Strategies for Innovating

Many domains provide us with (largely untapped) detailed trace data on human decisions in complex, dynamic environments. These decisions are often made by experts with deep experience in the task at hand. Read More

Product innovation can result from the novel design and combination of product components as well as from changing the underlying product architecture, that is, the way components interact with each other. Read More

Prior research has argued and shown that firms with centralized R&D produce broader innovations relative to decentralized firms, but the organizational mechanisms underlying this relationship are underexplored. This gap limits our understanding of whether and how formal R&D structure can be used as a lever to influence research outcomes. Read More

We study how a new development in entrepreneurship—crowdfunding—interacts with more traditional financing sources, such as venture capital (VC) and bank financing.  Read More

Using data on employer job search, this study demonstrates that employers are seeking algorithmic literacy from workers in a particularly broad class of occupations because familiarity with algorithms in downstream “using” occupations is important for integrating AI and data science into production. Read More

This paper addresses the recent trend of offering unlimited vacation to employees. While potentially useful for acquiring human capital benefits, unlimited vacation is a risky perk for firms due to the possibility of abuse. Read More

We will examine the cost of inventor mobility from a talent poaching perspective. It is either prohibitively costly or impossible to contract over all states of the world (Grossman and Hart, 1986; Tirole, 1999). Read More

In today’s connected world, individuals are no longer mere consumers of goods, information and services, but public producers of often valuable data. In fact, personal data is becoming such a core input that The Economist called it “the world’s most valuable resource” ahead of oil. Read More

The idea that source code for computer software be accessible to anyone has gained increasing popularity among software developers, fueling the rapid growth of the open source software (OSS) movement. Platforms for OSS development currently host incredibly valuable projects like the Linux kernel, TensorFlow and various blockchain software projects. Read More

In this project, we attempt to provide a rigorous, empirical study of e-commerce A/B testing strategies. We perform a meta-analysis on 2,732 A/B tests conducted by 252 ecommerce companies across seven industries over the course of three years. Read More