomberg Opinion

Tesla's Online Selling Is a Big Bet on Millennials

Scott Duke Kominers

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke. "Tesla's Online Selling Is a Big Bet on Millennials." Bloomberg Opinion (March 6, 2019). View Details

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Article | Bloomberg Opinion

Busting the Refugee-Crime Connection

Scott Duke Kominers

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke. "Busting the Refugee-Crime Connection." Bloomberg Opinion (January 7, 2019). View Details

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Article | Bloomberg Opinion

This Was a Great Year to Be a Math Geek

Scott Duke Kominers

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke. "This Was a Great Year to Be a Math Geek." Bloomberg Opinion (December 28, 2018). View Details

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Article | Bloomberg Opinion

How Apple Gamed App Pricing

Scott Duke Kominers

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke. "How Apple Gamed App Pricing." Bloomberg Opinion (December 11, 2018). View Details

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Editorial | Bloomberg Opinion

Robots Can Save Us from Phone Scammers

Scott Duke Kominers

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke. "Robots Can Save Us from Phone Scammers." Bloomberg Opinion (October 15, 2018). View Details

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Article | Bloomberg Opinion

Amazon's $15 Minimum Wage Might Cost Some Workers

Scott Duke Kominers

Keywords: Economics; Retail Industry; United States;

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke. "Amazon's $15 Minimum Wage Might Cost Some Workers." Bloomberg Opinion (October 10, 2018). View Details

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Article | Bloomberg Opinion

Leonard Bernstein and the Promise of America

Scott Duke Kominers

Keywords: Music Entertainment; United States;

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke. "Leonard Bernstein and the Promise of America." Bloomberg Opinion (August 24, 2018). View Details

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Article | Bloomberg Opinion

Why Work Requirements Hurt the Poor

Scott Duke Kominers

Keywords: Social Issues; Welfare or Wellbeing; United States;

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke. "Why Work Requirements Hurt the Poor." Bloomberg Opinion (August 20, 2018). View Details

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Article | Bloomberg Opinion

Math Geeks Must Wait 100 Years for a Day Like This

Scott Duke Kominers

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke. "Math Geeks Must Wait 100 Years for a Day Like This." Bloomberg Opinion (June 1, 2018). View Details

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Article | Bloomberg Opinion

Facebook Is Right to Think 'Likes' Can Lead to Love

Scott Duke Kominers

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke. "Facebook Is Right to Think 'Likes' Can Lead to Love." Bloomberg Opinion (May 11, 2018). View Details

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Article | Bloomberg View

Facebook Knows It Can't Offer More Privacy

Scott Duke Kominers

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke. "Facebook Knows It Can't Offer More Privacy." Bloomberg View (April 26, 2018). View Details

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Other Article | Bloomberg View

L.L. Bean Will Regret Ending Lifetime Product Guarantee

Scott Duke Kominers

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke. "L.L. Bean Will Regret Ending Lifetime Product Guarantee." Bloomberg View (February 20, 2018). View Details

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Article | Bloomberg View

Must-Reads for 2017: Grappling with Backlash

Scott Duke Kominers

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke. "Must-Reads for 2017: Grappling with Backlash." Bloomberg View (December 12, 2017). View Details

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Article | Bloomberg View

Uber Really Wants You to Use Its Credit Card

Scott Duke Kominers

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke. "Uber Really Wants You to Use Its Credit Card." Bloomberg View (December 6, 2017). View Details

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Other Article | Bloomberg View

Velcro Is Too Sticky for Its Own Good

Scott Duke Kominers

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke. "Velcro Is Too Sticky for Its Own Good." Bloomberg View (October 17, 2017). View Details

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Article | Bloomberg View

Fans Watch Taylor Swift. Economists Watch the Fans

Scott Duke Kominers

The star will sell tickets first to fans who "boost" her work online. It's an auction, but the currency is not money.

Keywords: Auctions;

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke. "Fans Watch Taylor Swift. Economists Watch the Fans." Bloomberg View (August 29, 2017). View Details

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Article | Bloomberg View

To Improve Wireless Networks, Auction the Airwaves

Scott Duke Kominers

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke. "To Improve Wireless Networks, Auction the Airwaves." Bloomberg View (July 24, 2017). View Details

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Article | Bloomberg View

Uber's New Pricing Idea Is Good Theory, Risky Business

Scott Duke Kominers

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke. "Uber's New Pricing Idea Is Good Theory, Risky Business." Bloomberg View (June 13, 2017). View Details

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Article | Bloomberg View

Kenneth Arrow Made Great Models, and Was One

Scott Duke Kominers

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke. "Kenneth Arrow Made Great Models, and Was One." Bloomberg View (February 23, 2017). View Details

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Article | Bloomberg View

Why Obama Just Wrote Articles in 3 Academic Journals

Scott Duke Kominers

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke. "Why Obama Just Wrote Articles in 3 Academic Journals." Bloomberg View (January 22, 2017). View Details

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Article | Bloomberg View

Prediction Markets Didn't Call Trump's Win, Either

Scott Duke Kominers

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke. "Prediction Markets Didn't Call Trump's Win, Either." Bloomberg View (November 15, 2016). View Details

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Article | Bloomberg View

Apple Has Designs on Stifling Innovation

Scott Duke Kominers

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke. "Apple Has Designs on Stifling Innovation." Bloomberg View (October 24, 2016). View Details

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Article | Bloomberg View

For Better Online Product Reviews, Pay the Reviewers

Scott Duke Kominers

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke. "For Better Online Product Reviews, Pay the Reviewers." Bloomberg View (September 21, 2016). View Details

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Article | Bloomberg View

Matchmaking to Find Homes for Refugees

Alex Teytelboym and Scott Duke Kominers

Citation:
Teytelboym, Alex, and Scott Duke Kominers. "Matchmaking to Find Homes for Refugees." Bloomberg View (September 19, 2016). View Details

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Article | Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly

Congress Must Look Forward in Reining in Patent Trolls

Lauren Cohen, Umit G. Gurun and Scott Duke Kominers

Citation:
Cohen, Lauren, Umit G. Gurun, and Scott Duke Kominers. "Congress Must Look Forward in Reining in Patent Trolls." Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly (May 28, 2015). View Details

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Blog Post | Fortune.com, Postcards Blog

How U.S. Laws Protecting America's Best Ideas Are Killing Innovation

Lauren Cohen, Umit G. Gurun and Scott Duke Kominers

Citation:
Cohen, Lauren, Umit G. Gurun, and Scott Duke Kominers. "How U.S. Laws Protecting America's Best Ideas Are Killing Innovation." Fortune.com, Postcards Blog (January 22, 2015). http://fortune.com/2015/01/22/how-u-s-laws-protecting-americas-best-ideas-are-killing-innovation/. View Details

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Article | Harvard Business Review (website)

Lessons from the GoDaddy Customer Revolt

Scott Duke Kominers and Paul Myer Kominers

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke, and Paul Myer Kominers. "Lessons from the GoDaddy Customer Revolt." Harvard Business Review (website) (December 29, 2011). View Details

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Cases and Teaching Materials

Case | HBS Case Collection | March 2020

Poppy (B)

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 business model, as well as how Patel Thompson rekindled her entrepreneurial ambitions

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Marketplace Matching; Business Model; Business Exit or Shutdown; Personal Development and Career; United States;

Citation:
Eisenmann, Thomas R., Scott Duke Kominers, Jeff Huizinga, and Allison Ciechanover. "Poppy (B)." Harvard Business School Case 820-715, March 2020. View Details

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Case | HBS Case Collection | March 2020

Zoom Video Communications and COVID-19

Scott Kominers and George Gonzalez

When a global pandemic forced people around the world to stay home and work remotely, Zoom became the video conferencing tool of choice for many organizations. The case explores Zoom's strengths and weaknesses as a platform, role in society, and emergent use cases. The case then examines how the company can maintain its users and momentum once the crisis subsides.

Keywords: platform design; Health Pandemics; Communication Technology; Strategic Planning; Technology Industry; Information Technology Industry;

Citation:
Kominers, Scott, and George Gonzalez. "Zoom Video Communications and COVID-19." Harvard Business School Case 820-108, March 2020. View Details

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Case | HBS Case Collection | March 2020

Opportunity Insights: Research and Policy for Social Mobility

Scott Kominers, Jeffrey Huizinga and Allison Ciechanover

Opportunity Insights -- a non-profit that researches drivers of economic opportunity and develops policy solutions to help families achieve better life outcomes -- seeks to expand its impact.

Keywords: economic opportunity; Social mobility; Nonprofit Organizations; Social Issues; Housing; Policy; Opportunities;

Citation:
Kominers, Scott, Jeffrey Huizinga, and Allison Ciechanover. "Opportunity Insights: Research and Policy for Social Mobility." Harvard Business School Case 820-714, March 2020. View Details

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Case | HBS Case Collection | February 2020

Klöckner & Co: Steeling for a Digital World

Scott Duke Kominers and Carin-Isabel Knoop

Hoping to get ahead of potential digital disruption at Klöckner & Co. – one of the world’s largest steel and metal distributors – CEO Gisbert Rühl set up both kloeckner.i (KCI), an internal transformation arm, and XOM Materials (XOM), an independent industry platform. KCI and XOM sought to digitize the $350 billion materials supply and service chain, and promote greater price transparency and efficiency. However, the materials market traditionally resisted digitalization, making the process longer, harder, and more expensive than expected. As 2020 opened, Rühl and his teams wondered how they could dramatically increase uptake.

Keywords: digital transformation; Corporate Entrepreneurship; Market Design; Market Platforms; Multi-Sided Platforms; Markets; Industry Structures; Supply and Industry; Technology Platform; Technology Adoption; Transformation; Steel Industry; Information Technology Industry; Europe; Germany;

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke, and Carin-Isabel Knoop. "Klöckner & Co: Steeling for a Digital World." Harvard Business School Case 820-035, February 2020. View Details

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Case | HBS Case Collection | January 2020

Lunchclub: Algorithmic Networking

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 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; Networking; Business Startups; Marketplace Matching; Market Design; Growth and Development Strategy; Information Industry;

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

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Supplement | HBS Case Collection | June 2019

Quantopian: A New Model for Active Management (B)

Sara Fleiss, Scott Duke Kominers and Charles B. Ughetta

Citation:
Fleiss, Sara, Scott Duke Kominers, and Charles B. Ughetta. "Quantopian: A New Model for Active Management (B)." Harvard Business School Supplement 219-115, June 2019. View Details

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Case | HBS Case Collection | April 2019 (Revised June 2019)

Raksul

Scott Duke Kominers, Masahiro Kotosaka, Nobuo Sato and Akiko Kanno

Raksul, 2018 Forbes Japan "Startup of the Year," ran an e-commerce platform drawing upon thousands of individual suppliers. Launched as a business-to-business printing services marketplace, Raksul had recently expanded to operate both a logistics/delivery marketplace and a television advertising marketplace. Each marketplace faces its own growth challenges; at the same time, the CEO must consider whether and how each marketplace can enhance the others.

Keywords: e-commerce; marketplace design; B2B; platform strategy; printing; Entrepreneurship; Market Platforms; Logistics; Advertising; Growth and Development Strategy; Industry Structures; Web Services Industry; Japan;

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke, Masahiro Kotosaka, Nobuo Sato, and Akiko Kanno. "Raksul." Harvard Business School Case 819-115, April 2019. (Revised June 2019.) View Details

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Case | HBS Case Collection | February 2019

Halliday's OASIS

Scott Duke Kominers and Nicole Tempest Keller

Wade Watts has won control of the OASIS – a futuristic, immersive virtual reality game world. He must decide on rules, rights, and marketplace design, balancing the founding principles of the OASIS with the platform’s potentially negative externalities.

Keywords: managing markets; corporate responsibility; Virtual reality; social media; Technology Platform; Management; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; United States;

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke, and Nicole Tempest Keller. "Halliday's OASIS." Harvard Business School Case 819-106, February 2019. View Details

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Case | HBS Case Collection | February 2019 (Revised August 2019)

Maccabitech: The Promise of Israel's Healthcare Data

Scott Duke Kominers and Carin-Isabel Knoop

This case is set in mid-2019, when Qualcomm was struggling with unwanted takeover battles, fights with Apple and the Chinese government, and internal dissension on the board of directors. Ten years earlier Qualcomm was hailed as a monopoly on CDMA technologies and its derivatives—it appeared to be positioned to become the next dominant technology company in the tradition of Microsoft and Intel. But as the industry changed, Qualcomm’s competitive position seriously weakened. The purpose of the case is to explore central questions in strategy formulation: 1. how to build a long-term sustainable position based on technology, 2. how to design an IP strategy to lock in customers for the long run, 3. how to build a global standard and appropriate returns on that standard, and 4. how to respond when your historical business model starts to crumble.

Keywords: big data; healthcare; Data and Data Sets; Two-Sided Platforms; Health Care and Treatment; Innovation and Invention; Research; Entrepreneurship; Risk Management; Israel;

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke, and Carin-Isabel Knoop. "Maccabitech: The Promise of Israel's Healthcare Data." Harvard Business School Case 819-032, February 2019. (Revised August 2019.) View Details

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Teaching Note | HBS Case Collection | December 2018

Feeding America (A) and (B)

Scott Duke Kominers and Alan Lam

Teaching Note for HBS Nos. 818-130 and 818-131.

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke, and Alan Lam. "Feeding America (A) and (B)." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 819-092, December 2018. View Details

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Teaching Note | HBS Case Collection | January 2019

GoFundMe: The Giving Layer of the Internet

Scott Duke Kominers and Allison M. Ciechanover

Teaching Note for HBS No. 818-108.

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke, and Allison M. Ciechanover. "GoFundMe: The Giving Layer of the Internet." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 819-090, January 2019. View Details

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Case | HBS Case Collection | January 2019 (Revised May 2019)

When Trolls Attack: Carbonite vs. Oasis Research

Lauren H. Cohen, Umit G. Gurun, Scott Duke Kominers and Sarah Mehta

This case, set in October 2017, follows Danielle Sheer, general counsel for Carbonite, as she defends the company against claims of patent infringement. It provides a broad overview of the U.S. patent system and explores the impact that non-practicing entities (sometimes also called “patent trolls”) can have on companies.

Keywords: Patent Infringement Litigation; Non-practicing Entities; Patent trolls; Innovation and Invention; Intellectual Property; Patents; Laws and Statutes; Lawsuits and Litigation; Legal Liability; Computer Industry; Technology Industry; Boston;

Citation:
Cohen, Lauren H., Umit G. Gurun, Scott Duke Kominers, and Sarah Mehta. "When Trolls Attack: Carbonite vs. Oasis Research." Harvard Business School Case 219-001, January 2019. (Revised May 2019.) View Details

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Supplement | HBS Case Collection | June 2018

Feeding America (B)

Scott Duke Kominers and Alan Lam

Supplements the (A) case.

Keywords: Social Enterprise; Nonprofit Organizations; Food; Resource Allocation; Fairness; Performance Efficiency; United States;

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke, and Alan Lam. "Feeding America (B)." Harvard Business School Supplement 818-131, June 2018. View Details

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Case | HBS Case Collection | June 2018

Feeding America (A)

Scott Duke Kominers and Alan Lam

This case describes how Feeding America, the third-largest nonprofit organization in the U.S., designed a marketplace for allocating donated food across its network of food banks. It considers the promises and pitfalls of using market-based allocation in the context of a centralized artificial currency market and evaluates the importance of different design components in making the marketplace efficient and fair for all participants.

Keywords: Social Enterprise; Nonprofit Organizations; Food; Resource Allocation; Fairness; Performance Efficiency; United States;

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke, and Alan Lam. "Feeding America (A)." Harvard Business School Case 818-130, June 2018. View Details

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Case | HBS Case Collection | March 2018 (Revised July 2018)

Cadre

Thomas R. Eisenmann, Scott Duke Kominers and David Lane

Late in 2017, CEO Ryan Williams and his team debated whether Cadre should become not only a technology-enabled investment manager, but also an online trading exchange providing high levels of liquidity for investors in commercial real estate (CRE) equity. Cadre was a pioneering New York City–based startup, offering investors equity in individual CRE properties that its investment team had sourced and vetted. Traditional private equity (PE) funds required investors in CRE equity to accept an entire portfolio of properties, while imposing high fees and holding periods of up to 10 years. Cadre allowed investors both deal-by-deal selectivity and managed accounts of Cadre properties, at fee levels substantially lower than those charged by PE funds.

Keywords: ＂Cadre,＂; Entrepreneurship; Market Design; Market Platforms; Strategy; Online Technology; Private Equity; Financial Services Industry; Real Estate Industry; United States;

Citation:
Eisenmann, Thomas R., Scott Duke Kominers, and David Lane. "Cadre." Harvard Business School Case 818-058, March 2018. (Revised July 2018.) View Details

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Case | HBS Case Collection | March 2018 (Revised October 2019)

Yo-Yo Ma and Silkroad

Rohit Deshpandé, Paul A. Gompers and Scott Duke Kominers

Silkroad—a cross-cultural music collaboration that world-famous cellist Yo-Yo Ma had spearheaded since 1998, was preparing to celebrate its 20th anniversary. In parallel, Ma was stepping back from his role as the organization’s Artistic Director. Silkroad had come of age, gaining international recognition for its uniquely global music, which blended musical traditions from across the world—especially Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and America. The Ensemble had also forged strong partnerships with universities, local governments, and civic groups and developed an array of outreach programs to help people understand and express themselves through music. Ma was confident that there could be no better time to hand over leadership. But the transition was bittersweet: He felt a deep personal connection both to the Ensemble as a whole and to every one of its performers and staff members. And he wondered how reducing his involvement would affect the organization’s sustainability.

Keywords: Managing diverse teams; Leadership transitions; Global innovation; nonprofit organizations; music; Cultural Entrepreneurship; Nonprofit Organizations; Music Entertainment; Leadership; Transition;

Citation:
Deshpandé, Rohit, Paul A. Gompers, and Scott Duke Kominers. "Yo-Yo Ma and Silkroad." Harvard Business School Case 818-110, March 2018. (Revised October 2019.) View Details

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Case | HBS Case Collection | March 2018

GoFundMe: The Giving Layer of the Internet

Scott Duke Kominers and Allison M. Ciechanover

By 2017, GoFundMe is the world’s largest social fundraising platform. Gross donation volume is growing rapidly, yet the number of monthly campaign starts is relatively flat. The CEO contemplates a variety of growth initiatives.

Keywords: Growth and Development Strategy; Expansion; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; Technology Industry;

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke, and Allison M. Ciechanover. "GoFundMe: The Giving Layer of the Internet." Harvard Business School Case 818-108, March 2018. View Details

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Background Note | HBS Case Collection | February 2018

Patent Trolling

Lauren H. Cohen, Umit G. Gurun, Scott Duke Kominers and George Hou

The U.S. Intellectual Property (IP) Ecosystem is one of the most robust and dynamic in the world—and has been for centuries. The bedrock of this system is the "patent," a legal document that allows its holder exclusive commercialization rights of a part of the "idea space" granted through the patent. Strong legal protection of IP has made the U.S. a destination of great thinkers and innovators worldwide in order to enjoy this legal protection of their valuable insights. A new threat, however, looms. The same legal system that has protected IP has been used to create an organizational form known as a "Patent Troll." Patent Trolls amass patents for the sake of opportunistically extracting rents from firms producing and commercializing products. In this Industry Note, we describe the origin, evolution, costs, benefits, and future outlook for Patent Trolling in the United States.

Keywords: Intellectual Property; Patents; Lawsuits and Litigation; United States;

Citation:
Cohen, Lauren H., Umit G. Gurun, Scott Duke Kominers, and George Hou. "Patent Trolling." Harvard Business School Background Note 218-085, February 2018. View Details

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Technical Note | HBS Case Collection | January 2018 (Revised February 2018)

Making Markets

Thomas R. Eisenmann and Scott Duke Kominers

Explains how to identify and capitalize on marketplace design opportunities. Defines markets and marketplaces and describes the basic functions of each. Discusses attributes (e.g., heterogeneity of participants' preferences and asymmetry in available information) that determine whether and how marketplaces create value. Explains common causes of market failure and presents a framework for designing marketplaces in response. Discusses tactics for building trust and liquidity when launching new marketplaces as well as challenges encountered as marketplaces mature (e.g., congestion and disintermediation).

Keywords: marketplaces; Two-Sided Markets; Entrepreneurship; Market Design; Multi-Sided Platforms; Marketplace Matching; Market Participation; Market Transactions; Market Entry and Exit; Market Platforms; Auctions;

Citation:
Eisenmann, Thomas R., and Scott Duke Kominers. "Making Markets." Harvard Business School Technical Note 818-096, January 2018. (Revised February 2018.) View Details

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Case | HBS Case Collection | October 2017

Updating Dating

Thomas R. Eisenmann, Scott Duke Kominers and Alan Lam

To identify design ideas for their own startup, two MBAs compare the different profiling, matching, and monetization approaches employed by five incumbent dating services: Coffee Meets Bagel, OKCupid, Jiayuan, Dating Ring, and HurryDate.

Keywords: marketplace design; entrepreneurship; dating services; Entrepreneurship; Market Design; United States; China;

Citation:
Eisenmann, Thomas R., Scott Duke Kominers, and Alan Lam. "Updating Dating." Harvard Business School Case 818-052, October 2017. View Details

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Case | HBS Case Collection | February 2011 (Revised February 2012)

Online Marketing at Big Skinny

Benjamin Edelman and Scott Duke Kominers

Describes a wallet maker's application of seven Internet marketing technologies: display ads, algorithmic search, sponsored search, social media, interactive content, online distributors, and A/B testing. Provides concise introductions to the key features of each technology, and asks which forms of online marketing the company should prioritize in the future. Discusses similarities and differences between online and off-line marketing, as well as issues of marketing campaign evaluation.

Keywords: Advertising Campaigns; Online Advertising; Resource Allocation; Marketing Strategy; Performance Evaluation; Internet; Retail Industry;

Citation:
Edelman, Benjamin, and Scott Duke Kominers. "Online Marketing at Big Skinny." Harvard Business School Case 911-033, February 2011. (Revised February 2012.) (request a courtesy copy.) View Details

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Teaching Note | HBS Case Collection | February 2011 (Revised June 2014)

Online Marketing at Big Skinny

Benjamin Edelman and Scott Kominers

Teaching Note for 911033.

Keywords: Marketing; Online Advertising;

Citation:
Edelman, Benjamin, and Scott Kominers. "Online Marketing at Big Skinny." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 911-034, February 2011. (Revised June 2014.) View Details

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Letters

Other Article | Science News

Why I Volunteer at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair

Scott Duke Kominers

Citation:
Kominers, Scott Duke. "Why I Volunteer at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair." Science News (February 28, 2018). View Details

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Response | Science

Paying for Tissue: Net Benefits

Scott Kominers and Gary Becker

Citation:
Kominers, Scott, and Gary Becker. "Paying for Tissue: Net Benefits." Science 337, no. 6100 (September 14, 2012): 1292–1293. View Details

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Response | Chronicle of Higher Education

Professional-School Training Is Invaluable, Even for Scholars

Scott Kominers

Citation:
Kominers, Scott. "Professional-School Training Is Invaluable, Even for Scholars." Chronicle of Higher Education (February 14, 2012). View Details

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Other Article | Harvard Gazette

Sharing the Fun of Research

Scott Kominers

Citation:
Kominers, Scott. "Sharing the Fun of Research." Harvard Gazette (October 27, 2011). View Details

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Comments and Errata

Other Article | Journal of Economic Theory

Corrigendum to "Multilateral Matching"

Keisuke Bando, Toshiyuki Hirai, John William Hatfield and Scott Duke Kominers

We identify an error in the claim by Hatfield and Kominers (2015) that every stable outcome in the setting of multilateral matching with contracts is efficient. We then show that the result can be recovered under a suitable differentiability condition.

Keywords: matching; stability; Competitive equilibrium; Networks; Joint Ventures; Balance and Stability;

Citation:

Bando, Keisuke, Toshiyuki Hirai, John William Hatfield, and Scott Duke Kominers. Corrigendum to "Multilateral Matching". Art. 104933. Journal of Economic Theory 184 (November 2019). View Details

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