Publications

August 2024
Case

Lucky Ones Coffee: Employing People with Disabilities

By: Richard S. Ruback, Robin Greenwood, Joe Higgins, Matthew Preble and Dave Habeeb

Katie Holyfield and Taylor Matkins founded The Lucky Ones Coffee in 2017 with a mission to create jobs in Park City, Utah for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. The company quickly earned strong support from the local community, and by early 2023... View Details

Keywords: Service Industry; Tourism Industry; Retail Industry; Food and Beverage Industry; Utah; United States

Article

Variety of Innovation in Global Value Chains

By: Giulio Buciuni and Gary P. Pisano

This article analyzes how the geography and organization of pre- and production stages in Global Value Chains (GVC) contribute to lead firms' innovation development. A novel approach in GVC studies is introduced based on transaction cost economics (TCE) and the... View Details

Keywords: GVC; Global Value Chains; Manufacturing; Production; Global Range; Innovation and Invention

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2018
Working Paper

Executive Development Programs Enter the Digital Matrix: I. Disrupting the Demand Landscape

By: Das Narayandas and Mihnea C. Moldoveanu

Executive development programs have entered a period of disruption catalyzed by the digitalization of content, connectivity, and communication and are driven by renewed demand for high-level executive and managerial skills. Unlike other segments of higher education,... View Details

Keywords: Executive Education; Internet and the Web; Disruption; Management Skills; Leadership Development

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May 2015
Case

Venture Republic, 2011

By: W. Carl Kester and Mayuka Yamazaki

In December 2011, the founders of Venture Republic, a Japanese developer and operator of on-line search engines for shopping and travel, faced a decison about whether or not to take the company private in a management buyout transaction just three years after an... View Details

Keywords: Management Buyout; MBO; Valuation Methodologies; Financing Decisions; Conflicts Of Interest; Governance; Japan; Search Engines; Going Private; Conflict of Interests; Internet and the Web; Valuation; Privatization; Financing and Loans; Corporate Governance; Web Services Industry; Japan

June 2008
Article

How Are Preferences Revealed?

By: John Beshears, James J. Choi, David Laibson and Brigitte C. Madrian

Revealed preferences are tastes that rationalize an economic agent's observed actions. Normative preferences represent the agent's actual interests. It sometimes makes sense to assume that revealed preferences are identical to normative preferences. But there are many... View Details

Keywords: Consumer Behavior; Attitudes; Microeconomics

November 2012 (Revised August 2014)
Case

Cisco in 2012: Reorganizing for Efficiency and Flexibility

By: Ranjay Gulati, Alison Berkley Wagonfeld and Luciana Silvestri

In 2012, Cisco was under intense pressure to show results: growth in its core business was decelerating and a number of exploratory ventures and acquisitions had not proven as profitable as expected. CEO John Chambers vowed to restore the company's health in a way that... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Change and Adaptation; Restructuring; Adaptation; Performance Efficiency; Emerging Markets; Information Technology Industry

October 2011 (Revised March 2012)
Case

AQR's DELTA Strategy

By: Daniel Bergstresser, Lauren Cohen, Randolph B. Cohen and Christopher Malloy

In the summer of 2008, AQR Capital Management was considering the launch of a new hedge fund strategy. The proposed DELTA portfolio would offer investors exposure to a basket of nine major hedge fund strategies. The DELTA strategy would be innovative in two ways.... View Details

Keywords: Investment Portfolio; Investment Funds; Financial Strategy; Financial Services Industry

February 2008 (Revised September 2010)
Case

Enterprise Culture in Chinese History: Zhang Jian and the Dasheng Cotton Mills

By: Elisabeth Koll

This case focuses on the legal and managerial evolution of limited-liability firms in China, using the example of the Dasheng cotton mills in Nantong near Shanghai. Dasheng, one of the earliest and most successful industrial enterprises in pre-war China, was founded by... View Details

Keywords: History; Law; Organizational Culture; Family Ownership; State Ownership; Corporate Governance; Financial Crisis; Business and Government Relations; Entrepreneurship; Change; Manufacturing Industry; Shanghai; China

January 2009
Article

Spatial Diversity in Invention: Evidence from the Early R&D Labs

By: Tom Nicholas

This article uses historical data on inventor and firm R&D lab locations to examine the technological and geographic structure of corporate knowledge capital accumulation during a formative period in the organization of US innovation. Despite the localization of... View Details

Keywords: Factories, Labs, and Plants; Geographic Location; Innovation and Invention; Patents; Knowledge Acquisition; Research and Development; United States

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Research Summary

The State of Small Business Lending: Credit Access During the Recovery and How Technology May Change the Game

By: Karen Mills

Small businesses are core to America's economic competitiveness. Not only do they employ half of the nation’s private sector workforce—about 120 million people—but since 1995 they have created approximately two-thirds of the net new jobs in our country. Yet in... View Details

Research Summary

Corporate Risk Management

Traditionally companies have managed different kinds of risk individually: the corporate treasurer or finance director handles credit risk and foreign exchange risk, the human resources manager handles employment risk, and so on. Integrated risk management calls for... View Details

June 1983
Article

A Comparison of Tournaments and Contracts

By: Jerry R. Green and Nancy Stokey

Tournaments, reward structures based on rank order, are compared with individual contracts in a model with one risk-neutral principal and many risk-averse agents. Each agent's output is a stochastic function of his effort level plus an additive shock term that is... View Details

Keywords: Tournaments; Contracts