faculty publications

Ford School assistant professor Ben Green, and an affiliate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, says that if algorithms are to improve society, focusing only on whether they’re mathematically “fair” won’t get us...

In an era when the Indian government has prioritized women's menstrual health and movies like Netflix's "Period. End of Sentence" are garnering worldwide attention, the distribution of disposable sanitary pads to women in India's rural areas has...

Recently, Shobita Parthasarathy appeared on the Issues in Science and Technology podcast, The Ongoing Transformation, to discuss her article, "Innovation as a Force for Equity." "As someone who is dedicated to the project of equity and justice in...

Who gets to define the ethics behind the use of technology in society? The discussion has become more pressing amid controversies related to misinformation, privacy, and algorithmic bias.  Ben Green explores this question as editor of a special...

Ford School professor Shobita Parthasarathy is calling for a change in innovation policy to center “equity as a public value” as the scientific community ponders “the next 75 years of science policy.” In her essay Innovation as a Force for Equity,...

Machine learning is increasingly used for government decision-making to predict adverse outcomes. For instance, many cities and states in the U.S. have adopted pretrial risk assessments that inform decisions about whether to release criminal...

The routes and schedules of public transit, the presence or absence of sidewalks, the availability of different transportation options, and the design of highways that have divided cities—these are examples of aspects of transportation systems that...

The global effort to develop and distribute COVID-19 vaccines has progressed despite myriad challenges. Yet the final step—shots in arms—meets resistance among some that can't easily be overcome by science and supply chains. Vaccine hesitancy—a...

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed policymaking biases that have ignored poor and marginalized communities, argues Ford school professor Shobita Parthasarathy. In a paper, Innovation Policy, Structural Inequality, and COVID-19, published in the...

Robert Hampshire was part of the author team that won the EURO Award for the Best EJOR Paper announced today during the annual European Conference on Operational Research in Dublin. Conveyed by EURO, the Association of European Operational Research...

Catherine Hausman’s NBER working paper, “Price regulation and environmental externalities: Evidence from methane leaks,” (with Lucija Muehlenbachs) looks at the unintended consequences of cost-of-service price regulations of privately-owned natural...