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Publications
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- Faculty Publications (17)
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- 2021
- Article
Designing, Not Checking, for Policy Robustness: An Example with Optimal Taxation
By: Benjamin B. Lockwood, Afras Sial and Matthew C. Weinzierl
Economists typically check the robustness of their results by comparing them across plausible ranges of parameter values and model structures. A preferable approach to robustness—for the purposes of policymaking and evaluation—is to design policy that takes these...
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- January 2021
- Article
Turbulence, Firm Decentralization and Growth in Bad Times
By: Philippe Aghion, Nicholas Bloom, Brian Lucking, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen
What is the optimal form of firm organization during “bad times”? We present a model of delegation within the firm to show that the effect is ambiguous. The greater turbulence following macro shocks may benefit decentralized firms because the value of local information...
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- Article
Robust and Stable Black Box Explanations
By: Himabindu Lakkaraju, Nino Arsov and Osbert Bastani
As machine learning black boxes are increasingly being deployed in real-world applications, there
has been a growing interest in developing post hoc explanations that summarize the behaviors
of these black boxes. However, existing algorithms for generating such...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Designing, Not Checking, for Policy Robustness: An Example with Optimal Taxation
By: Benjami Lockwood, Afras Y. Sial and Matthew C. Weinzierl
Economists typically check the robustness of their results by comparing them across plausible ranges of parameter values and model structures. A preferable approach to robustness—for the purposes of policymaking and evaluation—is to design policy that takes these...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Design and Analysis of Switchback Experiments
By: Iavor I Bojinov, David Simchi-Levi and Jinglong Zhao
In switchback experiments, a firm sequentially exposes an experimental unit to a random treatment, measures its response, and repeats the procedure for several periods to determine which treatment leads to the best outcome. Although practitioners have widely adopted...
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- November 2018 (Revised May 2019)
- Case
California Closets: Organizing the Customer Experience
By: Boris Groysberg and Annelena Lobb
California Closets had used robust net promoter score (NPS) data, surveyed across its locations, to create a more consistent and satisfying customer experience. CEO Bill Barton wanted to further optimize the customer experience around best practices. He also wanted to...
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- 2018
- Working Paper
Opportunistic Returns and Dynamic Pricing: Empirical Evidence from Online Retailing in Emerging Markets
By: Chaithanya Bandi, Antonio Moreno, Donald Ngwe and Zhiji Xu
We investigate how dynamic pricing can lead to more product returns in the online retail industry. Using detailed sales data of more than two million transactions from the Indian online retail market, where price promotions are very common, we document two types of...
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- Article
Popular Acceptance of Inequality Due to Innate Brute Luck and Support for Classical Benefit-based Taxation
U.S. survey respondents' views on distributive justice differ in two specific, related ways from what is conventionally assumed in modern optimal tax research. When expressing their preferences over allocations in stylized, hypothetical scenarios meant to isolate key...
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- May 2017
- Article
Experimental Evidence of Pooling Outcomes Under Information Asymmetry
By: William Schmidt and Ryan W. Buell
Operational decisions under information asymmetry can signal a firm's prospects to less-informed parties, such as investors, customers, competitors, and regulators. Consequently, managers in these settings often face a tradeoff between making an optimal decision and...
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- October 2011
- Article
The Surprising Power of Age-Dependent Taxes
This article provides a new, empirically driven application of the dynamic Mirrleesian framework by studying a feasible and potentially powerful tax reform: age-dependent labor income taxation. I show analytically how age dependence improves policy on both the...
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- February 2009
- Article
Optimal Reserve Management and Sovereign Debt
By: Laura Alfaro and Fabio Kanczuk
Most models currently used to determine optimal foreign reserve holdings take the level of international debt as given. However, given the sovereign's willingness-to-pay incentive problems, reserve accumulation may reduce sustainable debt levels. In addition, assuming...
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- November 2007
- Background Note
Bayesian Estimation & Black-Litterman
By: Joshua D. Coval and Erik Stafford
Describes a practical method for asset allocation that is more robust to estimation errors than the traditional implementation of mean-variance optimization with sample means and covariances. The Bayesian inspired Black-Litterman model is described after introducing...
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- 2007
- Working Paper
Optimal Reserve Management and Sovereign Debt
By: Laura Alfaro and Fabio Kanczuk
Most models currently used to determine optimal foreign reserve holdings take the level of international debt as given. However, given the sovereign's willingness-to-pay incentive problems, reserve accumulation may reduce sustainable debt levels. In addition, assuming...
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- Forthcoming
- Article
Design and Analysis of Switchback Experiments
By: Iavor I Bojinov, David Simchi-Levi and Jinglong Zhao
In switchback experiments, a firm sequentially exposes an experimental unit to a random treatment, measures its response, and repeats the procedure for several periods to determine which treatment leads to the best outcome. Although practitioners have widely adopted...
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- Research Summary
Optimal Reserve Management and Sovereign Debt (with Fabio Kanczuk)
By: Laura Alfaro
Most models currently used to determine optimal foreign reserve holdings take the level of international debt as given. Some of the implications of this analysis, however, may not be generalized once one considers the joint decision to hold debt and reserves by a...
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- Forthcoming
- Article
Probabilistically Robust Recourse: Navigating the Trade-offs between Costs and Robustness in Algorithmic Recourse
By: Martin Pawelczyk, Teresa Datta, Johannes van-den-Heuvel, Gjergji Kasneci and Himabindu Lakkaraju
As machine learning models are increasingly being employed to make consequential decisions in real-world settings, it becomes critical to ensure that individuals who are adversely impacted (e.g., loan denied) by the predictions of these models are provided with a means...
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- Research Summary
Strength of Incentives
By: Jerry R. Green
When economists analyze the incentive properties of decision making systems they assume that all economic agents are capable of optimizing their decisions and that they respond without error to the incentives that the system creates. In this project, Jerry R. Green...
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