Publications

Educators

2020
Working Paper

Social Interactions in Pandemics: Fear, Altruism, and Reciprocity

By: Laura Alfaro, Ester Faia, Nora Lamersdorf and Farzad Saidi

In SIR models, homogeneous or with a network structure, infection rates are assumed to be exogenous. However, individuals adjust their behavior. Using daily data for 89 cities worldwide, we document that mobility falls in response to fear, as approximated by Google... View Details

Keywords: Social Interactions; Pandemics; Mobility; Cities; SIR Networks; Social Preferences; Social Planner; Targeted Policies; Health Pandemics; Interpersonal Communication; Behavior; Policy

Research Summary

Conceptualizing and measuring environmental sustainability

By: Michael W. Toffel

This research involves developing clarity around the murky construct of environmental sustainability, and improving techniques to measure corporate environmental performance. My prior research in this domain includes View Details

December 2022
Article

Social Skills Improve Business Performance: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial with Entrepreneurs in Togo

By: Stefan Dimitriadis and Rembrand Koning

Recent field experiments demonstrate that advice, mentorship, and feedback from randomly assigned peers improve entrepreneurial performance. These results raise a natural question: what is preventing entrepreneurs and managers from forming these peer connections... View Details

Keywords: Social Skills; Business Performance; Entrepreneurs; Peer Relationships; Field Experiment; Entrepreneurship; Performance; Relationships; Interpersonal Communication; Togo

January–February 2019
Article

Who Loses When a Team Wins? Better Performance Increases Racial Bias

By: Letian Zhang

Although it is well known that organizational and team performance influences strategic decision-making, little is known about its impact on ascriptive inequality. This study proposes a performance effect on racial bias: higher team performance reduces managers’... View Details

Keywords: Discrimination; Race And Ethnicity; Performance Feedback; NBA; Prejudice and Bias; Race; Ethnicity; Performance; Sports

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March 2007
Class Lecture

Strategy, Leadership, and Performance Management in the Social Enterprise Sector (FSS)

By: Herman B. Leonard

Keywords: Social Enterprise; Nonprofit Organizations; Strategy; Leadership; Performance

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May 2013
Article

The Performance Frontier: Innovating for a Sustainable Strategy

By: Robert G. Eccles and George Serafeim

By now most companies have sustainability programs. They're cutting carbon emissions, reducing waste, and otherwise enhancing operational efficiency. But a mishmash of sustainability tactics does not add up to a sustainable strategy. To endure, a strategy must address... View Details

Keywords: Sustainability; Innovation; Environment; Corporate Reporting; Corporate Social Responsibility; Governance; Strategy; Value; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Performance; Environmental Sustainability; Innovation and Invention

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Web

Measuring Success in Impact Investing | Social Enterprise | Harvard Business School

Measuring Success in Impact Investing Multiple Alumni Topics Business for Social Impact Impact Investing More Impact Stories A Pathway to Pursue Aspirations Mizuho Kanai 2018 While Mizuho Kanai (MBA 2018)... View Details

Article

Contagion of Cooperation in Static and Fluid Social Networks

By: Jillian J. Jordan, David G. Rand, Samuel Arbesman, James H. Fowler and Nicholas A. Christakis

Cooperation is essential for successful human societies. Thus, understanding how cooperative and selfish behaviors spread from person to person is a topic of theoretical and practical importance. Previous laboratory experiments provide clear evidence of social... View Details

Keywords: Social Contagion; Social Networks; Cooperation; Behavior; Social Media

1977
Working Paper

Mitigating Demographic Risk Through Social Insurance

By: Jerry R. Green

A two-period lifetime overlapping generations growth model is used to evaluate the possibility that social insurance can effectively offset economic risks associated with uncertainty about the rate of population growth. Crude measures of the seriousness of this type of... View Details

Keywords: Social Insurance; Econometric Models; Public Sector; Government Administration; Policy; Human Needs; Social Issues; Risk and Uncertainty

September 2009 (Revised May 2011)
Supplement

Acumen Fund: Measurement in Impact Investing (B)

By: Alnoor Ebrahim and V. Kasturi Rangan

As Acumen Fund, a global venture philanthropy firm, moves forward with an investment portfolio exceeding $22 million, it runs into two critical measurement problems. First, how should it track the performance of each investment when its interest is not just the bottom... View Details

Keywords: Venture Capital; Investment Portfolio; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; Standards; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Performance Evaluation; Social Enterprise; Competition; Financial Services Industry; Kenya

February 2021
Case

Measuring Impact at JUST Capital

By: Charles C.Y. Wang and Ethan Rouen

JUST Capital is a nonprofit organization that seeks to make public companies more "just" by measuring and ranking their overall impact on society, based on the priorities most important to the average American. This case examines JUST's strategy for influencing... View Details

Keywords: Nonprofit Organizations; Ethics; Measurement and Metrics; Performance Evaluation; Social Issues; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact

Educators

2012
Working Paper

What Do Managers Do? Exploring Persistent Performance Differences among Seemingly Similar Enterprises

By: Robert Gibbons and Rebecca Henderson

Social networks and social groups have both been seen as important to discouraging malfeasance and supporting the global pro-social norms that underlie social order, but have typically been treated either as pure substitutes or as having completely independent effects.... View Details

Keywords: Social Norms; Social Networks; Triadic Closure; Social Groups; Group Identity; Groups and Teams; Identity; Performance Consistency; Social and Collaborative Networks; Societal Protocols; Social Media

27 Jan 2022
News

‘The Triple Bottom Line Is Better than ESG to Measure a Company’s Financial, Environmental and Social Performance’

March 2019 (Revised April 2019)
Case

Measuring Impact at JUST Capital

By: Ethan C. Rouen and Charles C.Y. Wang

JUST Capital is a nonprofit organization that seeks to make public companies more "just" by measuring and ranking their overall impact on society, based on the priorities most important to the average American. This case examines JUST’s strategy for influencing... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Social Issues; Performance Evaluation

Educators

01 Mar 2016
News

Measuring Impact

the findings of the inaugural Harvard Impact Study, the University’s first effort to quantify the economic and social contributions of its alumni. HBS professor Josh Lerner led the study, which was based on a survey sent to almost 245,000... View Details

Keywords: April White

04 Sep 2019
News

A Measured Approach

that time. “That’s the thing that’s frustrating. We like to ask, what are you going to measure? And then, periodically, when you measure those things again, if you find out it’s not headed in the right direction, let’s change what you’re... View Details

Keywords: Lisa Scanlon Mogolov

2009
Other Unpublished Work

Choice-based Measures of Conflict in Preferences

By: Katherine Baldiga and Jerry R. Green

We propose a family of measures of difference between ordinal preference relations. The difference between two preferences is the probability that they would disagree about the optimal choice from a random available set. It is in this sense that these measures are... View Details

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Measurement and Metrics; Mathematical Methods; Conflict of Interests; Welfare

2018
Working Paper

Do We See the Same Hierarchy? Status Disagreement in Multicultural Teams and Its Impact on Team Performance

By: Catarina Fernandes and Sujin Jang

This paper develops and tests a theory of status disagreement in multicultural teams. We posit that, in multicultural teams, the diversity of members’ cultural backgrounds will lead to implicit disagreements about who has how much status in the team. More specifically,... View Details

Keywords: Status; Social Hierarchies; Multicultural Teams; Team Performance; Team Diversity; Status and Position; Groups and Teams; Diversity; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues; Performance