Publications

July 1989 (Revised April 2001)
Case

Kanthal (A)

By: Robert S. Kaplan

Multinational company needs an improved cost system to determine the profitability of individual customer orders. Its strategy is to have significant sales and profitability growth without adding additional administrative and support people. The new cost system... View Details

Keywords: Cost Accounting; Earnings Management; Cost Management; Financial Management; Multinational Firms and Management; Business or Company Management; Customer Relationship Management; Sales; Business Strategy; Profit; Electronics Industry

Educators

Article

Measuring the Effectiveness of Competition in Defense Procurement: A Survey of the Empirical Literature

By: James J. Anton and Dennis A. Yao

This article surveys the literature that has attempted to measure competition's effects on defense procurement. The focus is on conceptual underpinnings of models rather than technical aspects of estimation procedures. While providing valuable insight, the models are... View Details

Keywords: Performance Effectiveness; Competition; Surveys; Value; Economics; Forecasting and Prediction; Programs; Power and Influence; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques

07 Oct 2016
Working Paper Summaries

Sovereign Debt Portfolios, Bond Risks, and the Credibility of Monetary Policy

Keywords: by Wenxin Du, Carolin E. Pflueger, and Jesse Schreger

Research Summary

Do Equity Covariances Reflect Financial Leverage?

No arbitrage option pricing theory and the efficient market hypothesis predict that firms with higher financial leverage should have higher equity betas, all else equal. This paper finds little support in the data for this prediction. Within industry, there is large... View Details

July 2023
Article

Before or After? The Effects of Payment Decision Timing in Pay-What-You-Want Contexts

By: Raghabendra P. KC, Vincent Mak and Elie Ofek

We study how payment decision timing—before versus after product delivery—influences consumer payment under pay-what-you-want pricing. We focus on situations where there is minimal change in consumer uncertainty regarding the product before versus after receiving it.... View Details

Keywords: Price; Behavior; Valuation; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving

February 2024
Article

Conveying and Detecting Listening in Live Conversation

By: Hanne Collins, Julia A. Minson, Ariella S. Kristal and Alison Wood Brooks

Across all domains of human social life, positive perceptions of conversational listening (i.e., feeling heard) predict well-being, professional success, and interpersonal flourishing. But a fundamental question remains: Are perceptions of listening accurate? Prior... View Details

Keywords: Interpersonal Communication; Behavior; Perception

September 2021 (Revised December 2021)
Case

Spire, the CubeSat Revolution, and the Government as a Space Data Customer

By: Matthew Weinzierl, Mehak Sarang and Brendan L. Rosseau

This case outlines the rise of Spire Global, a young space company using CubeSats to provide weather data and weather prediction services. In addition to tracing the evolution of a space startup from novel idea to publicly-traded company, the case also examines the... View Details

Keywords: Space; Government Contracting; Remote Sensing; Satellites; Business Startups; Public Sector; Cost vs Benefits; Competition; Weather; Forecasting and Prediction

Educators

June 2009
Article

Highbrow Films Gather Dust: Time-inconsistent Preferences and Online DVD Rentals

By: Katherine L. Milkman, Todd Rogers and Max H. Bazerman

We report on a field study demonstrating systematic differences between the preferences people anticipate they will have over a series of options in the future and their subsequent revealed preferences over those options. Using a novel panel data set, we analyze the... View Details

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Forecasting and Prediction; Film Entertainment; Demand and Consumers; Renting or Rental; Power and Influence; Prejudice and Bias; Online Technology; Motion Pictures and Video Industry

Frank Nagle is an assistant professor in the Strategy Unit at Harvard Business School. Professor Nagle studies how competitors can collaborate on the creation of core technologies, while still competing on the products and services built on top of them - especially... View Details

July 2023 (Revised July 2023)
Background Note

Generative AI Value Chain

By: Andy Wu and Matt Higgins

Generative AI refers to a type of artificial intelligence (AI) that can create new content (e.g., text, image, or audio) in response to a prompt from a user. ChatGPT, Bard, and Claude are examples of text generating AIs, and DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion are... View Details

Keywords: AI; Artificial Intelligence; Model; Hardware; Data Centers; AI and Machine Learning; Applications and Software; Analytics and Data Science; Value

Educators

14 Aug 2015
Working Paper Summaries

Are ‘Better’ Ideas More Likely to Succeed? An Empirical Analysis of Startup Evaluation

Keywords: by Pian Shu; Financial Services

2016
Working Paper

CEO Personality and Firm Policies

By: Ian D. Gow, Steven N. Kaplan, David F. Larcker and Anastasia A. Zakolyukina

Based on two samples of high quality personality data for chief executive officers (CEOs), we use linguistic features extracted from conferences calls and statistical learning techniques to develop a measure of CEO personality in terms of the Big Five traits:... View Details

Keywords: Interpersonal Communication; Personal Characteristics; Management Teams

Research Summary

Social Networks and Unraveling in Labor Markets

This paper develops a model of local unraveling (or early hiring) in entry-level labor markets. Information about workers' productivity is revealed over time and transmitted credibly via a two-sided network connecting firms and workers. While employment starts only... View Details

Research Summary

Analyst Disagreement, Forecast Bias and Stock Returns

We present evidence of inefficient information processing in equity markets by documenting that biases in analysts' earnings forecasts are reflected in stock prices. In particular, investors fail to account for analysts' tendency to withhold negative views and to issue... View Details

October 18, 2024
Article

Why Workplace Well-Being Programs Don’t Achieve Better Outcomes

By: Jazz Croft, Acacia Parks and Ashley Whillans

By 2026, global corporate spending on wellness programs is set to top $94.6 billion, yet anticipated improvements in well-being are not being realized, and, in fact, mental health needs are continuing to rise around the world. Drawing on a large body of recent... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Culture; Employees; Well-being

December 2009
Article

Estimation and Empirical Properties of a Firm-Year Measure of Accounting Conservatism

By: Mozaffar N. Khan and Ross L. Watts

We estimate a firm-year measure of accounting conservatism, examine its empirical properties as a metric, and illustrate applications by testing new hypotheses that shed further light on the nature and effects of conservatism. The results are consistent with the... View Details

08 May 2020
News

Which Covid-19 Data Can You Trust?

Article

Competition for Scarce Resources

By: Peter Eso, Volker Nocke and Lucy White

We model a downstream industry where firms compete to buy capacity in an upstream market that allocates capacity efficiently. Although downstream firms have symmetric production technologies, we show that industry structure is symmetric only if capacity is sufficiently... View Details

Keywords: Competitive Strategy; Natural Environment; Technology; Production; Business Cycles; Forecasting and Prediction; Cost; Demand and Consumers; Industry Structures; Performance Capacity