Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(3,278)
- Faculty Publications (649)
- 2021
- Working Paper
Shareholder Activism and Firms' Voluntary Disclosure of Climate Change Risks
By: Caroline Flammer, Michael W. Toffel and Kala Viswanathan
This paper examines whether—in the absence of mandated disclosure requirements—shareholder activism can elicit greater disclosure of firms’ exposure to climate change risks. We find that environmental shareholder activism increases the voluntary disclosure of climate... View Details
Keywords: Shareholder Activism; Climate Risk; Corporate Accountability; Climate Change; Corporate Disclosure; Corporate Governance; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Business and Shareholder Relations; Risk and Uncertainty; Natural Environment; Environmental Sustainability; Financial Services Industry; United States
- October 2019 (Revised August 2022)
- Case
Nehemiah Mfg. Co.: Providing a Second Chance
By: Michael Chu, Brian Trelstad and John Masko
In 2009, Dan Meyer and Richard Palmer, two veterans of the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) industry, founded Nehemiah Manufacturing to build FMCG brands while providing jobs to Cincinnati, Ohio’s beleaguered urban core. Two years later, the pair made their first... View Details
Keywords: Fast Moving Consumer Goods; Social Entrepreneurship; Retention; Selection and Staffing; Employment; Human Capital; Growth Management; Brands and Branding; Social Marketing; Mission and Purpose; Prejudice and Bias; City; Urban Scope; Consumer Products Industry; Manufacturing Industry; Ohio; United States
- Article
Achieving Value in Highly Complex Acute Care: Lessons from the Delivery of Extra Corporeal Life Support
By: Michael Nurok, Jonathan Warsh, Erik Dong, Jeffrey Lopez, Mayumi Kharabi and Robert S. Kaplan
We applied a value (outcomes and cost) analysis to extracorporeal life support (ECLS), a relatively rare but very expensive ICU therapy with highly variable outcomes. To address the outcome component of the value approach, we created guidelines for ECLS delivery; to... View Details
- Article
Psychological Safety and Near Miss Events in Radiation Oncology
By: Palak Kundu, Olivia Jung, Kathy Rose, Chonlawan Khaothiemsang, Nzhde Agazaryan, Amy C. Edmondson, Michael L. Steinberg and Ann C. Raldow
Background: Near miss events, defined as harm averted due to chance, are learning opportunities in radiation oncology. Psychological safety is a feature of a learning environment characterized by interpersonal risk taking. We examine the effects of near miss type and... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Improving Regulatory Effectiveness Through Better Targeting: Evidence from OSHA
By: Matthew S. Johnson, David I. Levine and Michael W. Toffel
We study how a regulator can best target inspections. Our case study is a US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) program that randomly allocated some inspections. On average, each inspection averted 2.4 serious injuries (9%) over the next five years.... 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
- Article
The Feeling of Not Knowing It All
By: Haiyang Yang, Ziv Carmon, Dan Ariely and Michael I. Norton
How do consumers assess their mastery of knowledge they have learned? We explore this question by investigating a common knowledge consumption situation: encountering opportunities for further learning. We argue and show that such opportunities can trigger a... View Details
- June 2019 (Revised February 2020)
- Case
Eric Hawkins Leading Agile Teams @ Digitally-Born AppFolio (A)
By: Tsedal Neeley, Paul Leonardi and Michael Norris
Eric Hawkins, director of engineering at AppFolio—a digital technology firm that offered cloud-based business software to small and medium sized companies—was shocked by an unusual request from his senior leadership team. Could Hawkins and one of his agile teams build... View Details
- May 2019
- Supplement
Did You Decide to Proceed by Targeting Three or Six New Products?
- May–June 2019
- Article
U-Shaped Conformity in Online Social Networks
By: Monic Sun, Michael Zhang and Feng Zhu
We explore how people balance their needs to belong and to be different from their friends by studying their choices of a virtual-house wall color on a leading Chinese social-networking site. The setting enables us to randomize both the popular color and the adoption... View Details
- Article
Use of Crowd Innovation to Develop an Artificial Intelligence-Based Solution for Radiation Therapy Targeting
By: Raymond H. Mak, Michael G. Endres, Jin Hyun Paik, Rinat A. Sergeev, Hugo Aerts, Christopher L. Williams, Karim R. Lakhani and Eva C. Guinan
Importance: Radiation therapy (RT) is a critical cancer treatment, but the existing radiation oncologist work force does not meet growing global demand. One key physician task in RT planning involves tumor segmentation for targeting, which requires substantial... View Details
- April 2019
- Article
Rituals and Nuptials: The Emotional and Relational Consequences of Relationship Rituals
By: Ximena Garcia-Rada, Ovul Sezer and Michael I. Norton
Four studies reveal the benefits of relationship rituals: couples with relationship rituals report more positive emotions and greater relationship satisfaction and commitment than those without them. We show that rituals are crucial for understanding consumption... View Details
Keywords: Rituals; Relationship Satisfaction; Relationships; Satisfaction; Spending; Behavior; Perception; Emotions
- Article
Handshaking Promotes Deal-Making by Signaling Cooperative Intent
By: Juliana Schroeder, Jane L. Risen, Francesca Gino and Michael I. Norton
We examine how a simple handshake—a gesture that often occurs at the outset of social interactions—can influence deal-making. Because handshakes are social rituals, they are imbued with meaning beyond their physical features. We propose that during mixed-motive... View Details
- Article
The Right and Wrong Way to Do ‘CEO Activism’
By: Aaron K Chatterji and Michael W. Toffel
CEO activism—where leaders take public stands on controversial social and political issues that aren’t related to their company’s bottom line—has become increasingly common. CEO activism has attracted favorable media attention, but has also resulted in backlash and... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
The Revised-Is-Quality Heuristic: Why Consumers Prefer Products Labeled as Revised
By: Ximena Garcia-Rada, Leslie K. John, Ed O’Brien and Michael I. Norton
From downloading never-ending updates to tracking ever-newer releases, consumers
today are surrounded by revised products that purport to have improved upon their predecessors.
Seven experiments examine when and why consumers rely on a “revised-is-quality”... View Details
- February 2019
- Article
Pettiness in Social Exchange
By: Tami Kim, Ting Zhang and Michael I. Norton
We identify and document a novel construct—pettiness, or intentional attentiveness to trivial details—and examine its (negative) implications in interpersonal relationships and social exchange. Seven studies show that pettiness manifests across different types of... View Details
- 2019
- Article
Fair Algorithms for Learning in Allocation Problems
By: Hadi Elzayn, Shahin Jabbari, Christopher Jung, Michael J Kearns, Seth Neel, Aaron Leon Roth and Zachary Schutzman
Settings such as lending and policing can be modeled by a centralized agent allocating a scarce resource (e.g. loans or police officers) amongst several groups, in order to maximize some objective (e.g. loans given that are repaid, or criminals that are apprehended).... View Details
- January 2019 (Revised July 2019)
- Case
New Balance: Managing Orders and Working Conditions
By: Michael W. Toffel, Eileen McNeely and Matthew Preble
New Balance Athletics, Inc., a major U.S.-based athletic footwear and apparel brand, sources most of its footwear products from independent suppliers whose factories are located in China, Indonesia, and Vietnam. Monica Gorman, vice president of responsible leadership... View Details
Keywords: Footwear; Athletic Footwear; Manufacturing; CSR; Sustainability; Quality Management; Supply Chains; Operations; Management; Production; Working Conditions; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Labor and Management Relations; Supply Chain Management; Supply Chain; Order Taking and Fulfillment; Apparel and Accessories Industry; Consumer Products Industry
- 2019
- Article
An Empirical Study of Rich Subgroup Fairness for Machine Learning
By: Michael J Kearns, Seth Neel, Aaron Leon Roth and Zhiwei Steven Wu
Kearns et al. [2018] recently proposed a notion of rich subgroup fairness intended to bridge the gap between statistical and individual notions of fairness. Rich subgroup fairness picks a statistical fairness constraint (say, equalizing false positive rates across... View Details
- Article
Product Quality and Entering Through Tying: Experimental Evidence
By: Hyunjin Kim and Michael Luca
Dominant platform businesses often develop products in adjacent markets to complement their core business. One common approach used to gain traction in these adjacent markets has been to pursue a tying strategy. For example, Microsoft pre-installed Internet Explorer... View Details
Keywords: Tying; Platform Strategy; Google; Product; Quality; Digital Platforms; Strategy; Market Entry and Exit