Publications
Publications
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- Faculty Publications (17)
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- 2023
- Working Paper
The Benefits of Revealing Race: Evidence from Minority-owned Local Businesses
By: Abhay Aneja, Michael Luca and Oren Reshef
Is there latent demand to support Black-owned businesses? To explore, we analyze a new feature
that made it easier to identify Black-owned restaurants on a large online platform. We find that
labeling restaurants as “Black-owned” increased customer engagement and...
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- December 2022
- Article
Competition, Contracts, and Creativity: Evidence from Novel Writing in a Platform Market
By: Yanhui Wu and Feng Zhu
A growing number of people today are participating in the gig economy, working as independent contractors on short-term projects. We study the effects of competition on gig workers' effort and creativity on a Chinese novel-writing platform. Authors produce and sell...
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- October 2022
- Case
Colette Phillips and GetKonnected!: Creating Inclusive Ecosystems
By: Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Amy Chiu and Joyce Kim
Colette Phillips’ marketing firm had just won the City of Boston’s 2nd largest contract in history to a Black-owned company. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Get Konnected!, the networking organization for people of color that she founded 15 years earlier and led to...
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Keywords:
Diversity;
Ecosystem;
Inclusion;
People Of Color;
Network;
Racial Bias;
Gender Bias;
Entrepreneurial Ecosystem;
Entrepreneur;
Change;
Change Barriers;
Change Leadership;
Community;
Innovation;
Pandemic;
Impact;
Systemic Racism;
Minority-owned Businesses;
Social and Collaborative Networks;
Equity;
Race;
Small Business;
Prejudice and Bias;
Boston
- 2023
- Working Paper
Scapegoating and Discrimination in Times of Crisis: Evidence from Airbnb
By: Michael Luca, Elizaveta Pronkina and Michelangelo Rossi
We present evidence that discrimination against Asian-American Airbnb users sharply increased at the
start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a DiD approach, we find that hosts with distinctively Asian
names experienced a 20 percent decline in guests relative to hosts...
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- October 2021
- Article
Can Self-Regulation Save Digital Platforms?
By: Michael A. Cusumano, Annabelle Gawer and David B. Yoffie
This article explores some of the critical challenges facing self-regulation and the regulatory environment for digital platforms. We examine several historical examples of firms and industries that attempted self-regulation before the Internet. All dealt with similar...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Invisible Primes: Fintech Lending with Alternative Data
By: Marco Di Maggio, Dimuthu Ratnadiwakara and Don Carmichael
We exploit anonymized administrative data provided by a major fintech platform to investigate whether using alternative data to assess borrowers’ creditworthiness results in broader credit access. Comparing actual outcomes of the fintech platform’s model to...
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- July 2021 (Revised October 2021)
- Case
Trouble at Basecamp: Managing Politics, Polarization, and Conflict in the Workplace (A)
By: Nour Kteily, Deepak Malhotra and David Lane
As founders of the software company Basecamp, Jason Fried and David H. Hansson were used to being the subjects of social media attention. Both maintained active and dedicated Twitter followings for their unique perspectives on management and life. But on April 26,...
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Keywords:
Change;
Communication;
Policy;
Diversity;
Fairness;
Values and Beliefs;
Governance;
Employees;
Working Conditions;
Leading Change;
Leadership Style;
Mission and Purpose;
Organizational Culture;
Work-Life Balance;
Labor and Management Relations;
Conflict and Resolution;
Identity;
Social Issues;
Equality and Inequality;
Digital Platforms;
Conflict Management;
Information Technology Industry;
United States
- March 2021 (Revised September 2021)
- Case
Applied: Using Behavioral Science to Debias Hiring
By: Ashley Whillans and Jeff Polzer
The UK government’s Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) needed to hire a new associate and were trying to increase the diversity of their job candidates. This decision was based on academic research showing that recruiters and managers often fell into common traps like...
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- November–December 2021
- Article
Does Gender Matter? The Effect of Management Responses on Reviewing Behavior
By: Davide Proserpio, Isamar Troncoso and Francesca Valsesia
We study the effect of management responses on the reviewing behavior of self-identified female and male reviewers. Using data from Tripadvisor, we show that after hotels begin to respond to reviews, the probability that a negative review comes from a self-identified...
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- March 2020 (Revised August 2022)
- Case
Racial Discrimination on Airbnb (A)
By: Michael Luca, Scott Stern, Devin Cook and Hyunjin Kim
Facing mounting criticism and evidence of widespread racial discrimination on the platform, apartment rental platform Airbnb needed to decide a path forward. For years, Airbnb had given hosts extensive discretion about whether to reject a guest after seeing little more...
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- March 2019
- Case
Wattpad
By: John Deighton and Leora Kornfeld
How to run a platform to match four million writers of stories to 75 million readers? Use data science. Make money by doing deals with television and filmmakers and book publishers. The case describes the challenges of matching readers to stories and of helping writers...
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Keywords:
Platform Businesses;
Creative Industries;
Publishing;
Data Science;
Machine Learning;
Collaborative Filtering;
Women And Leadership;
Managing Data Scientists;
Big Data;
Recommender Systems;
Digital Platforms;
Information Technology;
Intellectual Property;
Analytics and Data Science;
Publishing Industry;
Entertainment and Recreation Industry;
Canada;
United States;
Philippines;
Viet Nam;
Turkey;
Indonesia;
Brazil
- July 2017 (Revised December 2018)
- Case
Populism in America: Fake News, Alternative Facts and Elite Betrayal in the Trump Era
By: Rafael Di Tella and Sarah McAra
During the 2016 U.S. election, long-time politician Hillary Clinton, a Democrat, and celebrity billionaire Donald Trump, a Republican, faced off in a contentious race for president. In the primaries, candidates from both major political parties used anti-establishment...
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- November, 2016
- Article
Fixing Discrimination in Online Marketplaces
By: Ray Fisman and Michael Luca
Online marketplaces such as eBay, Uber, and Airbnb have the potential to reduce racial, gender, and other forms of bias that affect the off-line world. And in the early days of Internet commerce, the relative anonymity of transactions did make it harder for...
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- 2014
- Working Paper
Digital Discrimination: The Case of Airbnb.com
By: Benjamin Edelman and Michael Luca
Online marketplaces often contain information not only about products, but also about the people selling the products. In an effort to facilitate trust, many platforms encourage sellers to provide personal profiles and even to post pictures of themselves. However,...
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- Forthcoming
- Article
Look the Part? The Role of Profile Pictures in Online Labor Markets
By: Isamar Troncoso and Lan Luo
Profile pictures are a key component of many freelancing platforms, a design choice that can impact hiring and matching outcomes. In this paper, we examine how appearance-based perceptions of a freelancer’s fit for the job (i.e., whether a freelancer "looks the part"...
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- Forthcoming
- Article
Sampling Bias in Entrepreneurial Experiments
By: Ruiqing Cao, Rembrand Koning and Ramana Nanda
Using data from a prominent online platform for launching new digital products, we document that ‘sampling bias’—defined as the difference between a startup’s target customer base and the actual sample on which early ‘beta tests’ are conducted—has a systematic and...
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- Research Summary
The Economics of Digitization
What is the value of digital platforms that build on user-generated content? How well do existing frameworks explain the value of these businesses? While drawing on prior work, this research stream examines new issues in parts of the economy that previously were... View Details