itional two-sided platforms (e.g., Amazon, Uber) rely primarily on commission contracts to generate revenues and fuel growth, whereas their decentralized counterparts (e.g., Uniswap, Filecoin) often forego these in favor of token retention. What economics underpin this choice?…Read More
Listening to the other side is essential for communication and conflict resolution. However, even when a listener listens well, the speaker may still exclaim, “You are not listening to me!” We reason this occurs because speakers think someone who disagrees with them simply has not listened.…Read More
Inter-ethnic tensions have been well documented as one of the main inhibiting factors behind the slow economic progress of developing countries. For example, government leaders have shown to prioritize their ethnic supporter base in providing public goods and services (Franck and Rainer 2012; Kramon and Posner 2016), often resulting in suboptimal distributions. However, relatively little is known about the role of ethnicity in taxation. Specifically, how ethnicity influences the distribution of tax burden and what the costs of such ethnic targeting are, if existent, remain largely unknown. My proposed project will study the role of ethnic targeting in the building of the property tax system in Nigeria.…Read More
Psychological Science, a leading journal in the field of psychology, recently published a paper by Hauenstein et al. (2024) in which the authors reanalyzed data from the Good Judgment Project (e.g., Mellers et al., 2014) and argued that IARPA’s tournaments permitted method variance; forecasters could select their own questions and make their own forecasts whenever they wished while the forecast window was open.…Read More
The Mack Institute is proud to release our newest work of original research, When Goliath Needs David: How Corporations and Startups are Redefining Corporate Venturing. Based on a systematic review of the world’s 500 largest companies, it presents a data-driven analysis of how corporations are partnering with startups to fuel…Read More 
Corporate Venturing 2025: A New Model of Corporate-Startup Interaction Tuesday, June 24 | 2:00 p.m. | via Zoom Join us for a webinar marking the release of our new report, When Goliath Needs David: How Corporations and Startups Are Redefining Corporate Venturing. The report explores how established companies are increasingly…Read More 
Penn Hyperloop, a student team sponsored in part by the Mack Institute, made an impressive showing at The Boring Company’s “Not-a-Boring” Competition, a global contest that challenges university teams to design and build advanced tunnel boring machines. Competing against top engineering programs from around the world, Penn Hyperloop earned third…Read More
Productivity in the Age of Intelligent Automation Spring 2025 Conference Report Productivity has always been a central concern of business leaders, operations researchers, and innovators. But what it means to be productive—and how we measure and achieve it—is rapidly changing in the age of artificial intelligence. The Mack Institute’s Spring…Read More 
Mack Institute predoctoral fellow Lennart Meincke, Wharton Professor Gideon Nave, and Mack Institute Co-Director Christian Terwiesch have published a new paper on AI and creativity in the prestigious journal Nature Human Behaviour. Building on growing research into how artificial intelligence can support idea generation, their study reveals a crucial tradeoff:…Read More
This spring, a student team from the Mack Institute for Innovation Management collaborated with Penn’s Computational Social Science (CSS) Lab to explore how to bring the lab’s latest innovation, an AI-powered media bias detection tool, to market. The student team is Jieru Shi (WG'25), Keshav Ramesh (W'25) and Caleb Yam…Read More 
Algorithms shape countless decisions in our digital lives, powering everything from personalized ads to loan approvals. Many of the most powerful algorithms are so-called “black box” algorithms, meaning that no one, not even the developers building them or the businesses deploying them, fully understands how they work. While these hyper-complex…Read More
The relationship between corporations and startups is evolving. Once seen as disruptive challengers to industry giants, startups are now forging strategic partnerships with established companies to drive innovation, scale new ideas, and navigate an uncertain economic landscape. As startup funding tightens and rapid scaling takes a backseat to sustainable growth,…Read More
Listen to an AI-generated podcast summarizing key insights from Reimagining Customer Service Journeys with LLMs: A Framework for Chatbot Design and Workflow Integration, a white paper from Mack Institute co-director Prof. Christian Terwiesch and Lennart Meincke, Mack Institute predoctoral fellow. The paper presents a framework for integrating chatbots into workflows,…Read More
Friday, March 21, 2025 The Wharton School, Philadelphia The Mack Institute is pleased to announce our Spring 2025 conference, Productivity in the Age of Intelligent Automation. This one-day event will bring together leading Wharton researchers and expert business practitioners to examine the uncertain question of how artificial intelligence will impact…Read More 
Congratulations to this year’s Y-Prize winners, Stentix! The team proposed a bile duct stent that can be adjusted noninvasively, helping to maintain bile flow without additional surgeries. A biliary stent is a small, tube-like device inserted into the bile ducts to keep them open and allow bile to flow from…Read More
Prof. Christian Terwiesch, Mack Institute co-director, and Lennart Meincke, Mack Institute predoctoral fellow, have co-authored a new working paper on chatbot design and workflow integration, the latest in Prof. Terwiesch's series of papers on practical applications of Generative AI. The paper devises a framework for chatbot implementation based on varying…Read More 
