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Publications
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- Faculty Publications (14)
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- October 2024
- Article
Canary Categories
By: Eric Anderson, Chaoqun Chen, Ayelet Israeli and Duncan Simester
Past customer spending in a category is generally a positive signal of future customer spending. We show that there exist “canary categories” for which the reverse is true. Purchases in these categories are a signal that customers are less likely to return to that...
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- 2024
- Working Paper
Behavioral Attenuation
By: Thomas Graeber, Benjamin Enke, Ryan Oprea and Jeffrey Yang
We report a large-scale examination of behavioral attenuation: due to information-processing constraints, the elasticity of people’s decisions with respect to economic fundamentals is generally too small. We implement more than 30 experiments, 20 of which were...
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- March 2024
- Case
Hippo: Weathering the Storm of the Home Insurance Crisis
By: Lauren Cohen, Grace Headinger and Sophia Pan
Rick McCathron, CEO of Hippo, considered how the firm’s underwriting model could account for the effects of climate change. Along with providing smart home packages, targeting risk-friendly customers, and using data-driven pricing, the Insurtech used technologically...
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Keywords:
Fintech;
Underwriters;
Big Data;
Insurance Companies;
Business Model Design;
Weather Insurance;
Business Model;
Forecasting and Prediction;
Climate Change;
Environmental Sustainability;
Green Technology;
Technological Innovation;
Natural Environment;
Natural Disasters;
Weather;
Business Strategy;
Competitive Advantage;
Business Earnings;
Insurance;
Social Issues;
Insurance Industry;
United States;
California
- 2023
- Working Paper
The Optimal Stock Valuation Ratio
By: Sebastian Hillenbrand and Odhrain McCarthy
Trailing price ratios, such as the price-dividend and the price-earnings ratio, scale prices by trailing cash flow measures. They theoretically contain expected returns, yet, their performance in predicting stock market returns is poor. This is because of an omitted...
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- March 2022
- Article
Where to Locate COVID-19 Mass Vaccination Facilities?
By: Dimitris Bertsimas, Vassilis Digalakis Jr, Alexander Jacquillat, Michael Lingzhi Li and Alessandro Previero
The outbreak of COVID-19 led to a record-breaking race to develop a vaccine. However, the limited vaccine capacity creates another massive challenge: how to distribute vaccines to mitigate the near-end impact of the pandemic? In the United States in particular, the new...
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- June 2021
- Article
From Predictions to Prescriptions: A Data-driven Response to COVID-19
By: Dimitris Bertsimas, Léonard Boussioux, Ryan Cory-Wright, Arthur Delarue, Vassilis Digalakis Jr, Alexander Jacquillat, Driss Lahlou Kitane, Galit Lukin, Michael Lingzhi Li, Luca Mingardi, Omid Nohadani, Agni Orfanoudaki, Theodore Papalexopoulos, Ivan Paskov, Jean Pauphilet, Omar Skali Lami, Bartolomeo Stellato, Hamza Tazi Bouardi, Kimberly Villalobos Carballo, Holly Wiberg and Cynthia Zeng
The COVID-19 pandemic has created unprecedented challenges worldwide. Strained healthcare providers make difficult decisions on patient triage, treatment and care management on a daily basis. Policy makers have imposed social distancing measures to slow the disease, at...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Government Shareholdings in Brokerage Firms and Analyst Research Quality
By: Sheng Cao, Xianjie He, Charles C.Y. Wang and Huifang Yin
During times when the Chinese government wished to prop up the market, sell-side analysts from brokerages with significant government ownership issued relatively less pessimistic (or more optimistic) earnings forecasts, earnings-forecast revisions, and stock...
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- March 2017 (Revised March 2022)
- Case
Flashion: Art vs. Science in Fashion Retailing
By: Kris Ferreira and Karim R. Lakhani
Kate Wilson, retail analytics manager at Flashion, a fashion flash-sale site, is tasked with developing analytics to optimize pricing for first-exposure products on the site. Many in the industry have relied on years of experience and intuition to determine pricing—can...
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- Winter 2016
- Article
Analytics for an Online Retailer: Demand Forecasting and Price Optimization
By: Kris J. Ferreira, Bin Hong Alex Lee and David Simchi-Levi
We present our work with an online retailer, Rue La La, as an example of how a retailer can use its wealth of data to optimize pricing decisions on a daily basis. Rue La La is in the online fashion sample sales industry, where they offer extremely limited-time...
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- October 2013
- Article
How Much to Make and How Much to Buy? An Analysis of Optimal Plural Sourcing Strategies
By: Phanish Puranam, Ranjay Gulati and Sourav Bhattacharya
While many theories of the firm seek to explain when firms make rather than buy, in practice, firms often make and buy the same input—they engage in plural sourcing. We argue that explaining the mix of external procurement and internal sourcing for the same input...
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- 2012
- Working Paper
~Why Do We Redistribute so Much but Tag so Little? Normative Diversity, Equal Sacrifice and Optimal Taxation
Tagging is a free lunch in conventional optimal tax theory because it eases the classic tradeoff between efficiency and equality. But tagging is used in only limited ways in tax policy. I propose one explanation: conventional optimal tax theory has yet to capture the...
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- April 2010
- Case
Metabical: Pricing, Packaging, and Demand Forecasting Recommendations for a New Weight Loss Drug
By: John A. Quelch and Heather Beckham
Metabical is a new weight loss drug from Cambridge Sciences Pharmaceuticals intended for moderately overweight individuals. In anticipation of final FDA approval, the senior director of marketing, Barbara Printup, prepares for the product launch and must make several...
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- 01 Jan 1977
- Conference Presentation
Short Term Natural Gas Consumption Forecasts: Optimal Use of National Weather Service Data
By: James K. Sebenius and Richard Lehman
- Teaching Interest
Executive Education: Finance for Senior Executives
By: Malcolm P. Baker
Finance for Senior Executives provides the frameworks to strategically use financial resources and position your company for future success. By examining corporate finance from both internal and external perspectives, this HBS Executive Education