Quality Improvement - Publications - Faculty & Research

July 2011
Article

Mixed Source

By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Gaston Llanes

We study competitive interaction between a profit-maximizing firm that sells software and complementary services and a free open source competitor. We examine the firm's choice of business model between the proprietary model (where all software modules are... View Details

Keywords: Competition; Open Source Distribution; Profit; Sales; Applications and Software; Service Operations; Business Model; Decision Choices and Conditions; Quality; Value Creation

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November 1993 (Revised March 1997)
Case

Romeo Engine Plant

By: Amy P. Hutton and Robert S. Kaplan

A newly reopened automobile engine plant has been organized along total quality and teamwork principles. Employees now is to solve problems and ensure quality, rather than watch parts being produced. New operating and financial systems have been installed to promote... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Change and Adaptation; Motivation and Incentives; Management Practices and Processes; Groups and Teams; Performance Efficiency; Performance Improvement; Manufacturing Industry; Auto Industry

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30 Aug 2016
First Look

August 30, 2016

patient-reported outcomes, at an accelerated pace. These comprehensive sets are integrated with electronic health records and incorporated into clinical practice, and they will underpin internal quality View Details

Keywords: Carmen Nobel

10 Apr 2013
Research & Ideas

Learning Curve: Making the Most of Outsourcing

the vendor of outsourced services can improve the efficiency and perhaps the quality of services delivered—particularly in health care, where outsourcing is on the rise. In research recently published in the... View Details

Keywords: by Paul Guttry; Health

09 Jul 2012
Research & Ideas

The Unconscious Executive

addition, unconscious thought might be more dependable than conscious thought when we are low on energy. Preliminary research also indicates that using odor or sound cues during sleep might activate our unconscious mind and improve... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

December 2022
Case

Mission Produce in 2022

By: Forest Reinhardt, Jose B. Alvarez and Natalie Kindred

Founded by CEO Steve Barnard in 1983, California-based Mission Produce was a leading supplier of Hass avocados with a global sourcing, marketing, and distribution network and $892 million in 2021 sales. Barnard had been influential in the global avocado trade’s... View Details

Keywords: Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Food and Beverage Industry; Retail Industry; Consumer Products Industry; United States; California; Peru; Guatemala; Colombia; Mexico; Chile

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September 2008 (Revised August 2010)
Case

Boston Teacher Residency: Developing a Strategy for Long-term Impact

By: Stacey M. Childress, Geoff Eckman Marietta and Sara Suchman

In June 2008, Jesse Solomon, the founding director of the Boston Teacher Residency (BTR), faced an important decision about the organization's strategic direction. Since its founding in 2003, 125 of its graduates had joined the Boston Public Schools (BPS) and BTR had... View Details

Keywords: Restructuring; Teaching; Entrepreneurship; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Performance Improvement; Business Strategy; Education Industry; Boston

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August 2019
Case

Twiggle: E-Commerce with Semantic Search

By: Shane Greenstein and Danielle Golan

Four years after being founded, in 2014, by former Google executives Amir Konigsberg (CEO) and Adi Avidor (CTO), Twiggle had developed a search enhancement that plugged into an online merchant’s existing framework. The company utilized advanced structuring and... View Details

Keywords: Search Technology; Customer Acquisition; Internet and the Web; Technological Innovation; Commercialization; Growth and Development Strategy; E-commerce; Technology Industry; Israel

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2024
Working Paper

The Revised-Is-Quality Heuristic: Why Consumers Prefer Products Labeled as Revised

By: Ximena Garcia-Rada, Leslie K. John, Ed O’Brien and Michael I. Norton

From downloading never-ending updates to tracking ever-newer releases, consumers today are surrounded by revised products that purport to have improved upon their predecessors. Seven experiments examine when and why consumers rely on a “revised-is-quality”... View Details

Keywords: Product Change; Versioning; Expectancy Effects; Heuristics; Intuitive Processing; Product Marketing; Change; Perception; Consumer Behavior

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Article

Highways and Spatial Location within Cities: Evidence from India

By: Ejaz Ghani, Arti Grover Goswami and William R. Kerr

We investigate the impact of the Golden Quadrilateral (GQ) highway project on the spatial organization and efficiency of manufacturing activity. The GQ project upgraded the quality and width of 3,633 miles of road in India. We use a difference-in-difference estimation... View Details

Keywords: Infrastructure; Transportation; India

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2022
Working Paper

Coordination and Incumbency Advantage in Multi-Party Systems: Evidence from French Elections

By: Kevin Dano, Francesco Ferlenga, Vincenzo Galasso, Caroline Le Pennec and Vincent Pons

In theory, free and fair elections can improve the selection of politicians and incentivize them to exert effort. In practice, incumbency advantage and coordination issues may lead to the (re)election of bad politicians. We ask whether these two forces compound each... View Details

Keywords: Political Parties; Incumbent Politicians; Democracy; Political Elections; Competitive Advantage

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17 May 2004
Research & Ideas

Why We Don’t Study Corporate Responsibility

welfare issues. In part this can be attributed to the rising influence of basic social scientific disciplines, which improved the quality of research but also oriented researchers toward making contributions... View Details

Keywords: by Manda Salls

10 May 2010
Research & Ideas

What Top Scholars Say About Leadership

negotiated relationship that individuals have with other individuals or that individuals have with society. In addition, there is a cultural quality about what constitutes a leader that changes across social situations, whether we are... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Education

16 Feb 2012
Working Paper Summaries

Platform Competition Under Partial Belief Advantage

Keywords: by Hanna Halaburda & Yaron Yehezkel; Consumer Products

2022
Article

Social Interactivity in Live Video Experiences Reduces Loneliness

By: Benjamin T. Kaveladze, Robert R. Morris, Rosa Victoria Dimitrova-Gammeltoft, Amit Goldenberg, James J. Gross, Judd Antin, Melissa Sandgren and Melissa C. Thomas-Hunt

Background: Loneliness, especially when chronic, can substantially reduce one's quality of life. However, positive social experiences might help to break cycles of loneliness by promoting more prosocial cognitions and behaviors. Internet-mediated live video... View Details

Keywords: Lonelines; Social Connection; Internet-mediated Communication; Experiment; Emotions; Well-being; Interpersonal Communication; Internet

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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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2014
Working Paper

The Diseconomies of Queue Pooling: An Empirical Investigation of Emergency Department Length of Stay

By: Hummy Song, Anita L. Tucker and Karen L. Murrell

We conduct an empirical investigation of the impact of queue management on patients' average wait time and length of stay (LOS). Using an Emergency Department's (ED) patient-level data from 2007 to 2010, we find that patients' average wait time and LOS are longer when... View Details