Publications

January 2018
Article

Who Gets Hired? The Importance of Competition Among Applicants

By: Edward P. Lazear, Kathryn L. Shaw and Christopher Stanton

Despite seeming to be an important requirement for hiring, the concept of a slot is absent from virtually all of economics. Macroeconomic studies of vacancies and search come closest, but the implications of slot-based hiring for individual worker outcomes has not been... View Details

Keywords: Hiring; Selection and Staffing; Employment; Competency and Skills

2007
Working Paper

Competition in Modular Clusters

By: Carliss Y. Baldwin and C. Jason Woodard

The last twenty years have witnessed the rise of disaggregated "clusters," "networks," or "ecosystems" of firms. In these clusters the activities of R&D, product design, production, distribution, and system integration may be split up among hundreds or even thousands... View Details

Keywords: Price; Profit; Digital Platforms; Industry Clusters; Competition; Horizontal Integration; Vertical Integration

Web

Community Values | About

the heart of a School-wide aspiration: to make HBS a model of the highest standards essential to responsible leadership in the modern business world. Our values are a set of guiding principles for all that we do wherever we are and with... View Details

22 Jan 2008
Research & Ideas

New Challenges in Leading Professional Services

New Model for High Performance But lately the challenges for professional service firms (PSFs) have been growing in size and complexity, and the excitement is more the type you need a stomach antacid to control. The dilemma, says HBS... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Consulting; Accounting; Legal Services

January 2020 (Revised March 2020)
Case

LOLA: Do You Know What's in Your Tampon?

By: Leonard A. Schlesinger and Aldo Sesia

LOLA is a direct-to-consumer (DTC) business launched in 2015. What started as a company to provide women with organic and transparent material-labeled tampons via a subscription model, had, by 2019 evolved to include additional menstrual and sexual wellness products.... View Details

Keywords: Direct-to-consumer; Channels; Disruption; Business Model; Brands and Branding; Internet and the Web; Strategy; Retail Industry; United States; Canada

Web

Entrepreneurship - Faculty & Research

Faculty Research In 2019, Xendit, a growth-stage Southeast Asia (SEA) fintech venture based in Jakarta, was looking to hire a Head of Sales and Head of Product to lead its next phase of growth. Founded by Moses Lo and Tessa Wijaya, Xendit provided payment... View Details

17 Jul 2007
First Look

First Look: July 17, 2007

shared platform, such as Visa, DVD, or Linux, multiple firms collaborate in developing the platform's technology then compete in offering users different but compatible versions of the platform. This article examines factors that favor proprietary versus shared View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

October 2023 (Revised April 2024)
Case

Veeva Systems: The Next Frontier

By: Satish Tadikonda and William Marks

Born out of a desire to bring technological advances in enterprise software into the healthcare vertical, Peter Gassner and Matt Wallach founded Veeva to bring life sciences companies into the digital age for data management in both the commercial and R&D sectors. Over... View Details

Keywords: Business Model; Governance Compliance; Applications and Software; Growth Management; Expansion; Technology Industry

March 2010 (Revised November 2010)
Case

Pandora Radio: Fire Unprofitable Customers?

By: Willy C. Shih and Halle Alicia Tecco

Pandora Radio is at a crossroads. Founder Tim Westergren has just been told by a well known VC to get rid of his unprofitable customers in order to get his costs down, but Westergren is not sure that such actions are consistent with his company's business model.... View Details

Keywords: Business Model; Customer Satisfaction; Music Entertainment; Venture Capital; Profit; Growth and Development Strategy; Consumer Behavior; Internet; Media and Broadcasting Industry

24 Oct 2018
Sharpening Your Skills

Startup or Established Company? Which Is Best for You?

have more role models to learn from and stronger teams to collaborate with, a clear direction, and a mature board. The role you consider may have a narrow scope, but could offer deeper learning and of course great benefits, compensation,... View Details

Keywords: by Julia B. Austin

2023
Working Paper

Can Evidence-Based Information Shift Preferences Towards Trade Policy?

By: Laura Alfaro, Maggie X. Chen and Davin Chor

Amid public skepticism about trade, we investigate whether evidence-based information--a concise statement of a research ﬁnding--can shape preferences towards trade policy. Across survey experiments conducted over 2018-2022 on U.S. general population samples, we... View Details

Keywords: Evidence; Preference; Trade Policy; Information; Trade; Policy; Attitudes

April 2023
Article

The Preference Survey Module: A Validated Instrument for Measuring Risk, Time, and Social Preferences

By: Armin Falk, Anke Becker, Thomas Dohmen, David B. Huffman and Uwe Sunde

Incentivized choice experiments are a key approach to measuring preferences in economics but are also costly. Survey measures are a low-cost alternative but can suffer from additional forms of measurement error due to their hypothetical nature. This paper seeks to... View Details

Keywords: Survey Validation; Experiment; Preference Measurement; Surveys; Economics; Behavior; Measurement and Metrics

August 2017 (Revised December 2018)
Case

Tamarin App: Natural Language Processing

By: Srikant M. Datar and Caitlin N. Bowler

In this case, students explore the challenges of using sentiment analysis to monitor and understand public perception around a software application, Tamarin SEO App. Technical topics include building a filtering classifier using naive Bayes and sentiment analysis This... View Details

Keywords: Data Science; Branding; Data Analytics; Analytics and Data Science; Brands and Branding; Analysis; Perception; Planning

Article

Causal Inference in Accounting Research

By: Ian D. Gow, David F. Larcker and Peter C. Reiss

This paper examines the approaches accounting researchers use to draw causal inferences using observational (or non-experimental) data. The vast majority of accounting research papers draws causal inferences notwithstanding the well-known difficulties in doing so with... View Details

Keywords: Accounting; Research