Convex Ordering Cost - Publications - Faculty & Research

21 Feb 2005
Op-Ed

Is Business Management a Profession?

every medical student is now required to master. The medical school curriculum proceeds from the premise that in order to diagnose and treat disease, the would-be physician must have a firm grounding in what science (or, perhaps more... View Details

Keywords: by Rakesh Khurana, Nitin Nohria & Daniel Penrice

24 Jul 2017
Research & Ideas

People Have an Irrational Need to Complete 'Sets' of Things

items in order to complete a so-called “Global Survival Kit”—in other words, a pseudo-set. This page had a globe on it, too, but instead of location markers, it featured a line that grew closer to circumnavigating the globe each time an... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

04 Jun 2001
What Do You Think?

What’s the Future of the Subscription Model?

information to music in order to sell advertising. As questions are being raised about the ability of telephone service providers, newspapers, and others to sell subscriptions in the future, I recently asked readers what the future of... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

25 Jan 2010
Research & Ideas

A Macroeconomic View of the Current Economy

influencing the cost and availability of money, goods, and services. Macroeconomic forces can conspire to make business more difficult, but they can also present opportunities to executives who know how to, for example, read a country's... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

10 Aug 2015
Research & Ideas

New Medical Devices Get To Patients Too Slowly

implantable defibrillators or transcatheter heart valves, the FDA's regulatory approval process appears to delay those approvals, which in turn adds to development costs borne by device manufacturers, according to Innovation under... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Health; Technology

23 Aug 2006
Op-Ed

The Real Wal-Mart Effect

Wal-Mart's domestic sales volume, U.S. consumers save on the order of $18 billion per year. And because Wal-Mart forces its competitors to charge lower prices as well, this figure is a fraction of the company's real impact. These kinds of... View Details

Keywords: by Pankaj Ghemawat & Ken A. Mark; Retail

08 Sep 2015
Research & Ideas

Knowledge Transfer: You Can't Learn Surgery By Watching

the topic based on his own experience as an outdoor wilderness instructor, an area in which the cost of failure is too high for people to learn only from their own experience. “Trial and error is not the way you want to learn rock... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Health

10 Sep 2020
Research & Ideas

The COVID Two-Step for Leaders: Protect and Pivot

achieving the complete elimination of all waste in pursuit of the most efficient methods.” The system is based on two principles: automation with a human touch, and each process producing only what is needed for the next process in a continuous flow. According to... View Details

Keywords: by Boris Groysberg and Katherine Connolly Baden

11 Feb 2020
Sharpening Your Skills

10 Rules Entrepreneurs Need to Know Before Adopting AI

moving target, potential customers are wary of costs and implementation complexities, and use cases, while powerful, are still lacking in many areas. Take advantage of uncertainty All this uncertainty is a fertile breeding ground for... View Details

Keywords: by Rocio Wu

01 Sep 2006
What Do You Think?

Are We Ready for Self-Management?

under the supervision of a "floating" manager responsible for several such stores. They received above-market pay, partially in the form of performance incentives. The result? More highly energized workers, better cost control,... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

08 Nov 2011
First Look

First Look: Nov. 8

structural estimation methods. Our results confirm the belief expressed by industry experts that in the fast-food drive-thru industry, customers trade off price and waiting time. More interestingly, our estimates indicate that consumers attribute a very high View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

26 Jul 2011
First Look

First Look: July 26

would create net benefits for society that contain salient costs frequently lack enough support for enactment because losses loom larger than gains. To address this consequence of loss aversion, we propose a policy-bundling technique in... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

06 Jan 2014
Research & Ideas

Technology Re-Emergence: Creating New Value for Old Innovations

introduced low cost production methods to manufacture highly accurate quartz watches. Swiss business historians refer to this as the "Quartz Crisis." Companies like Seiko and Casio seized the quartz market. By 1983, two-thirds... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Apparel & Accessories; Technology; Consumer Products

19 Oct 2021
Research & Ideas

Fed Up Workers and Supply Woes: What's Next for Dollar Stores?

data. But higher costs for materials, manufacturing, shipping and trucking, and COVID safety measures, coupled with unprecedented competition for workers, are testing the endurance of retailers, especially those who rely heavily on cheap... View Details

Keywords: by Christine Pazzanese, Harvard Gazette; Retail

02 Apr 2001
Research & Ideas

Not All M&As Are Alike—and That Matters

resources-processes-values framework. Resources refer to tangible and intangible assets, processes deal with activities that turn resources into goods and services, and values underpin decisions employees make and how they make them. (See the sidebar "Some View Details

Keywords: by Joseph L. Bower

26 Jun 2018
First Look

New Research and Ideas, June 26, 2018

analytic methods in a series of experiments across a range of hedonic products. The results suggest that hedonic learning follows a sequence of stages whose order matters and that the holistic stage is facilitated by attending to... View Details

Keywords: Dina Gerdeman

17 Jun 2015
Lessons from the Classroom

Excellence Comes From Saying No

counter-intuitive such as a focus on individual achievement." The Courage To Be Bad At the core of Frei's philosophy is an appeal that Harvard MBAs are not used to hearing: in order to achieve excellence, you need the courage to be... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

08 Oct 2008
Research & Ideas

Book Excerpt: A Sense of Urgency

someone to blame for the crisis. Suddenly, a rumor started that the plant manager had purposefully taken steps in the prior year in order to create the severe problems the company faced. Any energy to confront the facts and deal with the... View Details

Keywords: by John P. Kotter

14 Jan 2020
Research & Ideas

The Business Case for Becoming a Jack-of-All-Trades

handheld controller. Scientific researchers soon realized the potential for the knowledge embedded in the technology in a whole range of applications, and quickly wrote their own software code to use it. “It took the cost of doing... View Details