Ana Antolin is a doctoral candidate in the Strategy unit at Harvard Business School. She received her B.S. in Quantitative Economics and International Relations from Tufts University. Prior to joining Harvard, she worked as a full-time research assistant in the Tufts Economics Department studying buyer-supplier relations and factory working conditions in the international garment industry.
Using Douglass North's definition of institutions as "humanly devised constraints that structure political, economic, and social interaction," she is interested in the roles firms and businesses play in both navigating and shaping institutions. Understanding these dynamics helps us to understand the environment and rules under which firms form strategies and the ways in which different strategic decisions shape environments. She is exploring this dynamic in various arenas both empirically and theoretically including: the shaping firm self-regulatory regimes, the effects of voluntary environmental and social standards on market competition, and the decision-making of firms that operate under multiple, sometimes competing, regulatory and judicial regimes. She has a secondary interest in understanding the diversity of firm objective functions (i.e., what firms are trying to "maximize" and what do they treat as constraints to maximizing) and how that affects choices and behavior of the firm and outcomes of various firm stakeholders.