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    • COVID-19 Business Impact Center
      COVID-19 Business Impact Center
      Cold Call
      A podcast featuring faculty discussing cases they've written and the lessons they impart.
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      • 05 Jan 2021
      • Cold Call Podcast

      Using Behavioral Science to Improve Well-Being for Social Workers

      For child and family social workers, coping with the hardships of children and parents is part of the job. But that can cause a lot of stress. Is it possible for financially constrained organizations to improve social workers’ well-being using non-cash rewards, recognition, and other strategies from behavioral science? Assistant Professor Ashley Whillans describes the experience of Chief Executive Michael Sanders’ at the UK’s What Works Centre for Children’s Social Care, as he led a research program aimed at improving the morale of social workers in her case, “The What Works Centre: Using Behavioral Science to Improve Social Worker Well-being.”  Open for comment; 0 Comment(s) posted.

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      Mathematical MethodsRemove Mathematical Methods →

      Page 1 of 10 Results
      • 22 Oct 2020
      • Working Paper Summaries

      Estimating Causal Effects in the Presence of Partial Interference Using Multivariate Bayesian Structural Time Series Models

      by Fiammetta Menchetti and Iavor Bojinov

      A case study of an Italian supermarket introducing a new pricing policy—in which it reduced prices on some brands—offers managers a new approach to reduce uncertainty. The approach is flexible and can be applied to different business problems.

      • 06 Apr 2020
      • Working Paper Summaries

      A General Theory of Identification

      by Iavor Bojinov and Guillaume Basse

      Statistical inference teaches us how to learn from data, whereas identification analysis explains what we can learn from it. This paper proposes a simple unifying theory of identification, encouraging practitioners to spend more time thinking about what they can estimate from the data and assumptions before trying to estimate it.

      • 09 Mar 2020
      • Working Paper Summaries

      Impact Investing: A Theory of Financing Social Entrepreneurship

      by Benjamin N. Roth

      The author provides a formal definition of organizational sustainability and characterizes the situations in which a social enterprise should be sustainable. The analysis then delineates when an investment in a social enterprise delivers superior impact to a grant.

      • 18 Sep 2019
      • Working Paper Summaries

      Using Models to Persuade

      by Joshua Schwartzstein and Adi Sunderam

      “Model persuasion” happens when would-be persuaders offer receivers a streamlined way of understanding data they already know, especially when the data is open to interpretation. Using examples from finance, politics, and law, the authors find that truthtellers do not eliminate the impact of misleading persuasion because wrong models may better fit the past than correct models.

      • 23 Jan 2018
      • Working Paper Summaries

      Transaction Costs and the Duration of Contracts

      by Alexander MacKay

      When buyers transact with sellers, they select not only whom to transact with but also for how long. This paper develops a model of optimal contract duration arising from underlying supply costs and transaction costs. The model allows for the quantification of transaction costs, which are often unobserved, and the impact of these costs on welfare.

      • 09 Jan 2018
      • Working Paper Summaries

      Identifying Sources of Inefficiency in Health Care

      by Amitabh Chandra and Douglas O. Staiger

      This economic study finds evidence of allocative inefficiency and substantial variation in comparative advantage across hospitals, with the benefits from treatment being much higher in some hospitals than others. The study overall suggests new directions for research on productivity in healthcare.

      • 19 Oct 2017
      • Working Paper Summaries

      Games of Threats

      by Elon Kohlberg and Abraham Neyman

      The Shapley value is the most widely studied solution concept of cooperative game theory, with applications to cost allocation, fair division, voting, etc. It is defined on coalitional games, which are the standards objects of the theory. The authors extend the Shapley value solution beyond coalitional games to “games of threats,” which arise in applications that combine competitive and cooperative considerations.

      • 14 Jun 2017
      • Working Paper Summaries

      Minimizing Justified Envy in School Choice: The Design of New Orleans' OneApp

      by Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Yeon-Koo Che, Parag A. Pathak, Alvin E. Roth, and Oliver Tercieux

      TCC (Top Trading Cycles) and DA (deferred acceptance) are the two main algorithms for priority-based resource allocation. In 2012, the New Orleans school system tried to use TCC for school assignments, but dropped it after one year. The authors of this paper compared data from New Orleans and Boston in order to review designs and algorithms for better school assignment systems.

      • 20 Oct 2011
      • Research & Ideas

      Getting the Marketing Mix Right

      by Dina Gerdeman

      Marketers have a wide array of selling tools at their disposal, but lack an effective method for predicting their success. Associate Professor Thomas J. Steenburgh and collaborators offer a new model for guiding their marketing investments. Key concepts include: Discrete choice models commonly used to evaluate marketing strategies often provide misleading results, leaving managers with the inability to accurately measure how they can get the best bang for their buck. A new model could help managers figure out which marketing efforts work best, and therefore decide which strategies to invest in. Open for comment; 2 Comment(s) posted.

      • 12 Mar 2008
      • Working Paper Summaries

      Allocating Marketing Resources

      by Sunil Gupta & Thomas J. Steenburgh

      Deciding how to allocate marketing resources is particularly difficult because decisions need to be made at many different levels—across countries, products, marketing mix elements, and different vehicles within elements of the mix (e.g., television versus the Internet for advertising). With the increasing availability of data and sophistication in methods, it is now possible to more judiciously allocate marketing resources. In this paper, HBS professors Gupta and Steenburgh discuss a two-stage process where a model of demand is estimated in stage-one and its estimates are used as inputs in an optimization model in stage-two. The researchers propose a matrix with three approaches for each of these two stages, and discuss the pros and cons of these methods. They highlight each method with applications and case studies to present rigorous yet practical approaches to making marketing resource allocation decisions. Key concepts include: This paper lays out a framework for managers who are responsible for allocating marketing resources for their products and services. Scores of studies in the area of allocating marketing resources now make it possible to form empirical generalizations about the impact of marketing actions on sales and profits. In practical terms, information about marketing resource allocation makes a significant impact at all levels of an organization. Closed for comment; 0 Comment(s) posted.

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