Working Papers
I'll Have the Ice Cream Soon and the Vegetables Later: Decreasing Impatience over Time in Online Grocery Orders
| Authors: | Todd Rogers, Katherine L. Milkman, and Max H. Bazerman |
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Abstract
How do decisions for the near future differ from decisions for the more distant future? Most economic models predict that they do not systematically differ. With online grocery data, we show that people are decreasingly impatient the further in the future their choices will take effect. In general, as the delay between order completion and delivery increases, customers spend less, order a higher percentage of "should" items (e.g., vegetables), and order a lower percentage of "want" items (e.g., ice cream). However, orders placed for delivery tomorrow versus two days in the future do not show this want/should pattern. A second study suggests that this arises because orders placed for delivery tomorrow include more items for planned meals (as opposed to items for general stocking) than orders placed for delivery in the more distant future, and that groceries for planned meals entail more should items than groceries for general stocking.
Download the paper: http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/07-078.pdf
Cases & Course Materials
Aid, Debt Relief, and Trade: An Agenda for Fighting World Poverty (A)
Harvard Business School Case 707-029
At the 2005 Group of Eight summit, world leaders agreed to relieve the world's poorest countries' debt burdens and double aid to Africa by 2010. The announcement raised questions whether debt relief would really help the poor. By examining past aid trends and policies of multilateral institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, this case also questions whether aid can allow poor countries to break the vicious cycle of poverty, and/or how aid can be used effectively.
Purchase this case:
http://www.hbsp.harvard.edu/b01/en/common/item_detail.jhtml?id=707029
Aid, Debt Relief, and Trade: An Agenda for Fighting World Poverty (B)
Harvard Business School Supplement 707-040
Supplements the (A) case.
Purchase this supplement:
http://www.hbsp.harvard.edu/b01/en/common/item_detail.jhtml?id=707040
Alleviating Poverty and Malnutrition
Harvard Business School Case 907-409
Deals with approaches to alleviating poverty and how firms, governments, and NGOs are able to work together to accomplish these goals.
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http://www.hbsp.harvard.edu/b01/en/common/item_detail.jhtml?id=907409
Alleviating Poverty and Malnutrition: Successful Models
Harvard Business School Note 907-412
Provides successful models of private-public sector cooperatives in alleviating poverty and malnutrition.
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http://www.hbsp.harvard.edu/b01/en/common/item_detail.jhtml?id=907412
HDFC (A)
Harvard Business School Case 301-093
The top management team at India's leading home finance company must decide how to deal with the emergence of intense competition at the end of the 1990s. Having founded the industry and dominated it for nearly 20 years, the well-respected company faces a bevy of new entrants from the banking, mortgage finance, and insurance sectors. In particular, management must decide how to respond to an aggressive new competitor who has copied HDFC's processes, lured away some of its key staff, and whose misleading, but lawful, advertising of interest rates is drawing customers away from HDFC.
Purchase this case:
http://www.hbsp.harvard.edu/b01/en/common/item_detail.jhtml?id=301093
HDFC (B)
Harvard Business School Supplement 301-094
Supplements the (A) case.
Purchase this case:
http://www.hbsp.harvard.edu/b01/en/common/item_detail.jhtml?id=301094
Publications
The Price of Immediacy
| Authors: | George Chacko, Jakub W. Jurek, and Erik Stafford |
|---|---|
| Periodical: | Journal of Finance (forthcoming) |
Abstract
This paper develops a new model of transaction costs, arising as the rents that a monopolistic market maker is able to extract from impatient investors. The mechanism for trade is a limit order, and immediacy is supplied when the limit order is executed. We show that limit orders are American options and their value represents the cost of transacting. The limit prices inducing immediate execution of the order are functionally equivalent to bid and ask prices and can be solved for various transaction sizes to characterize the market maker's entire supply curve.
We find considerable empirical support for the model's predictions in the cross-section of NYSE firms. The model produces unbiased, out-of-sample forecasts of abnormal returns for firms being added to the S&P 500 index.
Download the paper:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=934193
The Formation of Inter-Organizational Networks
| Author: | Toby E. Stuart |
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| Publication: | In The Missing Links: Formation and Decay of Economic Networks, edited by James Rauch. Russell Sage Foundation, 2007 |
Abstract
This chapter will offer a literature review and some thoughts on processes that may systematically account for the formation of networks among economic actors. After describing the arguments for why sociologists (and increasingly, economists) view networks to be essential to the functioning of markets, I will review much of the work that has been done in economic sociology on the formation of networks, as well as a little of the research on the subject in economics and applied mathematics. Although I will describe research on networks at both the organizational and the individual levels, I shall focus on the organization level. In addition, in the interest of brevity, I will emphasize horizontal relationships among organizations, rather than vertical (i.e., buyer-supplier) transactions.
Vertical Alliance Networks: The Case of University-Biotechnology-Pharmaceutical Alliance Chains
| Authors: | Toby E. Stuart, Salih Zeki Ozdemir, and Waverly W. Ding |
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| Periodical: | Research Policy 36, no. 4 (May 2007): 477-498 |
Abstract
Many young biotechnology firms act as intermediaries in tripartite alliance chains. They enter upstream partnerships with public sector research institutions, and later form commercialization alliances with established, downstream firms. We examine the alliance activity in a large sample of biotechnology firms and find: (i) firms with multiple in-licensing agreements are more likely to attract revenue-generating alliances with downstream partners; however, (ii) the positive relationship between in-licenses and downstream alliances attenuates as firms mature, and (iii) the diversity and the quality of the academic connections of firms' principals influences their chances of successfully acquiring commercialization rights to scientific discoveries in universities.