Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(3,804)
- Faculty Publications (497)
- 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
- 2023
- Working Paper
Operational Impact of Communication Channels: Evidence from Last-Mile Delivery Services
By: Natalie Epstein, Santiago Gallino and Antonio Moreno
Communication channels are often used to improve customer satisfaction and behavior. This paper studies
how they can be used to enhance operational performance.
We partner with a last-mile delivery company and, through natural and field experiments, explore... View Details
We partner with a last-mile delivery company and, through natural and field experiments, explore... View Details
- May 2023
- Article
Where Sales Technology (Really) Helps
Interest in Sales Enablement (SE), the catch-all term for attempts to increase sales productivity with AI and other technologies, is driven by multiple factors. One is the declining costs of the tools. Also, selling is now data-hungry work and not just in tech sectors.... View Details
- April 2023 (Revised January 2024)
- Background Note
Note on Healthcare in Ghana
By: Regina E. Herzlinger and Ben Creo
This note provides an overview of the healthcare system in Ghana. It discusses the public and private sector as well as traditional medical practice. It also discusses the country’s pharmaceutical industry. It is recommended as a companion to Professor Regina... View Details
Keywords: Africa; Pharmaceutical Companies; Pharmacy Benefit Manager; Health Care; Health Care Costs; Health Care Delivery; Health Care Entrepreneurship; Telehealth; Health Equity; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Health Care and Treatment; Business and Government Relations; Health Industry; Pharmaceutical Industry; Ghana
- April 24, 2023
- Article
In the COVID Era, Why Corporate Benefits Demand CEO/CFO Leadership
The expectation that employers provide their employees’ health benefits has been around since World War II. Unfortunately, although today’s employees expect employers to treat them as individuals, ease their experiences, prioritize their wellbeing, and control cost,... View Details
Keywords: COVID; COVID-19 Pandemic; CEO; Leadership; Health Insurance; Benefits; CFO; Compensation and Benefits
- April 2023
- Article
Inattentive Inference
By: Thomas Graeber
This paper studies how people infer a state of the world from information structures that include additional, payoff-irrelevant states. For example, learning from a customer review about a product’s quality requires accounting for the reviewer’s otherwise irrelevant... View Details
- February 13, 2023
- Editorial
The Secret Tax on Women’s Time
By: Lauren C. Howe, Lindsay B. Howe and Ashley V. Whillans
When studies revealed the so-called pink tax, showing in 2015 that personal hygiene products “for her” cost 13% more than similar products for men, it caused outrage and action. The irony that women, despite generally having fewer financial resources than men, are... View Details
- February 2023
- Case
Graphic Packaging: Project Cowboy (A)
By: Benjamin C. Esty and E. Scott Mayfield
In July 2019, Graphic Packaging CEO Michael Doss was proposing a $600 million investment in a new machine to produce coated recycled board (CRB), a type of paper packaging used for consumer products (cups, cereal boxes, beverage boxes, etc.) that utilized recycled... View Details
- February 2023
- Supplement
Graphic Packaging: Project Cowboy (A) Courseware
By: Benjamin C. Esty and Scott Mayfield
In July 2019, Graphic Packaging CEO Michael Doss was proposing a $600 million investment in a new machine to produce coated recycled board (CRB), a type of paper packaging used for consumer products (cups, cereal boxes, beverage boxes, etc.) that utilized recycled... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Life After Death: A Field Experiment with Small Businesses on Information Frictions, Stigma, and Bankruptcy
By: Shai Benjamin Bernstein, Emanuele Colonnelli, Mitchell Hoffman and Benjamin Iverson
In a randomized control trial (RCT) with U.S. small businesses, we document that a large share of firms are not well-informed about bankruptcy. Many assume that bankruptcy necessarily entails the death of a business and do not know about Chapter 11 bankruptcy, where... View Details
- January 2023 (Revised May 2023)
- Case
Peloton Interactive (A)
By: Suraj Srinivasan, Lynn S. Paine and David Lane
Early in February 2022, the board of Peloton Interactive faced some knotty challenges. Immense pandemic demand for its stationary exercise bicycles and treadmills had prompted the firm to scale up production rapidly. But as gyms reopened and the virulence of the virus... View Details
- January 2023 (Revised December 2023)
- Case
OhmConnect: Energizing the Future
By: Jeffrey F. Rayport, Jennifer Fonstad and Nicole Tempest Keller
Founded in 2013, OhmConnect was a free consumer web app that alerted customers about peak hours of electricity demand, and paid them to lower their energy use at home during these periods. The company sold the aggregated reductions generated by thousands of households... View Details
Keywords: App Development; Renewable Energy; Electricity Usage; Regulations; VC; Technology; Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC); Scalability; Applications and Software; Growth and Development Strategy; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Business Model; Venture Capital; Energy Industry; United States; California; Texas; Europe
- December 2022
- Case
Taylor Farms: Adding Value to Fresh Produce
By: José B. Alvarez, Forest L. Reinhardt, Jenyfeer Martinez Buitrago and Pedro Levindo
In October 2022, Bruce Taylor (HBS MBA, 1981), Chairman and CEO of Taylor Farms, the leading producer of salads and healthy fresh foods in the United States, wondered whether this was the right time for Taylor Farms to venture into the Controlled Environment... View Details
- December 2022
- Article
I Don't 'Recall': The Decision to Delay Innovation Launch to Avoid Costly Product Failure
By: Byungyeon Kim, Oded Koenigsberg and Elie Ofek
Innovations embody novel features or cutting-edge components aimed at delivering desired customer benefits.
Oftentimes, however, we observe the need to recall new products shortly after their introduction. Indeed, a firm
may rush an innovation to market in an attempt... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
Regulatory Incentives for Innovation: The FDA's Breakthrough Therapy Designation
By: Amitabh Chandra, Jennifer Kao, Kathleen Miller and Ariel D. Stern
Regulators of new products confront a tradeoff between speeding a new product to market and collecting additional product quality information. The FDA’s Breakthrough Therapy Designation (BTD) provides an opportunity to understand if a regulator can use new policy to... View Details
- 2022
- White Paper
The Options Multiplier: Decoding the CareerWise Youth Apprentice Journey
By: Joseph B. Fuller, Rachel Lipson, Farah Mallah, Girish Pendse and Rachel Snyder
As more Americans question the appeal of costly
higher education programs, earn-and-learn models,
like apprenticeship, are attracting increasing
attention from policymakers and employers alike. While apprenticeship is widespread in many
parts of Europe,... View Details
- October 2022 (Revised February 2024)
- Case
Masdar City: Aiming for Sustainable and Profitable Real Estate
By: Boris Vallee and Fares Khrais
Masdar City broke ground in 2008 and was conceived by the Abu Dhabi government to be an international beacon of innovation in sustainable energy and real estate. It was also to be a profitable investment for the government. At first glance, the two goals pulled in... View Details
Keywords: Analysis; Business Growth And Maturation; Decisions; Public Sector; Financial Crisis; Construction; Climate Change; Green Technology; Borrowing And Debt; Corporate Finance; Capital; Capital Budgeting; Capital Structure; Cost Of Capital; Equity; REIT; Financial Management; Financial Strategy; Initial Public Offering; Innovation; Growth And Development Strategy; Emerging Markets; Urban Development; Middle East; United Arab Emirates; Sustainable Cities; Green Building; Business and Government Relations; Decision Choices and Conditions; Financing and Loans; Real Estate Industry; Construction Industry; Energy Industry; Green Technology Industry; Abu Dhabi
- October 2022
- Article
Revisiting Extraversion and Leadership Emergence: A Social Network Churn Perspective
By: Blaine Landis, Jon M. Jachimowicz, Dan J. Wang and Robert W. Krause
One of the classic relationships in personality psychology is that extraversion is associated with emerging as an informal leader. However, recent findings raise questions about the longevity of extraverted individuals as emergent leaders. Here, we adopt a social... View Details
- September 2022
- Background Note
On CUE: The Quest for Optimal Customer Unit Economics
By: Elie Ofek, Barak Libai and Eitan Muller
Startups are often evaluated by how well they perform on unit economics, defined as the ratio of a customer’s lifetime value (LTV) to acquisition costs (CAC). A common target for unit economics, advocated by many VCs and analysts, is 3:1 (i.e., LTV/CAC=3). While there... View Details
- September 2022 (Revised November 2022)
- Case
The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act: Forced Labor and Genocide in U.S.-China Relations
By: Jeremy Friedman and David Lane
On June 21, 2022, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) went into effect, requiring companies to prove that goods imported from the People’s Republic of China were not made with forced labor. The bill was a reaction to reports of products being made with... View Details
Keywords: Ethics; Multinational Firms and Management; Globalized Markets and Industries; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Policy; Government Legislation; International Relations; Labor; Wages; Law Enforcement; Law; Rights; Operations; Supply Chain Management; Business and Government Relations; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; China; United States