Publications

September 2001 (Revised October 2001)
Case

Priceline.com v. Microsoft (A)

Describes Priceline's patent of its "reverse auction" pricing mechanism, its discussions with Microsoft regarding Microsoft's license of the patent for its Expedia service, Microsoft's subsequent use of the technology without a license, and Priceline's decision whether... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Technological Innovation; Patents; Rights; Business or Company Management; Strategy; Software; Information Technology Industry

17 Sep 2021
News

Clearing the Path to Citizenship

When Xiao Wang (MBA 2014) and his parents immigrated to the United States from China three decades ago, the process was a difficult and expensive one. The family spent the equivalent of five months’ rent on... View Details

31 Mar 2009
First Look

First Look: March 31, 2009

equity and other institutional investors and (2) Congress should consider a new statute to streamline the recapitalization of bank holding companies by moving them outside... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

26 Jan 2022
Blog Post

Video: HBS Dean Srikant Datar Introduces the Case Method Centennial

example of how it could be done at Harvard Law School. His visionary approach has not only endured for a century here at HBS, but also had an impact on hundreds of other business schools, thousands of companies, View Details

Article

The Learning Effects of Monitoring

By: Dennis Campbell, Marc Epstein and F. Asis Martinez-Jerez

This paper investigates the relationship between monitoring, decision making, and learning among lower-level employees. We exploit a field-research setting in which business units vary in the "tightness" with which they monitor employee decisions. We find that tighter... View Details

Keywords: Learning; Business or Company Management; Decision Making; Employees; Research; Resignation and Termination; Rights; Business Units; Governance Controls; Performance; Motivation and Incentives

October 2016 (Revised January 2017)
Supplement

Bally Total Fitness (B): The Fall, 2005–2016

By: John R. Wells and Gabriel Ellsworth

By many measures the largest health-club chain in the United States in the early 2000s, Bally Total Fitness sold most of its remaining fitness clubs to 24 Hour Fitness in 2014 and disappeared from the industry top 100 rankings. After Bally was bedeviled by accounting... View Details

2017
Working Paper

Peer Effects on the United States Supreme Court

By: Matthew Lilley, Richard Holden and Michael Keane

Using data on essentially every US Supreme Court decision since 1946, we estimate a model of peer effects on the Court. We consider both the impact of justice ideology and justice votes on the votes of their peers. To identify these peer effects we use two instruments.... View Details

Keywords: Supreme Court; Peer Effects; Voting Behavior; Legal System; Courts and Trials; Voting; Behavior

SSRN

01 Dec 2008
News

Lesson from the Fall

Skilling’s conduct will reopen discussions of what was the real offense committed by Skilling. The answer to this question is important because many of Skilling’s allegedly fraudulent activities fall into the “shadowed space” or “penumbra” between the clear light of... View Details

Keywords: Malcolm S. Salter; Oil and Gas Extraction; Oil and Gas Extraction; Oil and Gas Extraction; Oil and Gas Extraction

17 Sep 2019
Blog Post

What to Expect from your First Week at HBS

year ago, I began pursuing a JD/MBA at Harvard Law School and interned this past summer for the UN in Cambodia before ending up across the river at HBS to start my MBA. Expectation vs. Reality My... View Details

12 Jul 2020
Book

The Harvard Business School Faculty Summer Reader 2020

as she tracks leads and confronts complex mysteries across 25 books. I’m glad that John Lescroart is still writing about lawyer Dismas Hardy and police inspector Abe Glitzky (half-Black, half-Jewish) View Details

Keywords: by Staff

April–May 2005
Article

Markets for Partially-Contractible Knowledge: Bootstrapping Versus Bundling

By: James J Anton and Dennis A. Yao

We discuss how a seller can appropriate rents when selling knowledge that lacks legal property rights by solving either an expropriation or a valuation problem and then analyze how seller rents increase when a portion of the intellectual property (IP) can be protected.... View Details

Keywords: Knowledge; Markets; Rights; Valuation; Problems and Challenges; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques; Intellectual Property; Strategy

Read Now

January 1989 (Revised April 1991)
Case

General Electric: Valley Forge (A)

By: Robert L. Simons

A series of eight vignette cases designed to be taught in one classroom session. This case describes a potential problem in the way that General Electric has billed the government under a large defense contract. Designed to allow students to discuss what actions top... View Details

Keywords: Government Administration; Contracts; Policy; Accounting; Management Teams; Business and Government Relations; Industrial Products Industry

October 2008 (Revised September 2009)
Case

Consumer Lending in Japan: Citi CFJ (A)

By: J. Gunnar Trumbull and Akiko Kanno

Despite a tradition of high household savings, Japan has supported a dynamic and technically sophisticated consumer-lending sector. The high profitability of the sector has periodically attracted interest from domestic banks as well as international investors. Most... View Details

Keywords: Mergers and Acquisitions; Financing and Loans; Foreign Direct Investment; Personal Finance; Courts and Trials; Business and Government Relations; Banking Industry; Japan

2014
Working Paper

Hidden Substitutes

By: John William Hatfield and Scott Duke Kominers

In this paper, we show that preferences exhibiting some forms of complementarity in fact have an underlying substitutable structure. Specifically, we show that some preferences that are not substitutable in the setting of many-to-one matching with contracts become... View Details

Keywords: Many-to-One Matching; Many-to-Many Matching; Stability; Substitutes; Matching With Contracts; Slot-Specific Priorities; Sherlock; Market Design; Contracts; Marketplace Matching; Balance and Stability

Read Now

01 Sep 2010
News

Letters to the Editor

observer at all corporation board meetings. However, in order to be effective, the guidance provided by law should be more detailed than it is at present. In addition, the SEC ought to give guidance on remuneration of executives. Monroe... View Details

Keywords: Securities, Commodities, and Other Financial Investments; Securities, Commodities, and Other Financial Investments

October 2010
Case

Cherie Blair: Inventing Herself

By: Boris Groysberg, Robin Abrahams and Lindsay Tanne

Cherie Blair was famous, or infamous, in the United Kingdom as first lady from 1997 to 2007. Her marriage to Tony Blair, however, was the result of her own groundbreaking career in law--a career she fought to keep during the 10 years of her husband's tenure as Prime... View Details

Keywords: Work-Life Balance; Success; Lawsuits and Litigation; Government Administration; United Kingdom

08 Jan 2001
Research & Ideas

Can Japan Compete? [Part Two]

themselves and new industries will grow. The number-one priority is to change the competition laws and the whole approach to regulating competition. Without competitive... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace & Hilah Geer

April 2012
Article

The Impact of Relative Standards on the Propensity to Disclose

By: Alessandro Acquisti, Leslie John and George Loewenstein

Two sets of studies illustrate the comparative nature of disclosure behavior. The first set investigates how divulgence is affected by signals about others' readiness to divulge. Study 1A shows a "herding" effect, such that survey respondents are more willing to... View Details

Keywords: Rights; Surveys; Management Practices and Processes; Ethics; Corporate Disclosure; Judgments; Consumer Behavior; Standards

February 1990 (Revised March 1990)
Case

Quantum Semiconductor, Inc.

By: Janice H. Hammond and Roy D. Shapiro

Quantum is faced with a difficult ethical dilemma--industry studies provide evidence that chemicals used in semiconductor manufacturing may cause women working in fabrication cleanrooms to suffer a higher likelihood of spontaneous abortions. The possibility of other... View Details

Keywords: Safety; Prejudice and Bias; Law; Equality and Inequality; Cost; Production; Ethics; Health; Gender; Semiconductor Industry