contests - Publications - Faculty & Research

01 Dec 2009
News

Start-Up Contest for Alumni

Got an idea for a start-up? You could win a $25,000 cash prize from HBS. The inaugural Alumni New Venture Contest aims to draw attention to the fact that over half of HBS graduates describe themselves as entrepreneurs at some point in... View Details

Keywords: Contests

01 Sep 2003
News

Business Plan Contest

’03), who is now CEO of FBC, and faculty advisor HBS associate professor Stefan H. Thomke. Photos by Catherine Walsh/HBS Communications Now in its seventh year, the HBS Business Plan Contest is designed to promote entrepreneurship among... View Details

Keywords: contests; Colleges, Universities, and Professional Schools; Educational Services

Article

The Price of Anarchy of Self-Selection in Tullock Contests

By: Hau Chan, David C. Parkes and Karim R. Lakhani

Crowdsourcing platforms operate by offering their clients the ability to obtain cost-effective solutions for their problems through contests. The top contestants with the best solutions are rewarded, and the submitted solutions are provided to the clients. Within the... View Details

Keywords: Crowdsourcing Contests; Game Theory

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01 Sep 2010
News

Big Turnout for Business Plan Contest

The dream of starting their own business inspired 110 teams of students to enter the 2010 HBS Business Plan Contest, which awarded $170,000 in cash and in-kind services to winners and runners-up in separate business venture and social venture tracks. The final round of... View Details

Keywords: contests; awards; Natural Gas Distribution; Utilities; Water, Sewage and Supply Systems; Utilities

Article

Innovation Contests for High-Tech Procurement

By: Jin Hyun Paik, Martin Scholl, Rinat A. Sergeev, Steven Randazzo and Karim R. Lakhani

Innovation managers rarely use crowdsourcing as an innovative instrument despite extensive academic and theoretical research. The lack of tools available to compare and measure crowdsourcing, specifically contests, against traditional methods of procuring goods and... View Details

Keywords: Open Innovation; Contests; Crowdsourcing; Nasa; Evaluation; Acquisition; Information Technology; Innovation and Invention; Performance Evaluation; Framework

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2016
Working Paper

Markets for Ideas: Prize Structure, Entry Limits, and the Design of Ideation Contests

By: Pavel Kireyev

Contests are a popular mechanism for the procurement of innovation. In marketing, design, and other creative industries, firms use freelance marketplaces to organize contests and obtain high-quality ideas for ads, new products, and even business strategies from... View Details

Keywords: Idea Generation; Crowdsourcing; Contest Design; Structural Estimation; Motivation and Incentives; Competition; Innovation and Invention

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25 Apr 2017
News

HBS’s Annual Contest for Entrepreneurs is a Case Study unto Itself

Keywords: Alumni New Venture Contest

2014
Article

The Promise of Prediction Contests

By: Phillip E. Pfeifer, Yael Grushka-Cockayne and Kenneth C. Lichtendahl

This article examines the prediction contest as a vehicle for aggregating the opinions of a crowd of experts. After proposing a general definition distinguishing prediction contests from other mechanisms for harnessing the wisdom of crowds, we focus on... View Details

Keywords: Prediction; Forecasting and Prediction

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06 Jun 2016
News

Shareholder Proposals Contested by Firm Management

March 2019
Article

A Structural Analysis of the Role of Superstars in Crowdsourcing Contests

By: Shunyuan Zhang, Param Singh and Anindya Ghose

We investigate the long-term impact of competing against superstars in crowdsourcing contests. Using a unique 50-month longitudinal panel data set on 1677 software design crowdsourcing contests, we illustrate a learning effect where participants are able to improve... View Details

Keywords: Crowdsourcing Contests; Superstar Effect; Bayesian Learning; Utility; Economics Of Information System; Dynamic Structural Model; Dynamic Programming; Markov Chain; Monte Carlo; Learning; Competition; Performance Improvement

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March 2020
Case

Brazil: Contesting the Rules of Government

By: Sophus A. Reinert and Jonathan Schlefer

Brazilian factions so fiercely opposed one another that for a century and a half they had contested not just state policies but the rules and structure of the state itself. Was this politics, so unlike the Western political ideal, sign of an immature or failing... View Details

Keywords: Governance; Policy; Government Administration; Government and Politics; Social Issues; Brazil

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01 Sep 2008
News

Business Plan Contest Winners

The 12th annual HBS Business Plan Contest winner in the social enterprise track was Diagnostics-For-All (DFA), a nonprofit launched to develop a disposable, low-cost, paper-based “lab-on-a-chip” for use in diagnosing liver, kidney, and... View Details

Keywords: awards; Educational Support Services; Educational Services

26 Sep 2017
News

Not a popularity contest

July 2015 (Revised March 2021)
Case

Proxy Contest at DuPont

By: Jay W. Lorsch and Emily McTague

On January 9, 2015, Nelson Peltz of Trian Fund Management launched a proxy fight for four out of the twelve seats on the DuPont board. The fund had previously published a public letter addressed to shareholders outlining its proposal to break the company into three... View Details

Keywords: Board Of Directors; Hedge Fund; Activist Investing; Activist Investors; Proxy Fight; Corporate Governance; Governing and Advisory Boards; Investment Activism; Chemical Industry; United States

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01 Sep 2004
News

HBS Business Plan Contest

The School’s eighth annual Business Plan Contest proved that entrepreneurship is alive and well at HBS: Close to forty teams entered plans to be judged by a panel of experts. This year’s traditional track winner was Extend Fertility,... View Details

01 Jun 2007
News

Students Top Marketing Contest

In January, Melissa Lau, Yanlin Liu, and Deena Malkina (all HBS ’08) took home top honors in Rice University’s seventh annual Marketing Case competition, besting student teams from nine other business schools, including Kellogg, Stanford, and Sloan. With the teams... View Details

Keywords: Computer and Electronic Product Manufacturing; Manufacturing

Contested Meanings of Freedom

In 1886, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down a law that prohibited employers from paying wages in company store scrip and mandated monthly wage payments. The court held that the legislature could not pre-scribe mandatory wage contracts for legally competent... View Details