Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(1,975)
- Faculty Publications (560)
- January 2014
- Technical Note
Learning From Extreme Consumers
By: Jill Avery and Michael Norton
Traditional market research methods focus on understanding the average experiences of average consumers. This focus leads to gaps in our knowledge of consumer behavior and often fails to uncover insights that can drive revolutionary, rather than evolutionary... View Details
- October 2013
- Article
How Much to Make and How Much to Buy? An Analysis of Optimal Plural Sourcing Strategies
By: Phanish Puranam, Ranjay Gulati and Sourav Bhattacharya
While many theories of the firm seek to explain when firms make rather than buy, in practice, firms often make and buy the same input—they engage in plural sourcing. We argue that explaining the mix of external procurement and internal sourcing for the same input... View Details
- 2013
- Book
The Art of Negotiation: How to Improvise Agreement in a Chaotic World
By: Michael Wheeler
A member of the world-renowned Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School introduces the powerful next-generation approach to negotiation. For many years, two approaches to negotiation have prevailed: the "win-win" method exemplified in Getting to Yes by Roger... View Details
Keywords: Negotiation
- 2013
- Working Paper
Applying Random Coefficient Models to Strategy Research: Testing for Firm Heterogeneity, Predicting Firm-Specific Coefficients, and Estimating Strategy Trade-Offs
By: Juan Alcacer, Wilbur Chung, Ashton Hawk and Goncalo Pacheco-de-Almeida
Although Strategy research aims to understand how firm actions have differential effects on performance, most empirical research estimates the average effects of these actions across firms. This paper promotes Random Coefficients Models (RCMs) as an ideal empirical... View Details
- 2013
- Working Paper
Where do the Most Active Customers Originate and How Can Firms Keep Them Engaged?
By: Clarence Lee, E. Ofek and Thomas Steenburgh
In this paper, we study how firms offering Web services can acquire and develop an active customer base. We focus on two basic questions. First, how does the method of customer acquisition affect the way customers use the service to meet their own needs and to interact... View Details
- July–August 2013
- Article
A Joint Model of Usage and Churn in Contractual Settings
By: Eva Ascarza and Bruce G.S. Hardie
As firms become more customer-centric, concepts such as customer equity come to the fore. Any serious attempt to quantify customer equity requires modeling techniques that can provide accurate multiperiod forecasts of customer behavior. Although a number of researchers... View Details
- July 2013
- Case
Novozymes: Establishing the Cellulosic Ethanol Value Chain
By: Willy Shih and Sen Chai
As the world's largest producer of industrial enzymes, Novozymes had invested heavily for many years to bio-engineer enzymes that could break down cellulose into fermentable sugar. In 2010, the company had launched what it thought would become a breakthrough product... View Details
Keywords: System Complexity; Industrial Enzymes; Ethanol; Collulosic Ethanol; Fermentation; Genomics; Genetic Engineering; Value Chain; Assembling Value Chain; Energy Sources; Renewable Energy; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Innovation and Management; Innovation Strategy; Technological Innovation; Management; Growth and Development Strategy; Industry Growth; Production; Research; Research and Development; Science; Genetics; Natural Environment; Environmental Sustainability; Science-Based Business; Business Strategy; Commercialization; Vertical Integration; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Biotechnology Industry; Energy Industry; Denmark; United States
- June 2013 (Revised November 2022)
- Exercise
Competition Simulator Exercise
In the Competition Simulator Exercise, students explore through trial and error some important economic foundations of competitive strategy and managerial economics. In particular, the nine simulator exercises let students explore horizontal differentiation with and... View Details
Keywords: Competition; Economics; Game Theory; Competitive Strategy; Learning; Mathematical Methods; Analysis
- 2013
- Chapter
Privacy Breach Analysis in Social Networks
By: Frank Nagle
Over the past 5–10 years, online social networks have rapidly expanded, and as of March 2012 the largest online social network, Facebook, had over 901 million active members. The wealth of information users post in their social network profiles, as well as the... View Details
- April 2013
- Case
Managing with Analytics at Procter & Gamble
By: Thomas H. Davenport, Marco Iansiti and Alain Serels
Senior management at P&G has put a strong emphasis on using data to make "better, smarter, real-time business decisions." The Global Business Services (GBS) organization has developed tools, systems and processes to provide managers throughout P&G with direct access to... View Details
- September 2013
- Article
Cultures as Learning Laboratories: What Makes Some More Effective than Others?
By: Elaine Mosakowski, Goran Calic and P C Early
With a mandate to globalize, business school educators have increasingly embraced global service learning as an important technique for creating global mind-sets and enhancing cultural understanding in students. While we applaud this movement from the domestic to the... View Details
- 2013
- Article
The Strategic Fitness Process: A Collaborative Action Research Method for Developing Organizational Prototypes and Dynamic Capabilities
By: Michael Beer
Organizations underperform and sometimes fail because their leaders are unable to learn the unvarnished truth from relevant stakeholders about how the design and behavior of the organization is misaligned with its goals and strategy. The Strategic Fitness Process (SFP)... View Details
- 2014
- Working Paper
Bridging Science and Technology Through Academic-Industry Partnerships
By: Sen Chai and Willy C. Shih
Scientific research and its translation into commercialized technology is a driver of wealth creation and economic growth. Partnerships to foster the translational processes from public research organizations, such as universities and hospitals, to private firms are a... View Details
- 2013
- Chapter
Weighted Generating Functions for Type II Lattices and Codes
By: Noam D. Elkies and Scott Duke Kominers
We give a new structural development of harmonic polynomials on Hamming space, and harmonic weight enumerators of binary linear codes, that parallels one approach to harmonic polynomials on Euclidean space and weighted theta functions of Euclidean lattices. Namely, we... View Details
Keywords: Mathematical Methods
- Article
Assent-maximizing Social Choice
By: Katherine A. Baldiga and Jerry R. Green
We take a decision theoretic approach to the classic social choice problem, using data on the frequency of choice problems to compute social choice functions. We define a family of social choice rules that depend on the population's preferences and on the probability... View Details
- December 2012
- Case
Delwarca Software Remote Support Unit
By: Roy D. Shapiro and Paul E. Morrison
Delwarca Software provides business software to large corporate clients around the world. The firm serves customers who prefer to assemble corporate solutions using a combination of software programs from various suppliers rather than implementing a single enterprise... View Details
- 2014
- Working Paper
Search-Based Peer Firms: Aggregating Investor Perceptions Through Internet Co-Searches
By: Charles M.C. Lee, Paul Ma and Charles C.Y. Wang
Applying a "co-search" algorithm to Internet traffic at the SEC's EDGAR web-site, we develop a novel method for identifying economically-related peer firms and for measuring their relative importance. Our results show that firms appearing in chronologically adjacent... View Details
- November 2012
- Article
The Variance of Non-Parametric Treatment Effect Estimators in the Presence of Clustering
By: Samuel G. Hanson and Adi Sunderam
Non-parametric estimators of treatment effects are often applied in settings where clustering may be important. We provide a general methodology for consistently estimating the variance of a large class of non-parametric estimators, including the simple matching... View Details
- Fall 2012
- Article
Innovation Strategy and Entry Deterrence
By: Ozge Turut and Elie Ofek
We model an incumbent's decision to pursue radical or incremental innovation when facing a rival entrant. The radical innovation may yield lucrative financial returns but entails significant technological and market-related uncertainties. It is also particularly... View Details
- 2012
- Article
Mutual Fund Trading Pressure: Firm-Level Stock Price Impact and Timing of SEOs
By: Mozaffar N. Khan, Leonid Kogan and George Serafeim
In tests of the equity market timing theory of external finance, the prior literature has used overvaluation identifiers such as high market-to-book and high prior returns that are likely correlated with other determinants of SEOs. We use price pressure resulting from... View Details