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  • 2021
  • Article

Prisoners, Rooms, and Lightswitches
By: Daniel M. Kane and Scott Duke Kominers
We examine a new variant of the classic prisoners and lightswitches puzzle: A warden leads his n prisoners in and out of r rooms, one at a time, in some order, with each prisoner eventually visiting every room an arbitrarily large number of times. The...  View Details
Keywords: Mathematical Methods
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  • 2020
  • Working Paper

The Political Effects of Immigration: Culture or Economics?
By: Alberto Alesina and Marco Tabellini
We review the growing literature on the political effects of immigration. After a brief summary of the economics of immigration, we turn to the main focus of the paper: how immigrants influence electoral outcomes in receiving countries, and why. We start from the...  View Details
Keywords: Political Backlash; Cultural Beliefs; Immigration; Political Elections; Outcome or Result
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  • 2020
  • Working Paper

Rate-Amplifying Investor Demand and the Excess Sensitivity of Long-Term Interest Rates
By: Samuel G. Hanson, David O. Lucca and Jonathan H. Wright
Long-term nominal interest rates are known to be highly sensitive to high-frequency (daily or monthly) movements in short-term rates. We find that, since 2000, this high-frequency sensitivity has grown even stronger in U.S. data. By contrast, the association between...  View Details
Keywords: Conundrum; Monetary Policy Transmission; Interest Rates
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  • November 2020
  • Case

Axis My India
By: Ananth Raman, Ann Winslow and Kairavi Dey
Pradeep Gupta founded Axis My India (AMI) as a printing and publishing company in 1998. In 2013, AMI expanded into consumer research and election forecasting. Although a relatively unknown entity, AMI predicted several election results accurately. Gupta describes AMI’s...  View Details
Keywords: Market Research; Operations; Management; Infrastructure; Logistics; Service Operations; Political Elections; Forecasting and Prediction; Asia; India
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  • 2020
  • Working Paper

Collusion in Brokered Markets
By: 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...  View Details
Keywords: Real Estate; ＂repeated Games＂; Collusion; Antitrust; Brokered Markets; Game Theory; Real Estate Industry
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  • 2019
  • Working Paper

The Impact of Professionals' Contributions to Online Knowledge Communities on Their Workplace Knowledge Work
By: Hila Lifshitz - Assaf and Frank Nagle
Knowledge work is becoming increasingly challenging as pace of change in the knowledge frontier is increasing. Organizations have created multiple mechanisms to minimize knowledge gaps and increase learning such internal training, mentorship programs as well as...  View Details
Keywords: Open Source; Future Of Work; Software Development; Knowledge Work; Online Community; Learning; Knowledge Sharing; Software; Open Source Distribution; Performance Productivity
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  • 2019
  • Working Paper

Connecting the Dots: Superordinate Framing Enhances the Value of Unimportant Tasks
By: Jaewon Yoon, A.V. Whillans and Ed O'Brien
Each day, people begrudgingly complete mundane tasks. Four experiments (N = 3,502; two pre-registered) reveal that a simple intervention—superordinate framing—can enhance people’s task experiences. In two initial experiments, working adults were asked to describe...  View Details
Keywords: Superordinate Framing; Employees; Motivation and Incentives; Goals and Objectives; Mission and Purpose; Perspective
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  • January 2019
  • Case

LKQ-Stahlgruber
By: Guhan Subramanian and Caeden Brynie
Through a combination of organic growth and acquisitions, LKQ Corp. became the leading aftermarket auto parts distributor in the U.S. by the early 2000s. Beginning in 2012, the company began similarly consolidating the European marketplace. However, by 2017, the...  View Details
Keywords: Consolidation; Acquisition; Decision Making; Strategy; Opportunities; Europe; Germany
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  • December 2018
  • Article

Reserve Design: Unintended Consequences and the Demise of Boston's Walk Zones
By: 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...  View Details
Keywords: Neighborhoods; Equal Access; School Choice; Affirmative Action; Desegregation; Marketplace Matching; Fairness; Local Range; Education; Policy
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  • 2018
  • Book

The Gift of Global Talent: How Migration Shapes Business, Economy & Society
By: William R. Kerr
The global race for talent is on, with countries and businesses competing for the best and brightest. Foreign talent has transformed U.S. science and engineering, reshaped the economy, and influenced society at large. But America is bogged down in thorny debates on...  View Details
Keywords: Immigration; Policy; Labor; Economy; Talent and Talent Management; United States
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  • March 2018
  • Article

Making the Numbers? 'Short Termism' and the Puzzle of Only Occasional Disaster
By: Hazhir Rahmandad, Rebecca Henderson and Nelson P. Repenning
Much recent work in strategy and popular discussion suggests that an excessive focus on "managing the numbers"—delivering quarterly earnings at the expense of longer-term investments—makes it difficult for firms to make the investments necessary to build competitive...  View Details
Keywords: Capability; Short-termism; System Dynamics; Tipping Point; Business or Company Management; Earnings Management; Resource Allocation
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  • May 2017
  • Teaching Plan

Neurotrack and the Alzheimer's Puzzle
By: Richard G. Hamermesh and Carin-Isabel Knoop
Teaching Note for HBS No. 816-072.  View Details
Keywords: Health Care; Alzheimer's Disease; Career Path; Life Science Business
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  • 2017
  • Working Paper

Equality and Equity in Compensation
By: Jiayi Bao and Andy Wu
Equity compensation is widely used for incentivizing skilled employees, particularly in new technology businesses. Traditional theories explaining why firms offer equity suggest that workers with higher rank should receive compensation packages more heavily weighted in...  View Details
Keywords: Inequality Aversion; Compensation; Stock Options; Scarcity; Experiment; Compensation and Benefits; Equity; Equality and Inequality; Perception
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  • August 2, 2016
  • Article

Uncalculating Cooperation Is Used to Signal Trustworthiness
By: Jillian J. Jordan, Moshe Hoffman, Martin A. Nowak and David G. Rand
Humans frequently cooperate without carefully weighing the costs and benefits. As a result, people may wind up cooperating when it is not worthwhile to do so. Why risk making costly mistakes? Here, we present experimental evidence that reputation concerns provide an...  View Details
Keywords: Social Evaluation; Experimental Economics; Moral Psychology; Cooperation; Reputation; Decision Making
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  • February 2016 (Revised September 2017)
  • Case

Neurotrack and the Alzheimer's Puzzle
By: Richard G. Hamermesh, Liz Kind and Carin-Isabel Knoop
Elli Kaplan founded Neurotrack in 2012 with a breakthrough noninvasive cognitive diagnostics test that will detect Alzheimer's disease in its earliest pre-symptomatic stages. While the company has gained great traction in the three years since it was started, with no...  View Details
Keywords: Alzheimer's Disease; Diagnostics; Healthcare; Entrepreneurship; Health Disorders; Science-Based Business; Business Model; Medical Devices and Supplies Industry; United States
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  • December 2015
  • Article

Introduction: New Perspectives on Corporate Capital Structure
By: Viral Acharya, Heitor Almeida and Malcolm Baker
The National Bureau of Economic Research held a symposium titled "New Perspectives on Corporate Capital Structures" on April 5–6, 2013 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In its call for the submission of theoretical and empirical papers for the symposium, the NBER noted that...  View Details
Keywords: Capital Structure; Economic Growth; Financial Crisis; Corporate Finance
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  • Article

Financing Innovation
By: William R. Kerr and Ramana Nanda
We review the recent literature on the financing of innovation, inclusive of large companies and new startups. This research strand has been very active over the past five years, generating important new findings, questioning some long-held beliefs, and creating its...  View Details
Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Borrowing and Debt; Innovation and Invention
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  • Article

Visualizing and Measuring Software Portfolio Architecture: A Power Utility Case
By: Robert Lagerström, Carliss Y. Baldwin and Alan MacCormack
In this paper, we test a Design Structure Matrix (DSM) based method for visualizing and measuring software portfolio architectures. Our data is drawn from a power utility company, comprising 192 software applications with 614 dependencies between them. We show that the...  View Details
Keywords: Software; Infrastructure; Utilities Industry
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  • March 2015
  • Article

Signaling to Partially Informed Investors in the Newsvendor Model
By: William Schmidt, Vishal Gaur, Richard Lai and Ananth Raman
We investigate a puzzling phenomenon in which firms make investment decisions that purposefully do not maximize expected profits. Using an extension to the newsvendor model, we focus on a relatively common scenario in which the firm's investor has imperfect information...  View Details
Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Investment
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  • 2014
  • Working Paper

Making the Numbers? 'Short Termism' & the Puzzle of Only Occasional Disaster
By: Hazhir Rahmandad, Nelson P. Repenning and Rebecca Henderson
Much recent work in strategy and popular discussion suggests that an excessive focus on "managing the numbers"―delivering quarterly earnings at the expense of longer term investments―makes it difficult for firms to make the investments necessary to build competitive...  View Details
Keywords: Earnings Management; Competitive Advantage
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