Publications

January 2018 (Revised March 2020)
Case

SAP: Branding in the Digital Age

By: Das Narayandas and Amram Migdal

By 2017, digital, social, and mobile technologies were rapidly changing the way many of SAP’s traditional customers did business over the last decade. In response to this trend, SAP had acquired companies with capabilities in e-commerce, human capital, workforce... View Details

Keywords: Brand Positioning; Marketing; Sales; Brands and Branding; Strategy; Technology Industry

April 27, 2009
Article

Fraud in Online Advertising

By: Benjamin Edelman

At first glance, online advertising seems to be as measurable a medium as any ever invented. Advertisers can count how many times an ad was sent, then measure sales—yielding an analysis that seems to report the value of an online ad campaign. But the reality is... View Details

Keywords: Advertising Campaigns; Online Advertising; Crime and Corruption; Measurement and Metrics; Value

Find at Harvard

Read Now

June 2005
Case

CarMax

By: Rajiv Lal and David Kiron

Carmax is the largest multi-market used car dealer in the U.S., and has no format-to-format competitor in the $375 billion used car market. CarMax is trying to do what some analysts believed to be impossible: sell used cars profitably on a national scale, and at the... View Details

Keywords: Profit; Brands and Branding; Digital Platforms; Segmentation; Auto Industry

03 Feb 2014
Research & Ideas

The Tricky Business of Managing Web Advertising Affiliates

When the FBI charged Shawn Hogan and two others with defrauding eBay of about $21 million in affiliate marketing sales, Benjamin G. Edelman was watching closely behind the scenes. Edelman's name rarely came up at the View Details

Keywords: by Kim Girard; Advertising; Publishing

01 Mar 2016
First Look

March 1, 2016

their demand for a risky asset by weighing two signals: an average of the asset’s past price changes and the asset’s degree of overvaluation. The two signals are in conflict, and investors “waver” over time in the relative weight they put... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

October 2022
Exercise

Shanty Real Estate: Updated Confidential Information for Homebuyer

By: Michael Luca, Jesse M. Shapiro and Nathan Sun

Shanty is a simulation in which students inhabit the role of either a traditional home buyer or an iBuyer, both bidding on the same condo. The traditional home buyer has access to a “comp sheet” of similar properties that have recently sold, and has done a walkthrough.... View Details

Keywords: Algorithm; Decision Choices and Conditions; Decision Making; Market Timing; Measurement and Metrics

August 1993 (Revised April 1998)
Case

Filene's Basement

By: David E. Bell and Dinny Starr

Filene's Basement is in the process of deciding where, and if, to locate two new stores in its new Chicago area of operations. The existing Chicago area stores have been performing well, however, management is concerned with over saturation of the market. At the time... View Details

Keywords: Forecasting and Prediction; Growth Management; Marketing Strategy; Market Entry and Exit; Business Processes

05 Feb 2024
Research & Ideas

The Middle Manager of the Future: More Coaching, Less Commanding

to connect groups with disparate skills—like engineering, sales, and market analysis—at key points in a project. Extensive analysis of job postings Zhang bases his conclusions on a unique linguistic analysis of more than 34 million online... View Details

Keywords: by Ben Rand

February 2022 (Revised November 2022)
Case

Nuritas

By: Mitchell Weiss, Satish Tadikonda, Vincent Dessain and Emer Moloney

Nora Khaldi had built a technology “to unlock the power of nature” in the service of extending human lifespan and improving health, and now in April 2020 was debating telling her Board of Directors she wanted to put on ice some of her discoveries. Nuritas, the company... View Details

Keywords: Cash Burn; Cash Flow Analysis; Pharmaceutical Companies; Founder; Artificial Intelligence; AI; Entrepreneurship; Health Testing and Trials; Health Care and Treatment; Decision Making; Market Entry and Exit; AI and Machine Learning; Pharmaceutical Industry

Research Summary

Overview

By: Mark L. Egan

When considering how households make investment decisions, Professor Egan became intrigued by the question, “What makes a bank ‘special’ when compared to other lending institutions?” Focusing on empirical industrial organization with applications to finance and... View Details

Keywords: Banking; Financial Advisors; Consumer Finance; Personal Finance; Corporate Finance

30 May 2023
Research & Ideas

Can AI Predict Whether Shoppers Would Pick Crest Over Colgate?

Companies have long poured time and money into surveying customers. Now, with new research showing artificial intelligence provides plenty of rich data about shopper preferences, could customer surveys become obsolete? Companies turn to... View Details

Keywords: by Kristen Senz; Consumer Products

June 2012
Response

Solution to Exchanges 10.2 Puzzle: Borrowing in the Limit as Our Nerdiness Goes to Infinity

By: Ran I. Shorrer

This is a solution to the editor's puzzle from issue 10.2 of SIGecom Exchanges [Reeves 2011]. The puzzle asks to determine a point in time such that a lump sum payment of $S will be equivalent to a continuous stream of infinitesimal payments totaling $S, spread evenly... View Details

Keywords: Borrowing and Debt; Market Transactions; Mathematical Methods