Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(565)
- Faculty Publications (136)
- 2021
- Working Paper
Time and the Value of Data
By: Ehsan Valavi, Joel Hestness, Newsha Ardalani and Marco Iansiti
Managers often believe that collecting more data will continually improve the accuracy of their machine learning models. However, we argue in this paper that when data lose relevance over time, it may be optimal to collect a limited amount of recent data instead of... View Details
- August 2020
- Article
Leverage and the Beta Anomaly
By: Malcolm Baker, Mathias F. Hoeyer and Jeffrey Wurgler
The well-known weak empirical relationship between beta risk and the cost of equity—the beta anomaly—generates a simple tradeoff theory: As firms lever up, the overall cost of capital falls as leverage increases equity beta, but as debt becomes riskier the marginal... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
The Rise of Remote Work: Evidence on Productivity and Preferences from Firm and Worker Surveys
By: Alexander Bartik, Zoë Cullen, Edward L. Glaeser, Michael Luca and Christopher Stanton
Drawing on surveys of small business owners and employees, we present three main findings about the evolution of remote work after the onset of COVID-19. First, uptake of remote work was abrupt and widespread in jobs suitable for telework according to the task-based... View Details
- April 2020 (Revised May 2020)
- Case
NTT DOCOMO's Race to 5G
By: Juan Alcácer, Horst Melcher and Akiko Kanno
The case, based on extensive interviews with NTT DOCOMO’s technology leaders, focuses on the opportunities and challenges that NTT DOCOMO faces with the launch of infrastructure and services for 5G wireless telecommunication technology. With higher data rates and... View Details
- March 2020
- Case
Cafe Kenya
By: Lynda M. Applegate and James T. Kindley
This case describes Café Kenya (CK), a Kenyan-based chain of casual quick-food restaurants. The chain was started in 2011 in Nairobi by Nekesa Kuria. Kuria started Café Kenya and grew it by reinvesting profits into company stores and through franchising. She also... View Details
- March 2020
- Case
A Tower for the People: 425 Park Avenue
By: John Macomber, Joseph G. Allen and Emily Jones
Healthy buildings and superior air quality are increasingly important since people now spend so much time indoors. Indoor spaces drive performance and productivity. Commercial real estate landlords and investors are responding to the demands of sophisticated tenants... View Details
- February 2020 (Revised January 2022)
- Case
Mission Related Investments at the Ford Foundation (A)
By: Shawn Cole, Michael Norris and T. Robert Zochowski
In 2017, Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, one of the largest philanthropic foundations in the world, was preparing to meet with his board of directors to discuss beginning a mission related investments (MRI) program. Walker hoped to devote $1 billion of... View Details
Keywords: Mission-Related Investing; Philanthropy; Foundation; Endowments; Socially Responsible Investing; Investment; Institutional Investing; Investment Activism; Governance; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Mission and Purpose; Social Enterprise; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; United States; New York (city, NY)
- 2020
- Working Paper
Cutting the Gordian Knot of Employee Health Care Benefits and Costs: A Corporate Model Built on Employee Choice
By: Regina E. Herzlinger and Barak D. Richman
The U.S. employer-based health insurance tax exclusion created a system of employer-sponsored insurance (ESI) with limited insurance choices and transparency that may lock employed households into health plans that are costlier or different from those they prefer to... View Details
- 2019
- Working Paper
The Strategic Management of Execution
By: David J. Collis
“Tell me David, is it better to have a great strategy poorly executed or a so-so strategy really well executed?” The age-old question suggests there is a fundamental tradeoff between strategy and execution. The tone in which it is asked typically flags that the... View Details
- June 2019
- Case
Rachael Ray: Cooking Up a Brand
By: Boris Groysberg, Robin Abrahams and Kerry Herman
Rachael Ray built a remarkable career and brand, first as a cooking personality, and then as a lifestyle maven. This case explores her early career, decisions taken along the way, and the successes she achieved in publishing, television and as a spokesperson. As her... View Details
- February 2019
- Technical Note
Can Multiunit Organizations Remain Agile as They Grow?
By: Tatiana Sandino
This note discusses how multiunit organizations incorporate flexibility into their management control systems, some by authorizing all or a select number of their dispersed units to make input and process decisions, some by investing in data-analytic technologies to... View Details
- January 4, 2019
- Article
How Companies Can Balance Social Impact and Financial Goals
By: Marya L. Besharov, Wendy K. Smith and Michael Tushman
It’s notoriously difficult for a business to manage two separate-but-equal goals—making money and creating social value at the same time, for example, or managing an existing business at the same time that you invent a new one. Most attempts at managing these... View Details
- 2019
- Article
An Empirical Study of Rich Subgroup Fairness for Machine Learning
By: Michael J Kearns, Seth Neel, Aaron Leon Roth and Zhiwei Steven Wu
Kearns et al. [2018] recently proposed a notion of rich subgroup fairness intended to bridge the gap between statistical and individual notions of fairness. Rich subgroup fairness picks a statistical fairness constraint (say, equalizing false positive rates across... View Details
- December 2018 (Revised May 2019)
- Case
Darling Ingredients International
By: David E. Bell and Natalie Kindred
Led by CEO Randall Stuewe, Texas-based Darling Ingredients International was a rendering firm with $3.7 billion in 2017 revenues. Since 2003, Darling had transformed from U.S. focused into a global player in the processing of biological waste from meat and foodservice... View Details
Keywords: Darling; Ingredients; Stuewe; Rendering; Animal Byproducts; Used Cooking Oil; UCO; Diamond Green Diesel; DGD; Valero; Renewable Diesel; Biofuel; Recycling; Carbon; LCFS; Blend; Blender; Strategy; Corporate Strategy; Renewable Energy; Food; Agribusiness; Expansion; Diversification; Growth Management; Technological Innovation; Policy; Government Legislation; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Energy Industry; Food and Beverage Industry; United States; Louisiana; California; Texas
- 2018
- Chapter
The Orphan Drug Act at 35: Observations and an Outlook for the Twenty-First Century
By: Nicholas Bagley, Benjamin Berger, Amitabh Chandra, Craig Garthwaite and Ariel Dora Stern
On the 35th anniversary of the adoption of the Orphan Drug Act (ODA), we describe the enormous changes in the markets for therapies for rare diseases that have emerged over recent decades. The most prominent example is the fact that the profit-maximizing price of new... View Details
- September 2018
- Article
Discretionary Task Ordering: Queue Management in Radiological Services
By: Maria Ibanez, Jonathan R. Clark, Robert S. Huckman and Bradley R. Staats
Work-scheduling research typically prescribes task sequences implemented by managers. Yet employees often have discretion to deviate from their prescribed sequence. Using data from 2.4 million radiological diagnoses, we find that doctors prioritize similar tasks... View Details
Keywords: Discretion; Scheduling; Queue; Healthcare; Learning; Experience; Decentralization; Operations; Service Operations; Service Delivery; Performance; Performance Effectiveness; Performance Efficiency; Performance Improvement; Performance Productivity; Decisions; Time Management; Cost vs Benefits; Health Industry
- August 2018 (Revised October 2021)
- Case
Edward Jones: Implementing the Solutions Approach
By: David Collis and Ashley Hartman
In 2017 Edward Jones, the largest brokerage firm in the U.S., is deciding whether and how to implement a new "solutions" business model to replace its traditional "product" or "transactional" approach. Many of the required changes appeared to violate some of the... View Details
- March 2018
- Case
University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center: Managing Capacity in Neurology
By: Joel Goh, Robert S. Huckman and Nikhil Sahni
In December 2014, Dr. Anthony Furlan, chair of the Department of Neurology at University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center (UH), faced a mandate from the hospital’s executive leadership team. Specifically, all UH departments were directed to take steps within six... View Details
- 2018
- Chapter
Time, Money, and Subjective Wellbeing
By: Cassie Mogilner, A.V. Whillans and Michael I. Norton
Time and money are scarce and precious resources: people experience stress about having insufficient time and worry about having insufficient money. This chapter reviews research showing that the ways in which people spend their time and money, the tradeoffs that... View Details
- May 2017
- Article
Experimental Evidence of Pooling Outcomes Under Information Asymmetry
By: William Schmidt and Ryan W. Buell
Operational decisions under information asymmetry can signal a firm's prospects to less-informed parties, such as investors, customers, competitors, and regulators. Consequently, managers in these settings often face a tradeoff between making an optimal decision and... View Details