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- Article
Pattern Detection in the Activation Space for Identifying Synthesized Content
By: Celia Cintas, Skyler Speakman, Girmaw Abebe Tadesse, Victor Akinwande, Edward McFowland III and Komminist Weldemariam
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have recently achieved unprecedented success in photo-realistic image synthesis from low-dimensional random noise. The ability to synthesize high-quality content at a large scale brings potential risks as the generated samples may...
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- November 2021
- Article
Ratings, Reviews, and the Marketing of New Products
By: Itay P. Fainmesser, Dominique Olié Lauga and Elie Ofek
We study how user-generated content (UGC) about new products impacts a firm's advertising and pricing decisions and the effect on profits and market dynamics. We construct a two-period model where consumers value quality and are heterogeneous in their taste for the new...
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- September 2, 2021
- Article
The Digital Economy Runs on Open Source. Here's How to Protect It.
By: Hila Lifshitz-Assaf and Frank Nagle
Free and open source software (FOSS) is essential to much of the tech we use every day—from cars to phones to planes to the cloud. While traditionally, it was developed by an army of volunteer developers and given away for free, companies are increasingly taking a more...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
How to Fix ESG Reporting
By: Robert S. Kaplan and Karthik Ramanna
Investors, advocacy groups, academics, and the 200 CEOs of the US Business Roundtable have asked corporations to take on an added purpose beyond a narrow pursuit of shareholder value. In response, many companies now issue ESG (Environmental, Societal, and Governance)...
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Keywords:
ESG Reporting;
Sustainability;
Corporate Purpose;
Greenhouse Gas;
Activity-Based Costing;
Environmental Sustainability;
Environmental Management;
Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact;
Measurement and Metrics;
Goals and Objectives;
Agreements and Arrangements;
Corporate Accountability
- August 2021
- Article
Multiple Imputation Using Gaussian Copulas
By: F.M. Hollenbach, I. Bojinov, S. Minhas, N.W. Metternich, M.D. Ward and A. Volfovsky
Missing observations are pervasive throughout empirical research, especially in the social sciences. Despite multiple approaches to dealing adequately with missing data, many scholars still fail to address this vital issue. In this paper, we present a simple-to-use...
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- March 2021
- Article
Assortment Rotation and the Value of Concealment
By: Kris J. Ferreira and Joel Goh
Assortment rotation—the retailing practice of changing the assortment of products offered to customers—has recently been used as a competitive advantage for both brick-and-mortar and online retailers. We focus on product categories where consumers may purchase multiple...
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- Article
Memory and Representativeness
By: Pedro Bordalo, Katherine Baldiga Coffman, Nicola Gennaioli, Frederik Schwerter and Andrei Shleifer
We explore the idea that judgment by representativeness reflects the workings of episodic memory, especially interference. In a new laboratory experiment on cued recall, participants are shown two groups of images with different distributions of colors. We find that i)...
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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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- September 2020
- Article
The Rise of the Investor State: State Capital in the Chinese Economy
By: Meg Rithmire and Hao Chen
The nature and extent of the role of the Chinese state in the economy is fundamental to many empirical and theoretical debates about that country’s political economy. We document and explain the rise of a novel form of intervention on the part of the Chinese state: the...
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- May 2020
- Case
Big Boom Beverages: Fight or Flight?
By: Stephen A. Greyser and William Ellet
Four college friends market a beverage that combines ingredients like those in a drink they consumed in college bars. It includes a caffeinated energy drink, malt liquor, and a soft drink flavoring. They launch the business, Big Boom Beverages (BBB), with their own...
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- Mar 2020
- Conference Presentation
A New Analysis of Differential Privacy's Generalization Guarantees
By: Christopher Jung, Katrina Ligett, Seth Neel, Aaron Roth, Saeed Sharifi-Malvajerdi and Moshe Shenfeld
We give a new proof of the "transfer theorem" underlying adaptive data analysis: that any mechanism for answering adaptively chosen statistical queries that is differentially private and sample-accurate is also accurate out-of-sample. Our new proof is elementary and...
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- October 2019 (Revised October 2019)
- Case
Epic Games
By: Andy Wu and Christopher Zhang
Epic Games entered a stagnant market with its PC-games digital storefront in 2018, in the context of incumbent competitors such as Steam, its meteoric rise via Fortnite, and imminent industry shifts in gaming distribution. On the surface, Epic Games Store’s competitive...
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- Article
Effect of Different Financial Incentive Structures on Promoting Physical Activity Among Adults: A Randomized Clinical Trial
By: Chethan Bachireddy, Andrew Joung, Leslie K. John, Francesca Gino, Bradford Tuckfield, Luca Foschini and Katherine L. Milkman
Importance: Few adults engage in recommended levels of physical activity. Financial incentives can promote physical activity, but little is known about how their structure influences their effectiveness; for example, whether incentives are more effective if they are...
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- January 2019 (Revised December 2019)
- Case
CrossBoundary Energy
By: John Macomber
Almost 500 million people are without electricity in sub-Saharan Africa. Governments and public utilities are challenged to bring generation and distribution to most of them. Considerable promise exists in “off-grid” or “mini-grid” technologies, notably using renewable...
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Keywords:
Energy Investing;
Economic Development;
Renewable Energy;
Business Growth and Maturation;
Developing Countries and Economies;
Project Finance;
Emerging Markets;
Industry Structures;
Infrastructure;
Segmentation;
Private Equity;
Decision Choices and Conditions;
Energy Industry;
Utilities Industry;
Africa;
Tanzania;
Ghana
- November 2018
- Case
Cepuros Foods Malaysia: Finding the Secret Sauce for Growth (Brief Case)
By: John A. Quelch and Katherine B. Hartman
Shelby Diaz, country manager for Cepuros Foods International—Malaysia (CFI-M), must decide a growth strategy for the expansion of CFI-M's line of salsas, particularly regarding whom to target and how to allocate marketing investments. CFI-M could expand aggressively by...
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- October 2018
- Article
A Theory of Intergenerational Mobility
By: Gary Becker, Scott Duke Kominers, Kevin Murphy and Jorg L. Spenkuch
We develop a model of intergenerational resource transmission that emphasizes the link between cross-sectional inequality and intergenerational mobility. By drawing on first principles of human capital theory, we derive several novel results. In particular, we show...
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- August 2018
- Article
Growth Through Heterogeneous Innovations
By: Ufuk Akcigit and William R. Kerr
We build a tractable growth model where multi-product incumbents invest in internal innovations to improve their existing products, while new entrants and incumbents invest in external innovations to acquire new product lines. External and internal innovations generate...
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- Article
Are Buybacks Really Shortchanging Investment?
By: Jesse M. Fried and Charles C.Y. Wang
It’s no secret that the American economy is suffering from the twin ills of slow growth and rising income inequality. Many lay the blame at the doors of America’s largest public corporations. The charge? These firms prefer to distribute cash generated from their...
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- 2018
- Working Paper
Backhanded Compliments: How Negative Comparisons Undermine Flattery
By: Ovul Sezer, Alison Wood Brooks and Michael I. Norton
Seven studies (N = 2352) examine backhanded compliments—seeming praise that draws a comparison with a negative standard—a distinct self-presentation strategy with two simultaneous goals: eliciting liking (“Your speech was good…”) and conveying status (“…for a woman”)....
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- February 2018
- Case
Montes Calcados: A Step Ahead
By: James L. Heskett and James T. Kindley
Montes Calçados (MC) is a well-known "fast-fashion" Brazilian manufacturer of casual, but fashionable, shoes for women aged 18–35 in major cities worldwide. To boost its declining revenues, MC must evaluate two growth options: whether to expand distribution online (at...
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