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- March 2022
- Article
Targeting High Ability Entrepreneurs Using Community Information: Mechanism Design in the Field
Identifying high-growth microentrepreneurs in low-income countries remains a challenge due to a scarcity of verifiable information. With a cash grant experiment in India we demonstrate that community knowledge can help target high-growth microentrepreneurs; while the...
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- December 2021
- Article
Auctioneers Sometimes Prefer Entry Fees to Extra Bidders
By: Jiafeng Chen and Scott Duke Kominers
We investigate a market thickness–market power tradeoff in an auction setting with endogenous entry. We find that charging admission fees can sometimes dominate the benefit of recruiting additional bidders, even though the fees themselves implicitly reduce competition...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
The Demand for Executive Skills
By: Stephen Hansen, Raffaella Sadun, Tejas Ramdas and Joseph B. Fuller
We use a unique corpus of job descriptions for C-suite positions to document skills requirements in top managerial occupations across a large sample of firms. A novel algorithm maps the text of each executive search into six separate skill clusters reflecting...
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- July 2021
- Article
Augmenting Markets with Mechanisms
By: Samuel Antill and Darrell Duffie
We explain how the common practice of size-discovery trade detracts from overall financial market efficiency. At each of a series of size-discovery sessions, traders report their desired trades, generating allocations of the asset and cash that rely on the most recent...
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- July 2021
- Article
Redistribution through Markets
By: Piotr Dworczak, Scott Duke Kominers and Mohammad Akbarpour
Policymakers frequently use price regulations as a response to inequality in the markets they control. In this paper, we examine the optimal structure of such policies from the perspective of mechanism design. We study a buyer-seller market in which agents have private...
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- July–August 2021
- Article
Surfacing the Submerged State: Operational Transparency Increases Trust in and Engagement with Government
By: Ryan W. Buell, Ethan Porter and Michael I. Norton
Problem definition: As trust in government reaches historic lows, frustration with government performance approaches record highs.
Academic/practical relevance: We propose that in co-productive settings like government services, peoples’ trust and...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Diversity and Performance in Entrepreneurial Teams
By: Sophie Calder-Wang, Paul A. Gompers and Kevin Huang
We study the role of diversity and performance in the entrepreneurial teams. We exploit a unique dataset of MBA students who participated in a required course to propose and start a real micro-business that allows us to examine horizontal diversity (i.e., within the...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
The Health Costs of Cost-Sharing
By: Amitabh Chandra, Evan Flack and Ziad Obermeyer
We use the design of Medicare’s prescription drug benefit program to demonstrate three facts about the health consequences of cost-sharing. First, we show that an as-if-random increase of 33.6% in out-of-pocket price (11.0 percentage points (p.p.) change in...
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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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- 2020
- Working Paper
Heterogeneity of Gain-Loss Attitudes and Expectations-Based Reference Points
By: Lorenz Goette, Thomas Graeber, Alex Kellogg and Charles Sprenger
We examine the role of heterogeneity in gain-loss attitudes for identifying the leading behavioral model of expectations-based reference dependence (Kőszegi and Rabin, 2006, 2007) (KR). Failure to account for recently-documented heterogeneity in gain-loss attitudes is...
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- Oct 2020
- Conference Presentation
Optimal, Truthful, and Private Securities Lending
By: Emily Diana, Michael J. Kearns, Seth Neel and Aaron Leon Roth
We consider a fundamental dynamic allocation problem motivated by the problem of securities lending in financial markets, the mechanism underlying the short selling of stocks. A lender would like to distribute a finite number of identical copies of some scarce resource...
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- June 2020
- Article
Parallel Play: Startups, Nascent Markets, and the Effective Design of a Business Model
By: Rory McDonald and Kathleen Eisenhardt
Prior research advances several explanations for entrepreneurial success in nascent markets but leaves a key imperative unexplored: the business model. By studying five ventures in the same nascent market, we develop a novel theoretical framework for understanding how...
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- Article
The Inpatient Discharge Lounge as a Potential Mechanism to Mitigate Emergency Department Boarding and Crowding
By: Brian Franklin, Sharif Vakili, Robert S. Huckman, Sarah Hosein, Nicholas Falk, Katherine Cheng, Maria Murray, Sheila Harris, Charles A. Morris and Eric Goralnick
Delayed access to inpatient beds for admitted patients contributes significantly to emergency department (ED) boarding and crowding, which have been associated with deleterious patient safety effects. To expedite inpatient bed availability, some hospitals have...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Paying It Backward and Forward: Expanding Access to Convalescent Plasma Therapy Through Market Design
By: Scott Duke Kominers, Parag A. Pathak, Tayfun Sönmez and M. Utku Ünver
COVID-19 convalescent plasma (CCP) therapy is currently a leading treatment for COVID-19. At present, there is a shortage of CCP relative to demand. We develop and analyze a model of centralized CCP allocation that incorporates both donation and distribution. In order...
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- March 2020
- Article
Organizing Knowledge Production Teams Within Firms for Innovation
By: Vikas A. Aggarwal, David H. Hsu and Andy Wu
How should firms organize their pool of inventive human capital for firm-level innovation? While access to diverse knowledge may aid knowledge recombination, which can facilitate innovation, prior literature has focused primarily on one way of achieving that: diversity...
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- 2019
- Article
Ridesharing with Driver Location Preferences
By: Duncan Rheingans-Yoo, Scott Duke Kominers, Hongyao Ma and David C. Parkes
We study revenue-optimal pricing and driver compensation in ridesharing platforms when drivers have heterogeneous preferences over locations. If a platform ignores drivers' location preferences, it may make inefficient trip dispatches; moreover, drivers may strategize...
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- April 2019 (Revised January 2022)
- Case
Clear Link Technologies, LLC: Driving Sales with Peer Effects
By: Christopher Stanton, Richard Saouma and Olivia Hull
The importance of a good peer or coworker is widely discussed, but understanding the glue that makes coworkers valuable is less understood. This case sheds light on the importance of peers and the practices and environments that make a group greater than the sum of its...
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Keywords:
Talent and Talent Management;
Interactive Communication;
Experience and Expertise;
Decision Making;
Training;
Design;
Compensation and Benefits;
Knowledge Acquisition;
Knowledge Sharing;
Human Capital;
Working Conditions;
Measurement and Metrics;
Outcome or Result;
Performance;
Performance Improvement;
Research;
Sales;
Salesforce Management;
Motivation and Incentives;
Telecommunications Industry;
Utah;
United States
- January 2019 (Revised February 2020)
- Case
Roush Performance: How to Design a Sales Force Compensation Plan
By: Doug J. Chung
Roush Performance manufactured and marketed factory-modified performance vehicles and high-end aftermarket automotive performance parts. Since its inception, Roush Performance had focused on building its engineering technology competency and diversifying its product...
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- 2018
- Working Paper
Bundling Incentives in (Many-to-Many) Matching with Contracts
By: Jonathan Ma and Scott Duke Kominers
In many-to-many matching with contracts, the way in which contracts are specified can affect the set of stable equilibrium outcomes. Consequently, agents may be incentivized to modify the set of contracts upfront. We consider one simple way in which agents may do so:...
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- Article
Good Markets (Really Do) Make Good Neighbors
This article gives a (very) brief exposition of what market design is, along with four examples of market design in action. Loosely themed after Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Wall,” the examples demonstrate ways in which market design can break barriers—physical,...
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