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  • 2021
  • Working Paper

Investment Committee Voting and the Financing of Innovation
By: Andrey Malenko, Ramana Nanda, Matthew Rhodes-Kropf and Savitar Sundaresan
We provide novel evidence on voting practices used by the investment committees of prominent venture capital investors in the U.S. A substantial share of these VCs use a voting rule for seed and early stage investments where a single `champion' is sufficient for the...  View Details
Keywords: Optimal Voting Rules; Innovation and Invention; Venture Capital; Investment; Decision Making; Voting
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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...  View Details
Keywords: Optimal Taxation; Income Tax; Social Welfare; Elasticity; Income; Taxation; Policy
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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...  View Details
Keywords: Decentralization; Growth; Turbulence; Great Recession; Organizational Design; System Shocks; Economic Growth; Performance
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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...  View Details
Keywords: Machine Learning; Black Box Models; Framework
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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...  View Details
Keywords: Optimal Taxation; Robust Optimization; Taxation; Income; Policy; Design
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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...  View Details
Keywords: Switchback Experiments; Design; Analysis; Mathematical Methods
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  • November 2019
  • Article

How Do Sales Efforts Pay Off? Dynamic Panel Data Analysis in the Nerlove-Arrow Framework
By: Doug J. Chung, Byungyeon Kim and Byoung G. Park
This paper evaluates the short- and long-term value of sales representatives’ detailing visits to different types of physicians. By understanding the dynamic effect of sales calls across heterogeneous physicians, we provide guidance on the design of optimal call...  View Details
Keywords: Nerlove-Arrow Framework; Stock-of-goodwill; Dynamic Panel Data; Serial Correlation; Instrumental Variables; Sales Effectiveness; Detailing; Data and Data Sets; Sales; Analysis; Performance Effectiveness; Pharmaceutical Industry
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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...  View Details
Keywords: Net Promoter Score; Customer Relationship Management; Customer Satisfaction; Customers; Acquisition; Demographics; Strategy
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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...  View Details
Keywords: Cash On Delivery; Dynamic Pricing; Online Retail; Payment Methods; Strategic Customer Behavior; Opportunistic Returns; Price; Policy; Consumer Behavior; Emerging Markets; Retail Industry
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  • Article

Popular Acceptance of Inequality Due to Innate Brute Luck and Support for Classical Benefit-based Taxation
By: Matthew C. Weinzierl
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...  View Details
Keywords: Optimal Taxation; Welfarism; Luck; Benefit-based Taxation; Taxation; Equality and Inequality; Attitudes
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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...  View Details
Keywords: Behavioral Decision Research; Information Asymmetry; Signaling; Decision Choices and Conditions; Alignment
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  • November–December 2015
  • Article

Active Postmarketing Drug Surveillance for Multiple Adverse Events
By: Joel Goh, Margrét V. Bjarnadóttir, Mohsen Bayati and Stefanos A. Zenios
Postmarketing drug surveillance is the process of monitoring the adverse events of pharmaceutical or medical devices after they are approved by the appropriate regulatory authorities. Historically, such surveillance was based on voluntary reports by medical...  View Details
Keywords: Drug Surveillance; Health Care; Stochastic Models; Queueing; Diffusion Approximation; Brownian Motion; Health Care and Treatment; Data and Data Sets; Analysis
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  • Article

Total Cost Control in Project Management via Satisficing
By: Joel Goh and Nicholas G. Hall
We consider projects with uncertain activity times and the possibility of expediting, or crashing, them. Activity times come from a partially specified distribution within a family of distributions. This family is described by one or more of the following details about...  View Details
Keywords: Project Management; Time And Cost Control; Robust Optimization; Satisficing; Linear Decision Rule; PERT; Management; Cost Management; Projects
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  • Article

Portfolio Value-at-Risk Optimization for Asymmetrically Distributed Asset Returns
By: Joel Goh, Kian Guan Lim, Melvyn Sim and Weina Zhang
We propose a new approach to portfolio optimization by separating asset return distributions into positive and negative half-spaces. The approach minimizes a newly-defined Partitioned Value-at-Risk (PVaR) risk measure by using half-space statistical information. Using...  View Details
Keywords: Robust Optimization; Portfolio Management; Value-at-risk; Mathematical Methods; Finance
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  • October 2011
  • Article

The Surprising Power of Age-Dependent Taxes
By: Matthew C. Weinzierl
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...  View Details
Keywords: Taxation; Policy; Age; Income; Mathematical Methods; Welfare; United States
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  • July–August 2011
  • Article

Robust Optimization Made Easy with ROME
By: Joel Goh and Melvyn Sim
We introduce ROME, an algebraic modeling toolbox for a class of robust optimization problems. ROME serves as an intermediate layer between the modeler and optimization solver engines, allowing modelers to express robust optimization problems in a mathematically...  View Details
Keywords: Robust Optimization; Algebraic Modeling Toolbox; MATLAB; Stochastic Programming; Decision Rules; Inventory Control; PERT; Project Management; Portfolio Optimization; Technology; Mathematical Methods; Operations
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  • Article

Distributionally Robust Optimization and Its Tractable Approximations
By: Joel Goh and Melvyn Sim
In this paper we focus on a linear optimization problem with uncertainties, having expectations in the objective and in the set of constraints. We present a modular framework to obtain an approximate solution to the problem that is distributionally robust and more...  View Details
Keywords: Technology; Mathematical Methods; Operations
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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...  View Details
Keywords: Borrowing and Debt; Motivation and Incentives; Decisions; Emerging Markets; Balance and Stability; Earnings Management; Policy; Interest Rates; International Finance; Cost
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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...  View Details
Keywords: Asset Management; Investment Portfolio; Mathematical Methods
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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...  View Details
Keywords: Sovereign Finance; Borrowing and Debt; Financial Liquidity; International Finance; Emerging Markets; Mathematical Methods
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