Operations & Supply Chain Management

For e-commerce companies to assess how best to invest in improving delivery times, it is important to understand how improving delivery times affects customer demand. In collaboration with a business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce company, we study how the promised delivery time in a quote affects the customer's purchase probability. We use observational and experimental data from our partner, with quote-level variation in promised delivery times.

Experiments in online platforms frequently suffer from network interference, in which a treatment applied to a given unit affects outcomes for other units connected via the platform. This SUTVA violation biases naive approaches to experiment design and estimation.

Over the past decade, data has transformed everyday life. While it has changed the way people shop and businesses operate (Goldfarb and Tucker, 2019), it has only just begun to permeate economists thinking about the aggregate economy. In the early twentieth century, economists like Schultz (1943) analyzed agrarian economies and land-use issues. As agricultural productivity improved, production shifted more to manufacturing. Modern macroeconomics adapted with models featuring capital and labor, markets for goods, and equilibrium wages (Solow, 1956).

Lori Qingyuan Yue and Jue Wang reflect on their article, “Policy Learning in Nascent Industries’ Venue Shifting: A Study of the U.S. Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Industry,” which was recently published in Business & Society.

Problem definition: Motivated by ride-hailing platforms such as Uber, Lyft and Didi, we study the problem of matching riders with self-interested drivers over a spatial network.

There is a consensus that global value chains have aided developing countries' growth. This essay highlights the governance complexities arising from participating in such chains, drawing from lessons we have learned conducting research in the coffee and garment supply chains. Market power of international buyers can lead to inefficiently low wages, prices, quality standards, and poor working conditions. At the same time, some degree of market power might be needed to sustain long-term supply relationships that are beneficial in a world with incomplete contracts.

In the landscape of low carbon sources of energy, nuclear power stands out as an option that has generated increasing attention and capital investment. Since 2001, nuclear energy production has been in decline, though Clean Core Thorium Energy, led by Mehul Shah, is one of the companies that is bringing nuclear back to the forefront. Founded in 2017, Clean Core is a nascent player in an industry that has a poor reputation among investors.

Should an incumbent metal manufacturing company make the change to green steel and how should it address its business model to be successful in its move to carbon neutrality?