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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 (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
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
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
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
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
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
We analyze the competitive capacity investment timing decisions of both established firms and start-ups entering new markets which are characterized by a high degree of demand uncertainty. Firms may invest in capacity early (when the market is highly uncertain) or late (when market uncertainty has been resolved), possibly at different costs.…Read More
Companies in a variety of industries (e.g., airlines, hotels, theaters) often use last-minute sales to dispose of unsold capacity. Although this may generate incremental revenues in the short term, the long-term consequences of such a strategy are not immediately obvious.…Read More
