Publications

2020
Working Paper

EMEs and COVID-19: Shutting Down in a World of Informal and Tiny Firms

By: Laura Alfaro, Oscar Becerra and Marcela Eslava

Emerging economies are characterized by an extremely high prevalence of informality, small-firm employment and jobs not fit for working from home. These features factor into how the COVID-19 crisis has affected the economy. We develop a framework that, based on... View Details

Keywords: COVID-19; Emerging Economies; Informality; Firm-size Distribution; Health Pandemics; Developing Countries and Economies; Economy; System Shocks; Latin America

February 2010
Case

Shurgard Self-Storage: Expansion to Europe (Abridged)

By: Richard G. Hamermesh

Shurgard, a U.S.-based firm that rents storage facilities to consumers and small businesses, is considering financing options for rapid expansion of its European operations. Five years after entering Europe, Shurgard Europe has opened 17 facilities in Belgium, France,... View Details

Keywords: Business Model; Business Growth and Maturation; Multinational Firms and Management; Logistics; Corporate Entrepreneurship; Trade; Equity; Corporate Finance; United States; Europe

Educators

14 Sep 2021
HBS Seminar

Dashun Wang, Northwestern

2022
Article

Fairness via Explanation Quality: Evaluating Disparities in the Quality of Post hoc Explanations

By: Jessica Dai, Sohini Upadhyay, Ulrich Aivodji, Stephen Bach and Himabindu Lakkaraju

As post hoc explanation methods are increasingly being leveraged to explain complex models in high-stakes settings, it becomes critical to ensure that the quality of the resulting explanations is consistently high across all subgroups of a population. For instance, it... View Details

Keywords: Prejudice and Bias; Mathematical Methods; Research; Analytics and Data Science

September 2008 (Revised October 2008)
Case

Marc Abrahams: Annals of an Improbable Entrepreneur

By: Boris Groysberg and Michael Slind

Marc Abrahams was a media entrepreneur who specialized in science humor. In 2008, he sought to boost the scale and monetization potential of his business. That business, called Improbable Research, encompassed a magazine (Annals of Improbable Research), a high-profile... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Selection and Staffing; Human Capital; Growth and Development Strategy; Brands and Branding; Personal Development and Career

14 Dec 2015
HBS Seminar

Brian Tomlin, Professor of Business Administration, Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth

Web

Behavioral Finance & Financial Stability

Bubbles for Fama By: Robin Greenwood , Andrei Shleifer & Yang You FEB 2017 Authors Greenwood, Shleifer, and You evaluate Eugene Fama's claim that stock markets do not exhibit price bubbles using US and international stock return data.... View Details

March 2021
Article

The Customer May Not Always Be Right: Customer Compatibility and Service Performance

By: Ryan W. Buell, Dennis Campbell and Frances X. Frei

This paper investigates the impact of customer compatibility – the degree of fit between the needs of customers and the capabilities of the operations serving them – on customer experiences and firm performance. We use a variance decomposition analysis to quantify the... View Details

Keywords: Customer Compatibility; Satisfaction; Profitability; Service Operations; Customer Relationship Management; Customer Satisfaction; Performance

September 2016
Case

Hotel Vertu: Financing the Venture in the Boutique Hotel Industry

By: Howard H. Stevenson and Michael J. Roberts

Two recent MBA graduates are considering a business opportunity in the boutique hotel industry. Having found a seemingly attractive property in Savannah, Georgia, Yvonne D'Arcy and Elisabeth Whiting face questions about financing, deal structure, and unequal power... View Details

Keywords: Business Ventures; Entrepreneurship; Financing and Loans; Accommodations Industry

Educators

2020
Working Paper

Should Firms Move Talent from the Geographic Periphery to Hubs? A Strategic Human Capital Perspective

By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Victoria Sevcenko and Tarun Khanna

A longstanding literature holds that firms should hire and move talent from the geographic periphery to hubs as a means to create value from human capital. They do so, however, at the risk of losing the worker to rivals located in the same geographic hub,... View Details

Keywords: Geographic Location; Selection and Staffing; Employment; Residency; Technology Industry; India

25 Feb 2015
HBS Seminar

Jeffrey Schnapp, Harvard Graduate School of Design

11 Oct 2016
First Look

October 11, 2016

two forms: firms that are characterized by high camaraderie between workers, and firms that are characterized by high clarity from management. We document that firms exhibiting both high purpose and clarity have systematically higher... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

08 Jul 2010
Working Paper Summaries

Surviving the Global Financial Crisis: Foreign Direct Investment and Establishment Performance

Keywords: by Laura Alfaro & Maggie Chen

January–February 2024
Article

Shared Service Delivery Can Increase Client Engagement: A Study of Shared Medical Appointments

By: Ryan W. Buell, Kamalini Ramdas, Nazlı Sönmez, Kavitha Srinivasan and Rengaraj Venkatesh

Problem Definition: Clients and service providers alike often consider one-on-one service delivery to be ideal, assuming – perhaps unquestioningly – that devoting individualized attention best improves client outcomes. In contrast, in shared service delivery, clients... View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Customer Satisfaction; Outcome or Result; Performance Improvement

Article

Why A Behavioral Theory of Labor Negotiations Remains a Triumph at Fifty but the Labels 'Distributive' and 'Integrative' Should Be Retired

By: James K. Sebenius

Richard Walton and Robert McKersie's closeness to practice, disciplinary rigor, and successful search for powerful generalizations help explain the lasting impact of the Behavioral Theory of Labor Relations. Ironically, the names they chose for the fundamental... View Details

Keywords: Bargaining; Integrative Bargaining; Distributive Bargaining; Negotiation; Labor Unions

October–December 2022
Article

How Psychological Safety and Feeling Heard Relate to Burnout and Adaptation Amid Uncertainty

By: Michaela J. Kerrissey, Tuna Cem Hayirli, Aditi Bhanja, Nicholas Stark, James Hardy and Christopher Peabody

Background: Psychological safety—the belief that it is safe to speak up—is vital amid uncertainty, but its relationship to feeling heard is not well understood.
Purpose: The aims of this study were (a) to measure feeling heard and (b) to assess... View Details

Keywords: Burnout; Crisis; Psychological Safety; Feeling Heard; Process Adaptation; Interpersonal Communication; Well-being; Health Care and Treatment; Adaptation

February 2025
Article

Improving Customer Compatibility with Tradeoff Transparency

By: Ryan W. Buell and MoonSoo Choi

Through a large-scale field experiment with 393,036 customers considering opening a credit card account with a nationwide retail bank, we investigate how providing transparency into an offering’s tradeoffs affects subsequent rates of customer acquisition and long-run... View Details

Keywords: Transparency; Customer Selection; Customer Compatibility; Retention; Service Operations; Service Delivery; Marketing Strategy; Marketing Communications; Customer Focus and Relationships; Customer Satisfaction; Banking Industry; Australia

2011
Chapter

American Exceptionalism?: A Comparative Analysis of the Origins and Trajectory of U.S. Business Education Development

By: Rakesh Khurana

As business education in an academic setting becomes an increasingly global phenomenon, the university-based business school in America remains a unique institution. This holds true despite the fact that the American business school as it evolved in the post-World War... View Details

Keywords: Values and Beliefs; Business History; Business Education; Power and Influence; Society; United States; Europe