Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(2,108)
- Faculty Publications (367)
- July 2020 (Revised January 2021)
- Case
Pattern Brands
By: Sunil Gupta, Elie Ofek and Julia Kelley
In March 2020, direct-to-consumer (DTC) company Pattern Brands needed to decide how to allocate resources across its different brands. Pattern Co-Founders Nick Ling and Emmett Shine hoped to avoid the pitfalls faced by some DTC companies—such as inability to scale and... View Details
Keywords: Direct-to-consumer; Brands and Branding; Marketing Channels; Marketing Strategy; Product Marketing; Product Launch; Product Positioning; Business Model; Business Startups; Growth and Development Strategy; Demand and Consumers; Business Strategy; Diversification; Competitive Advantage; Consumer Products Industry; Retail Industry; North and Central America; United States; New York (city, NY); New York (state, US)
- May 2020
- Teaching Note
Danone: Changing the Food System
By: David E. Bell, Federica Gabrieli, Daniela Beyersdorfer, Amy Klopfenstein and Aldo Sesia
Teaching Note for HBS No. 520-053.
This is a teaching note for the case “Danone: Changing the Food System?” The case examines the efforts of one of the world’s largest food and beverage companies to resolve the social, environmental, and economic issues within... View Details
This is a teaching note for the case “Danone: Changing the Food System?” The case examines the efforts of one of the world’s largest food and beverage companies to resolve the social, environmental, and economic issues within... View Details
- May 2020
- Article
Identifying Sources of Inefficiency in Health Care
By: Amitabh Chandra and Douglas O. Staiger
In medicine, the reasons for variation in treatment rates across hospitals serving similar patients are not well understood. Some interpret this variation as unwarranted and push standardization of care as a way of reducing allocative inefficiency. However, an... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Sticky Capital Controls
By: Miguel Acosta-Henao, Laura Alfaro and Andres Fernandez
There is much ongoing debate on the merits of capital controls as effective policy instruments. The differing perspectives are due in part to a lack of empirical studies that look at the intensive margin of controls, which in turn has prevented a quantitative... View Details
- February 2020
- Case
Seso Global: Building a Blockchain-enabled Property Marketplace in Nigeria
By: Boris Vallee and Yang (Dolly) Yu
The mutual aspiration of addressing the housing shortage and improving real estate market efficiency led Daniel and Phillip to co-found Seso Global in 2017. Seso Global developed a unique integrated platform to streamline and rationalize the process of acquiring and... View Details
- January 2020
- Article
Rethinking Measurement of Pay Disparity and Its Relation to Firm Performance
By: Ethan Rouen
I develop measures of firm-level pay disparity and examine their relation to firm performance. Using comprehensive compensation data for a large sample of firms, I find no statistically significant relation between the ratio of CEO-to-mean employee compensation and... View Details
- 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
- November 2019 (Revised June 2020)
- Case
Russia: A Drama In Three Acts
By: Rawi Abdelal, Rafael Di Tella, Galit Goldstein and Sogomon Tarontsi
The collapse of central authority in the Soviet Union in 1991 ushered in a period of revolutionary transformations for the states that emerged in its wake. The leaders of Russia, the USSR's successor, struggled to reestablish central authority while also seeking to... View Details
Keywords: Business ＆ Government Relations; Developing Countries; Government Policy; Policy Change; Policy Making; Economic Systems; Economics; Globalization; Emerging Markets; Privatization; Non-Renewable Energy; Governance; Global Strategy; Corporate Governance; Policy; Business History; Lawfulness; Problems and Challenges; Business and Government Relations; Risk and Uncertainty; Strategy; Change Management; Russia; Moscow
- November 2019 (Revised April 2020)
- Case
Danone: Changing the Food System
By: David E. Bell, Federica Gabrieli and Daniela Beyersdorfer
Emmanuel Faber, Chairman and CEO of the food and beverage company Danone, believed that humankind had only ten years to bend the curve on climate change and restore the biodiversity that the global food and agricultural ecosystem was critically dependent on. Upon... View Details
- November 2019
- Article
Full Substitutability
By: John William Hatfield, Scott Duke Kominers, Alexandru Nichifor, Michael Ostrovsky and Alexander Westkamp
Various forms of substitutability are essential for establishing the existence of equilibria and other useful properties in diverse settings such as matching, auctions, and exchange economies with indivisible goods. We extend earlier models’ definitions of... View Details
- October 2019
- Case
Agility Africa
By: Juan Alcacer, Caroline M. Elkins and Esel Çekin
This case illustrates the challenge and opportunities that firms face when developing and executing new business models in high-risk, low-infrastructure, low-trust countries. It features a global logistics group, Agility, that aimed to become the leader in supplying... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Collusion in Brokered Markets
By: John William Hatfield, Scott Duke Kominers and Richard Lowery
The U.S. residential real estate agency market presents a puzzle for economic theory: commissions on real estate transactions have remained high for decades even though entry is frequent and costs are low. We model the real estate agency market, and other brokered... View Details
- 2019
- Working Paper
On Her Own Account: How Strengthening Women's Financial Control Affects Labor Supply and Gender Norms
By: Natalia Rigol, Erica Field, Rohini Pande, Simone Schaner and Charity Troyer-Moore
Can greater control over earned income incentivize women to work and influence gender norms? In collaboration with Indian government partners, we provided rural women with individual bank accounts and randomly varied whether their wages from a public workfare program... View Details
- August 2019 (Revised March 2022)
- Case
Lemonade: Disrupting Insurance with Instant Everything, Killer Prices, and a Big Heart
By: Elie Ofek and Danielle Golan
Launching its first products in the fall of 2016 in New York, insurtech startup Lemonade was on a mission to disrupt the insurance market by using AI and behavioral economics principles. The company offered renters, homeowners, and condo insurance and mainly targeted... View Details
- July 2019
- Case
Christmas Inc. (A)
By: Susanna Gallani, Gregory Sabin, Lexor Adams and Nicholas Haberling
Santa Claus is facing increasing pressures to contain costs. The economic model that has worked for centuries is starting to show some cracks, to the point that he is considering outsourcing part of its toy production. Evaluating the bids his team collected from... View Details
- Article
Frame Flexibility: The Role of Cognitive and Emotional Framing in Innovation Adoption by Incumbent Firms
By: Ryan Raffaelli, Mary Ann Glynn and Michael Tushman
Why do incumbent firms frequently reject nonincremental innovations? Beyond technical, structural, or economic factors, we propose an additional factor: the degree of the top management team's (TMT) frame flexibility, i.e., their capability to cognitively expand an... View Details
- June 2019 (Revised October 2019)
- Technical Note
Note on the Future of Commerce
By: William R. Kerr, Daniel O'Connor and Nathaniel Schwalb
In 2019, the retail and consumer product industries were undergoing a significant transformation. Over the past 50 years, what was once a highly fragmented industry began to consolidate, digitize, and increase convenience while lowering costs. The winning enterprises... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
To Infinity and Beyond: Scaling Economic Theories via Logical Compactness
By: Yannai A. Gonczarowski, Scott Duke Kominers and Ran I. Shorrer
Many economic-theoretic models incorporate finiteness assumptions that, while introduced for simplicity, play a real role in the analysis. Such assumptions introduce a conceptual problem, as results that rely on finiteness are often implicitly nonrobust; for example,... View Details
- 2010
- Article
Budgeting, Psychological Contracts, and Budgetary Misreporting
By: Susanna Gallani, Ranjani Krishnan, Eric J. Marinich and Michael D. Shields
This study examines the effect of psychological contract breach on budgetary misreporting. Psychological contracts are mental models or schemas that govern how employees understand their exchange relationships with their employers. Psychological contract breach leads... View Details
- June 2019
- Article
Social Risk, Fiscal Risk, and the Portfolio of Government Programs
We develop a model of government portfolio choice in which a benevolent government chooses the scale of risky projects in the presence of market failures and tax distortions. These two frictions generate motives to manage social risk and fiscal risk. Social risk... View Details