Publications

May–June 2023
Article

A New Approach to Building Your Personal Brand: How to Communicate Your Value

By: Jill Avery and Rachel Greenwald

For better or worse, in today’s world everyone is a brand. Whether you’re applying for a job, asking for a promotion, or writing a dating profile, your success will depend on getting others to recognize your value. So you need to get comfortable marketing... View Details

Keywords: Personal Brand; Influencer Marketing; Leadership Development; Marketing; Brands and Branding; Identity; Reputation; Competency and Skills

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May 2023
Article

How Do Campaigns Shape Vote Choice? Multi-Country Evidence from 62 Elections and 56 TV Debates

By: Caroline Le Pennec and Vincent Pons

We use two-round survey data from 62 elections in 10 countries since 1952 to study the formation of vote choice, beliefs, and policy preferences and assess how televised debates contribute to this process. Our data include 253,000 observations. We compare the... View Details

Keywords: Political Debates; TV Debates; Voting; Political Elections; Decision Choices and Conditions

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2023
Working Paper

Operational Impact of Communication Channels: Evidence from Last-Mile Delivery Services

By: Natalie Epstein, Santiago Gallino and Antonio Moreno

Communication channels are often used to improve customer satisfaction and behavior. This paper studies how they can be used to enhance operational performance.
We partner with a last-mile delivery company and, through natural and field experiments, explore... View Details

Keywords: Customer Satisfaction; Consumer Behavior; Logistics; Communication

SSRN

April 19, 2023
Editorial

Extreme Views Are More Attractive Than Moderate Ones

By: Amit Goldenberg

Do you ever feel like everyone on social media has a more extreme viewpoint than your own? We often blame social media companies for the cacophony of politically extreme opinions around us. After all, these companies are generally motivated to promote the most... View Details

Keywords: Social Media; Networks

April 2023
Case

Twitter: The Freedom to Speak Freely and Be Heard

By: Randolph B. Cohen, Carin-Isabel Knoop and Mel Martin

In April 2022, serial entrepreneur Elon Musk announced that he would be interested in purchasing the social media site Twitter for $44 billion. With more than 100 million twitter followers, Musk had historically leveraged the site to engage with the customers of his... View Details

Keywords: Values and Beliefs; Acquisition; Social Media; Power and Influence; Communications Industry; Communications Industry; Communications Industry; United States

2023
Working Paper

How Wicked Problems Drive Business Performance: A Review of the Academic Literature

By: Caroline Adelson, Charlotte Kuller, Cate Tompkins, Ellora Sarkar, Samantha Price and Marco Iansiti

Recent years have seen a rise in the number of businesses engaged in the pursuit of “purposeful” activities – that is, activities that engage with the broader community in ways that expand beyond the pursuit of shareholder value. Many of these activities involve... View Details

Keywords: Wicked Problems; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Social Issues; Performance

April 6, 2023
Article

A New NFT Launch Strategy: The Wave Mint

By: Scott Duke Kominers and 1337 Skulls Sers

In an NFT project, the mint—the process by which tokens are initially allocated—largely determines who your community is and how they and the broader market view the project going forward. In this piece, we review a new minting strategy recently introduced by 1337... View Details

Keywords: NFTs; Mechanism Design; Sales Management; Sales Model; Crypto Economy; Non-fungible Tokens; Networks; Product Launch; Auctions; Market Design

2023
Article

Estimating Causal Peer Influence in Homophilous Social Networks by Inferring Latent Locations.

By: Edward McFowland III and Cosma Rohilla Shalizi

Social influence cannot be identified from purely observational data on social networks, because such influence is generically confounded with latent homophily, that is, with a node’s network partners being informative about the node’s attributes and therefore its... View Details

Keywords: Causal Inference; Homophily; Social Networks; Peer Influence; Social and Collaborative Networks; Power and Influence; Mathematical Methods

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2023
Working Paper

Feature Importance Disparities for Data Bias Investigations

By: Peter W. Chang, Leor Fishman and Seth Neel

It is widely held that one cause of downstream bias in classifiers is bias present in the training data. Rectifying such biases may involve context-dependent interventions such as training separate models on subgroups, removing features with bias in the collection... View Details

Keywords: AI and Machine Learning; Analytics and Data Science; Prejudice and Bias

April 2023
Article

Learning Down to Train Up: Mentors Are More Effective When They Value Insights from Below

By: Ting Zhang, Dan Wang and Adam D. Galinsky

Although mentorship is vital for individual success, potential mentors often view it as a costly burden. To understand what motivates mentors to overcome this barrier and more fully engage with their mentees, we introduce a new construct, learning direction, which... View Details

Keywords: Mentoring; Learning Direction; Interpersonal Communication; Learning; Leadership Development

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March 2023 (Revised April 2023)
Case

Independent Governance of Meta’s Social Spaces: The Oversight Board

By: Jesse M. Shapiro, Natalia Rigol, Benjamin N. Roth and William R. Kerr

Julie Owono is a member of the Oversight Board, an outside entity with the authority to make binding decisions on tricky moderation questions for Meta's companies. She considers the Board's impact, and its future. View Details

Keywords: Business and Government Relations; Social Media; Fairness; Governing and Advisory Boards; Communications Industry; Communications Industry

2023
Working Paper

Deep Responsibility and Irresponsibility in the Beauty Industry

By: Geoffrey Jones

This working paper employs the concept of deep responsibility to assess the social responsibility of the beauty industry over time. It shows that many of today’s problems with the industry have deep historical roots. Products have carried too many health hazards.... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Corporate Accountability; Ethics; Beauty and Cosmetics Industry

SSRN

March 2023
Case

Moderna

By: Marco Iansiti, Karim R. Lakhani, Hannah Mayer, Kerry Herman, Allison J. Wigen and Dave Habeeb

This multimedia case follows the story of Moderna and its entry into vaccine development in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. In summer 2020, Stephane Bancel, CEO of biotech firm Moderna, faces several challenges as his company races to develop a vaccine for COVID-19.... View Details

Keywords: Health Pandemics; Research and Development; Digital Transformation; Health Testing and Trials; Biotechnology Industry; Pharmaceutical Industry

March 2023
Module Note

Communication as a Trusted Advisor

By: David G. Fubini and Patrick Sanguineti

A module note for the Mastering Consulting and Advisory Skills (MCAS) course, "Communication as a Trusted Advisor" provides best practices for communicating as an advisor across multiple contexts. View Details

Keywords: Communication

March 2023 (Revised June 2023)
Case

Metaverse Wars

By: Andy Wu, David B. Yoffie and Matt Higgins

In 2023, the term metaverse — a combination of “meta” and “universe” — had become a catch-all for a diverse set of expectations about online virtual worlds and the future of the internet. To some, the metaverse conjured images of a massive participatory videogame... View Details

Keywords: Metaverse; Technology; Virtual Reality; Facebook; Social Media; Technological Innovation; Internet and the Web; Technology Adoption

2023
Book

Deeply Responsible Business: A Global History of Values-Driven Leadership

By: Geoffrey Jones

Corporate social responsibility has entered the mainstream, but what does it take to run a successful purpose-driven business? This book examines leaders who put values alongside profits to showcase the challenges and upside of deeply responsible business. Should... View Details

March 2023 (Revised May 2023)
Case

OneTen at Delta Air Lines: Catalyzing Family-Sustaining Careers for Black Talent (A)

By: Linda A. Hill and Lydia Begag

It was December 10, 2020, and Ed Bastian, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Delta Air Lines (Delta), had just finished a meeting with Joanne Smith, Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer, and Keyra Lynn Johnson, the Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer.... View Details

Keywords: Recruitment; Training; Race; Equality and Inequality; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Job Design and Levels; Air Transportation Industry; United States

March 2023 (Revised May 2023)
Supplement

OneTen at Delta Air Lines: Catalyzing Family-Sustaining Careers for Black Talent (C)

By: Linda A. Hill and Lydia Begag

In February 2023, Delta Air Lines (Delta) Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Ed Bastian, celebrated the airline’s OneTen partnership in a room full of Atlanta’s prominent business leaders, educators, and public servants in Atlanta, at a OneTen/Delta Launch Event. To support... View Details

Keywords: Talent and Talent Management; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Business and Community Relations; Race; Leading Change; Air Transportation Industry; United States; Atlanta

March 2023 (Revised May 2023)
Case

Tribal Councils Investment Group of Manitoba Ltd.

By: David L. Ager

In the Fall of 2014, Heather Berthelette, the recently appointed COO of Tribal Councils Investment Group of Manitoba Ltd. (TCIG), was preparing a recommendation to the Board of Directors about whether to dissolve the company and return any remaining funds to the seven... View Details

Keywords: Indigenous Communities; Corporate Governance; Governing and Advisory Boards; Social Enterprise; Economic Growth; Investment Banking; Canada