Serguei Netessine Archives

New Report: Generative AI Adoption in the U.S. Military

Stylized depiction of the American flag with glowing red stripes and star patterns against a dark, mountainous landscape.

The U.S. Department of Defense is one of the most complex organizations in the world — so how is it approaching generative AI? A new report from Wharton’s Prof. Serguei Netessine and WG’25 Andrew Stiles examines the DoD’s early steps toward integrating GenAI and highlights lessons that industry leaders can…Read More

Business Model Innovation for Renewables

Consumers who want access to renewable energy have two main options: install renewable energy generation equipment “behind” the electrical meter (e.g., solar panels on the roof) or buy energy from a utility company, which would then source energy from generation companies. The first approach has obvious diseconomies of scale. It is only available to homeowners, while the second approach requires over-reliance on utility companies, which may not contract with renewable suppliers or may offer an expensive mix of renewable and nonrenewable energy. We study an alternative innovative business model, “community solar,” whereby consumers subscribe to own a portion of the energy generated by a large solar plant. We partner with Origo Energy, a Brazilian company that pioneered this model in South America, and we analyze the behavior of consumers who switch from the traditional business model to Origo’s subscription to understand boundary conditions for community solar.…Read More

Decentralized Platforms: Governance, Tokenomics, and ICO Design

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

Just Released: Mack Institute’s New Corporate Venturing Report

Two individuals in a grayscale illustration, one in a suit and the other casually dressed, holding a large jigsaw puzzle piece together.

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

Mack Institute Explores AI & Innovation, Corporate Venturing at Wharton Global Forum 2024 in São Paulo

The image depicts the Octávio Frias de Oliveira Bridge in São Paulo at twilight, with illuminated skyscrapers and a colorful sky reflecting in the river below.

This June, Mack Institute leadership traveled to Brazil for Wharton’s 56th Global Forum, which was held in São Paulo for the first time. Hosted annually in a different world city, the two-day business conference brings together Wharton alumni, faculty, and global business leaders for lectures, panel discussions, and networking. This…Read More

Evolution of Internet Retailing and Buy vs. Make Decisions

We have obtained data from Digital Commerce 360 which publishes pertinent statistics on top 1000 internet retail sites. One interesting aspect of this data is detailed information regarding outsourcing/insourcing decisions including web hosting, search engine optimization services, product delivery etc. This is a pretty unique data spanning hundreds of companies and a last decade. We wish to use this data to analyze outsourcing decisions of internet retailers and how these choices affect their performance. The data shows variation across time and industries, and it is supplemented with many quantitative metrics for internet retailers including number of visitors, conversion rate and basket size etc. We believe this unique data will allow us to gain unique insights into make vs buy decisions by internet retailers.…Read More

Research Spotlight: Serguei Netessine on the Entrepreneurs Bringing Light To Rural Rwanda

A rural landscape with a few people walking along a path surrounded by greenery in the foreground. In the background, there is a building with a peaked roof and a large mountain with a cloud-covered summit.

One tenth of the world’s population has no access to electricity — and eighty percent of that population lives in Africa, where half the continent is still unelectrified. Wharton’s Serguei Netessine together with co-authors recently published a paper studying an innovative new approach to bringing electricity to off-grid Rwandans via…Read More

To Diversify or Not? Multi-Platform Social Media Strategy and E-Commerce Performance

Xiaoning (Gavin) Wang, PhD Candidate, Lynn Wu, Operations, Information and Decisions, and Serguei Netessine, Operations, Information and Decisions, The Wharton School Abstract: As the number of social platforms has grown dramatically in the past two decades, companies face an increasing number of options to choose among for their social media resource…Read More

Field Experiments to Measure the Impact of Solar Lights at the Bottom of the Pyramid

Providing access to cleaner and cheaper lighting solutions is necessary to lift people out of poverty. The magnitude of the economic, health, and educational impacts created by these lighting solutions as we move up the energy ladder, however, is not clear.…Read More

When Should the Off-grid Sun Shine at Night? Optimum Renewable Generation and Energy Storage Investments

Globally, 1.5 billion people live off the grid, their only access to electricity often limited to operationally-expensive fossil fuel generators. Solar power has risen as a sustainable and less expensive option, but its generation is variable during the day and non-existent at night.…Read More

Privately Owned Battery Storage: Re-Shaping the Utility Business Case

How can rooftop solar owners capture economic value from investing in battery technologies? Storage adds at least three strategic options for homeowners that previously could only directly consume solar generation and sell any excess instantaneously, thus they traditionally relied on feed-in tariffs or other subsidies.…Read More

Does Immediate Feedback Make You Not Try as Hard? A Study on Automotive Telematics

Mobile and Internet-of-things (IoT) devices increasingly enable tracking of user behavior, and they often provide real-time or immediate feedback to consumers in an effort to improve their conduct. Growing adoption of such technologies leads to an important question: “Does immediate feedback provided to users improve their behavior?”…Read More

Do Smart Traffic Lights Reduce Congestion?

The smart traffic light is one of the major disruptions for smart cities. We will study the effect of the smart traffic lights on road traffic, congestion, and the network effect for these installations. …Read More

Power to X – Why and When to Use Electricity to Make Gas Renewable

With this proposal, we request research funding for the development of one paper studying the operational benefits of Power-to-X technologies to discern when shifting power systems to renewable oil and gas becomes optimal.…Read More

Initial Coin Offerings, Speculators, and Asset Tokenization

Initial coin offerings (ICOs) are an emerging form of fundraising for blockchain-based startups. We examine how ICOs can be leveraged in the context of asset tokenization, whereby firms issue tokens backed by future assets (i.e., inventory) to finance growth.…Read More

Higher Market Thickness Reduces Matching Rate in Online Platforms: Evidence from a Quasi-Experiment

Market thickness is a key parameter that can make or break a platform’s business model. Thicker markets can offer more opportunities for participants to meet and higher chances that a potential match would exist. …Read More

The Long Tail Theory, Debunked: We Stick With What We Know

Wharton professor Serguei Netessine finds that even as consumers are deluged with a growing array of choices, they tend to remain loyal to familiar brands and products.…Read More

Plant Operations and Product Recalls in the Automotive Industry: An Empirical Investigation

While there is overwhelming support for the negative consequences of product recalls, empirical evidence of operational drivers of recalls is almost nonexistent. In this study, we identify product variety, plant variety, and capacity utilization as drivers of subsequent manufacturing-related recalls.…Read More

Is Tom Cruise Threatened? An Empirical Study of the Impact of Product Variety on Demand Concentration

We empirically examine the impact of expanded product variety on demand concentration using large data sets from the movie rental industry as our test bed. We find that product variety is likely to increase demand concentration.…Read More

The Impact of New Product Introduction on Plant Productivity in the North American Automotive Industry

Product launch—an event when a new product debuts for production in a plant—is an important phase in product development. But launches disrupt manufacturing operations, resulting in productivity losses. Using data from North American automotive plants from years 1999–2007, we estimate that a product launch entails an average productivity loss of 12%–15% at the plant level.…Read More