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- 2022
- Working Paper
Come Together: Firm Boundaries and Delegation
By: Raffaella Sadun, Laura Alfaro, Nicholas Bloom, Paola Conconi, Harald Fadinger, Patrick Legros, Andy Newman and John Van Reenen
We develop an incomplete-contracts model to jointly study firm boundaries and the allocation of decision rights within them. Integration has an option value: it gives firm owners authority to delegate or centralize decision rights, depending on who can best solve...
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- Other Article
Sustainable Strategies and Net-Zero Goals
By: Mark L. Frigo, Robert S. Kaplan and Karthik Ramanna
In a recent Harvard Business Review article, Kaplan and Ramanna describe a rigorous approach, the E-liability method, for companies’ ESG reporting, especially as it pertains to GHG emissions measurements. They argue that the current standards for measuring...
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- Article
Eliminating Unintended Bias in Personalized Policies Using Bias-Eliminating Adapted Trees (BEAT)
By: Eva Ascarza and Ayelet Israeli
An inherent risk of algorithmic personalization is disproportionate targeting of individuals from certain groups (or demographic characteristics such as gender or race), even when the decision maker does not intend to discriminate based on those “protected”... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
Do Safety Management System Standards Indicate Safer Operations? Evidence from the OHSAS 18001 Occupational Health and Safety Standard
By: Kala Viswanathan, Matthew S. Johnson and Michael W. Toffel
Problem definition: In light of the enormous disruptions and costs associated with occupational injuries, companies and buyers are increasingly looking to voluntary occupational health and safety standards to improve worker safety. Yet because these standards require...
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- December 1, 2021
- Article
Do You Know How Your Teams Get Work Done?
By: Rohan Narayana Murty, Rajath B. Das, Scott Duke Kominers, Arjun Narayan, Suraj Srinivasan, Tarun Khanna and Kartik Hosanagar
In a research study at four Fortune 500 companies, when managers were asked about their teams’ work, on average they either did not know or could not remember 60% of the work their teams do. This is a major problem because it can lead to unrealistic digital...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Multiple Team Membership, Turnover, and On-Time Delivery: Evidence from Construction Services
By: Hise O. Gibson, Bradely R. Staats and Ananth Raman
Firms who want to compete in dynamic markets are finding that they must build more agile operations to ensure success. One way for a firm to increase organizational agility is to allocate employees to multiple project teams, simultaneously—a practice known as multiple...
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- February 2021
- Article
A Dynamic Theory of Multiple Borrowing
By: Daniel Green and Ernest Liu
Multiple borrowing—a borrower obtains overlapping loans from multiple lenders—is a common phenomenon in many credit markets. We build a highly tractable, dynamic model of multiple borrowing and show that, because overlapping creditors may impose default externalities...
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- January 2021 (Revised March 2021)
- Case
Jumia's Path to Profitability
By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell, Pippa Tubman Armerding and Gamze Yucaoglu
The case opens in September 2019 as Sacha Poignonnec and Jeremy Hodara, co-founders and co-CEOs of Jumia, the leading Pan-African e-commerce platform, are contemplating the company’s path to profitability in the aftermath of a fragile investor sentiment, as the company...
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Keywords:
Retail;
Business Models;
Business Model;
Business Startups;
Emerging Markets;
For-Profit Firms;
Strategy;
Digital Platforms;
Information Technology;
Technology Adoption;
Value Creation;
Globalization;
Entrepreneurship;
Competition;
Expansion;
Logistics;
Profit;
Resource Allocation;
Diversification;
Corporate Strategy;
Retail Industry;
Technology Industry;
Africa
- 2020
- Working Paper
Come Together: Firm Boundaries and Delegation
By: Laura Alfaro
We develop an incomplete-contracts model to jointly study firm boundaries and the allocation of decision rights within them. Integration has an option value: it gives firm owners authority to delegate or centralize decision rights, depending on who can best solve...
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- Oct 2020
- Conference Presentation
Optimal, Truthful, and Private Securities Lending
By: Emily Diana, Michael J. Kearns, Seth Neel and Aaron Leon Roth
We consider a fundamental dynamic allocation problem motivated by the problem of securities lending in financial markets, the mechanism underlying the short selling of stocks. A lender would like to distribute a finite number of identical copies of some scarce resource...
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- August 2020
- Article
Trust in State and Non-State Actors: Evidence from Dispute Resolution in Pakistan
By: Daron Acemoglu, Ali Cheema, Asim I. Khwaja and James A. Robinson
Lack of trust in state institutions is a pervasive problem in many developing countries. This paper investigates whether information about improved public services can help build trust in state institutions and move people away from non-state actors. We find that...
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- August 2019 (Revised April 2021)
- Case
Unifying Divisions: Joro's Mission to Preserve the Planet
By: Shikhar Ghosh and Marilyn Morgan Westner
The case focuses on the initial startup team and Founders’ agreements. In March 2018, Sanchali Pal proposed renegotiating the informal founders’ agreement and equity split she and her co-founders had drafted the previous spring. They had been working together for over...
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- 2019
- Article
Fair Algorithms for Learning in Allocation Problems
By: Hadi Elzayn, Shahin Jabbari, Christopher Jung, Michael J Kearns, Seth Neel, Aaron Leon Roth and Zachary Schutzman
Settings such as lending and policing can be modeled by a centralized agent allocating a scarce resource (e.g. loans or police officers) amongst several groups, in order to maximize some objective (e.g. loans given that are repaid, or criminals that are apprehended)....
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- April 2018
- Case
Hawk Electronics, Inc.
By: Richard G. Hamermesh and John J. Lafkas
Hawk Electronics ("Hawk") presents the problems that a company can encounter when its divisions have distinct strategies, especially when one division has been favored at another's expense. It also highlights how such problems can reflect cognitive biases, which...
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- Article
Orienteering for Electioneering
By: 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...
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- 2017
- Article
Frictions or Mental Gaps: What's Behind the Information We (Don't) Use and When Do We Care?
By: Benjamin Handel and Joshua Schwartzstein
Consumers suffer significant losses from not acting on available information. These losses stem from frictions such as search costs, switching costs, and rational inattention, as well as what we call mental gaps resulting from wrong priors/worldviews, or relevant...
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- Article
TDABC Cost Analysis of Ocular Disorders in an Ophthalmology Emergency Department versus Urgent Care: Clinical Experience at Massachusetts Eye and Ear
By: Robert S. Kaplan, Jonathan Chou, Mahek Shah, Amy Watts, Matthew Gardiner, Joan Miller and John I. Lowenstein
Purpose
To perform a cost analysis comparison for managing common ocular disorders in an eye emergency department (ED) versus an urgent care setting using a time-driven activity-based cost model (TDABC) to assist physicians and staff in appropriate allocation of...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Come Together: Firm Boundaries and Delegation
By: Laura Alfaro, Nick Bloom, Paola Conconi, Harald Fadinger, Patrick Legros, Andrew F. Newman, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen
We develop an incomplete-contracts model to jointly study firm boundaries and the allocation of decision rights within them. Integration has an option value: it gives firm owners authority to delegate or centralize decision rights, depending on who can best solve...
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- September 2016
- Article
Do Display Ads Influence Search?: Attribution and Dynamics in Online Advertising
By: Pavel Kireyev, Koen Pauwels and Sunil Gupta
As firms increasingly rely on online media to acquire consumers, marketing managers feel comfortable justifying higher online marketing spending by referring to online metrics such as click-through rate (CTR) and cost per acquisition (CPA). However, these standard...
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- February 2016 (Revised March 2017)
- Case
Regulating Radio in the Age of Broadcasting
By: David Moss, Marc Campasano and Colin Donovan
When the Titanic tragically sank on April 15, 1912, potentially life-saving help was delayed as a result of failures in radio communication. In part as a result, Congress moved swiftly to regulate radio, passing the Radio Act of 1912 four months later. Although at...
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