Publications

20 Oct 2008
Research & Ideas

The Seven Things That Surprise New CEOs

reporting on results and management's decisions. Surprise Six: Pleasing Shareholders Is Not The Goal Warning signs: Executives and board members judge actions by their effect on stock price. Analysts who don't understand the business push for View Details

Keywords: by Michael E. Porter, Jay W. Lorsch & Nitin Nohria

25 Oct 2013
Working Paper Summaries

Management: Theory and Practice, and Cases

Keywords: by Richard L. Nolan; Education

Research Summary

Overview

By: Shunyuan Zhang

Professor Zhang uses machine learning to address marketing problems that have arisen within the nascent sharing economy. She conducts rigorous analyses of structured and unstructured data generated by new sharing economy platforms to address important issues emerging... View Details

November 2024
Supplement

AlphaGo (C): Birth of a New Intelligence

By: Shikhar Ghosh and Shweta Bagai

This case, the final of a three-part series, explores DeepMind's pivotal transition from mastering games to solving real-world scientific challenges. In December 2020, DeepMind's AI system AlphaFold 2 achieved a breakthrough by solving protein folding—a 50-year-old... View Details

Keywords: Autonomy; Deep Learning; Drug Discovery; Healthcare Innovation; Neural Networks; Scientific Research; Technology Startup; AI and Machine Learning; Technological Innovation; Research and Development; Business Model; Business Strategy; Open Source Distribution; Technology Industry; United States

October 2023
Article

Speedy Activists: Firm Response Time to Sociopolitical Events Influences Consumer Behavior

By: Jimin Nam, Maya Balakrishnan, Julian De Freitas and Alison Wood Brooks

Organizations face growing pressure from their consumers and stakeholders to take public stances on sociopolitical issues. However, many are hesitant to do so lest they make missteps, promises they cannot keep, appear inauthentic, or alienate consumers, employees, or... View Details

Keywords: Brands and Branding; Public Opinion; Social Media; Social Issues

May–June 2023
Article

Need for Speed: The Impact of In-Process Delays on Customer Behavior in Online Retail

By: Santiago Gallino, Nil Karacaoglu and Antonio Moreno

The impact of delays has been widely studied in various offline services. The focus of this study is online services, and we explore the impact of in-process delays—measured by website speed—on customer behavior. We leverage novel retail and website speed data to... View Details

Keywords: Online Retail; Quasi-experiments; Abandonment; Synthetic Control; E-commerce; Internet and the Web; Consumer Behavior; Policy; Retail Industry

2021
Chapter

Towards a Unified Framework for Fair and Stable Graph Representation Learning

By: Chirag Agarwal, Himabindu Lakkaraju and Marinka Zitnik

As the representations output by Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are increasingly employed in real-world applications, it becomes important to ensure that these representations are fair and stable. In this work, we establish a key connection between counterfactual... View Details

Keywords: Graph Neural Networks; AI and Machine Learning; Prejudice and Bias

2024
Working Paper

What Triggers National Stock Market Jumps?

By: Scott R. Baker, Nicholas Bloom, Steven J. Davis and Marco Sammon

We examine newspapers the day after major stock-market jumps to evaluate the proximate cause, geographic source, and clarity of these events from 1900 in the US, 1930 in the UK and 1980 in 12 other countries. We find four main results. First, the United States plays an... View Details

Keywords: Uncertainty; Policy Uncertainty; Stock Market; Financial Markets; Volatility; Risk and Uncertainty; Policy; Newspapers

October 2019
Article

Adaptive Platform Trials: Definition, Design, Conduct and Reporting Considerations

By: Derek C. Angus, Brian M. Alexander, Scott Berry, Meredith Buxton, Roger Lewis, Melissa Paoloni, Steven A. R. Webb, Steven Arnold, Anna Barker, Donald A. Berry, Marc J. M. Bonten, Mary Brophy, Christopher Butler, Timothy F. Cloughesy, Lennie P. G. Derde, Laura J. Esserman, Ryan Ferguson, Louis Fiore, Sarah C. Gaffey, J. Michael Gaziano, Kathy Giusti, Herman Goossens, Stephane Heritier, Bradley Hyman, Michael Krams, Kay Larholt, Lisa M. LaVange, Philip Lavori, Andrew W. Lo, Alexander J. London, Victoria Manax, Colin McArthur, Genevieve O’Neill, Giovanni Parmigiani, Jane Perlmutter, Elizabeth A. Petzold, Craig Ritchie, Kathryn M. Rowan, Christopher W. Seymour, Nathan I. Shapiro, Diane M. Simeone, Bradley Smith, Bradley Spellberg, Ariel Dora Stern, Lorenzo Trippa, Mark Trusheim, Kert Viele, Patrick Y. Wen and Janet Woodcock

Researchers, clinicians, policymakers, and patients are increasingly interested in questions about therapeutic interventions that are difficult or costly to answer with traditional, free-standing, parallel-group randomized controlled trials (RCTs). Examples include... View Details

Keywords: Adaptive Platform Trials; Health Testing and Trials

2017
Working Paper

Economic Uncertainty and Earnings Management

By: Luke C.D. Stein and Charles C.Y. Wang

In the presence of managerial short-termism and asymmetric information about skill and effort provision, firms may opportunistically shift earnings from uncertain to more certain times. We document empirically that when financial markets are less certain about a firm's... View Details

Keywords: Discretionary Accruals; Uncertainty; Implied Volatility; Earnings Response Coefficient; Risk and Uncertainty; Earnings Management; Financial Markets

SSRN

2015
Chapter

Managerial Responsibility and the Purpose of Business: Doing One's Job Well

By: Nien-he Hsieh

Business managers routinely make decisions that significantly affect the lives of others in both positive and negative ways. In the light of these wide-ranging effects, much scholarship has been devoted to specifying the responsibilities of managers of for-profit... View Details

Keywords: Business or Company Management; Goals and Objectives

June 2015
Case

1996 Welfare Reform in the United States

By: Matthew Weinzierl, Katrina Flanagan and Alastair Su

On August 22, 1996, U.S. President Bill Clinton signed into law the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA)—a dramatic reform of the American system of economic assistance for the poor that, as its title suggested, attempted to... View Details

Keywords: Welfare State; Public Goods; Moral Hazard; Median Voter Theorem; Poverty; Welfare; Public Administration Industry; United States

Educators

Article

Seeking the Roots of Entrepreneurship: Insights from Behavioral Economics

By: Thomas Astebro, Holger Herz, Ramana Nanda and Roberto A. Weber

There is a growing body of evidence that many entrepreneurs seem to enter and persist in entrepreneurship despite earning low risk-adjusted returns. This has lead to attempts to provide explanations—using both standard economic theory and behavioral economics—for why... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Personal Characteristics; Attitudes; Behavior

May 2014
Case

Cycle for Survival (A)

By: Das Narayandas, Kerry Herman and Noah Fisher

Katie Kotkins, director of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center's (MSKCC) Cycle for Survival fundraising event, had to determine the best avenue for continuing the event's success and momentum after its founder, Jennifer (Jen) Goodman Linn (HBS '99) passed away... View Details

Keywords: Not For Profit; Cancer; Partnerships; United States; Fundraising; Nonprofit Organizations; United States

Educators

2014
Working Paper

Opting Out of Good Governance

By: C. Fritz Foley, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, Jonathan Greenstein and Eric Zwick

Cross-listing on a U.S. exchange does not bond foreign firms to follow the corporate governance rules of that exchange. Hand-collected data show that 80% of cross-listed firms opt out of at least one exchange governance rule, instead committing to observe the rules of... View Details

Keywords: Financial Markets; Globalization; Corporate Governance

2009
Working Paper

Corporate Misgovernance at the World Bank

By: Ashwin Kaja and Eric D. Werker

We test for evidence of corporate misgovernance at the World Bank. Most major decisions at the World Bank are made by its Board of Executive Directors. However, in any given year the majority of the Bank's member countries do not get a chance to serve on this powerful... View Details

Keywords: Developing Countries and Economies; Banks and Banking; Financing and Loans; International Finance; Corporate Governance; Governing and Advisory Boards