Publications

18 Aug 2015
News

Turning a Profit When Your Product is Free

01 Aug 2018
What Do You Think?

Are Free Trade and Free Markets Quaint Ideas From the Past?

tariffs—equivalent to taxes—we are currently witnessing.) It reflects the fact that “global” market freedom for capital and goods may work, but market freedom for labor does not. As a result, labor suffers at the expense of the owners of capital and View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

20 Jan 2023
News

Free Spirits

a beginning, a middle, and a finish. Their ready-to-drink cocktails are naturally low in sugar and calories (less than 2 grams and 35 calories). They are bottled and labeled with a sense of sophistication that would feel right at home on any elegant bar cart. With its... View Details

Keywords: Jen McFarland Flint; Food Services and Drinking Places; Hospitality

02 Jun 2012
News

Free Exchange: Silicon Sally

September 2023
Technical Note

Free and Open Source Software and Hardware

By: Frank Nagle

This technical note surveys the concepts of free and open source software and hardware. It introduces the concepts in general, providing a brief history of their development and numerous examples of how companies employ them in practice. Further, it identifies various... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Strategy; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Technological Innovation; Nonprofit Organizations; Competitive Strategy; Patents; Information Technology; Business Model; Open Source Distribution; Applications and Software; Information Technology Industry; Technology Industry

Educators

Purchase

04 Mar 2019
News

Acording To Research This Will Lower Stress And Increase Productivity At Work, And It's Free

11 Dec 2018
Research & Ideas

Free Trade Needs Nurturing—and Other Lessons from History

and started World War I, and it all collapsed. As percentages of GDP, we didn’t return to those earlier levels of global capital flows until the 1990s. Global free trade is not the natural order of things. Globalization is a project, and... View Details

Keywords: by Staff; Consumer Products; Consumer Products; Consumer Products; Consumer Products; Consumer Products; Consumer Products; Consumer Products; Consumer Products; Consumer Products; Consumer Products

15 Jan 2007
Research & Ideas

The Business of Free Software

recent research at Harvard Business School. In "The Business of Free Software: Enterprise Incentives, Investment, and Motivation in the Open Source Community," the authors—HBS professor Marco Iansiti and Gregory L. Richards of... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Hanna; Computer

18 Oct 2018
Research & Ideas

How to Use Free Shipping as a Competitive Weapon

price remains a primary determinant of whether a consumer will buy a product, free shipping provides an added enhancement for online merchants to consider. Shoppers are only one-tenth as sensitive to increases in shipping fees as they are... View Details

Keywords: by Kristen Senz; Retail

Article

Divide and Conquer: Competing with Free Technology under Network Effects

By: Deishin Lee and Haim Mendelson

We study how a commercial firm competes with a free open source product. The market consists of two customer segments with different preferences and is characterized by positive network effects. The commercial firm makes product and pricing decisions to maximize its... View Details

Keywords: Profit; Product Launch; Network Effects; Open Source Distribution; Adoption; Competitive Strategy; Competitive Advantage

05 Oct 2020
Book

Want to Be Happier? Make More Free Time

time, not more money When people invest too much time and energy into making more money, it’s often because they assume the extra cash will bring greater happiness. But they are wrong. People with more free time are actually happier,... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

2018
Working Paper

Shipping Fees and Product Assortment in Online Retail

By: Chaoqun Chen and Donald Ngwe

Shipping fees are an important aspect of online retail for both consumers and sellers. A common fee structure is contingent free shipping, in which consumers are granted free shipping for basket sizes above a minimum value and are charged a flat fee for orders below... View Details

Keywords: Shpping Fee; E-commerce; Multi-category Demand; Search Costs; Shipping Membership; Spending; Consumer Behavior; Retail Industry

30 May 2013
Blog Post

Product Launch Day

At Sonation we’ve been working all summer toward product launch day, and the day has finally come! Last week I went to Michigan with my cofounder Paul to demo the app at Interlochen, one of the premier summer arts camps in the US. Of all... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Technology

Article

When Talk Is "Free": The Effect of Tariff Structure on Usage Under Two- and Three-Part Tariffs

By: Eva Ascarza, Anja Lambrecht and Naufel Vilcassim

In many service industries, firms introduce three-part tariffs to replace or complement existing two-part tariffs. In contrast with two-part tariffs, three-part tariffs offer allowances, or “free” units of the service. Behavioral research suggests that the attributes... View Details

Keywords: Pricing; Nonlinear Pricing; Discrete/continuous Choice Model; Three-part Tariffs; Free Products; Price; Consumer Behavior; Analysis; Learning; Risk and Uncertainty

Article

R&D: A Small Contribution to Productivity Growth

By: Diego Comin

In this paper I evaluate the contribution of R&D investments to productivity growth. The basis for the analysis are the free entry condition and the fact that most R&D innovations are embodied. Free entry yields a relationship between the resources devoted to R&D and... View Details

Keywords: Research and Development; Investment; Interest Rates; Performance Productivity; Technological Innovation; Perspective; United States

2022
White Paper

Census II of Free and Open Source Software - Application Libraries

By: Frank Nagle, James Dana, Jennifer Hoffman, Steven Randazzo and Yanuo Zhou

Produced in partnership with Harvard Laboratory for Innovation Science (LISH) and the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF), Census II is the second investigation into the widespread use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). The Census II effort utilizes data... View Details

Keywords: Open Source Software; Applications and Software; Cybersecurity; Open Source Distribution

16 Oct 2018
Working Paper Summaries

Shipping Fees and Product Assortment in Online Retail

Keywords: by Chaoqun Chen and Donald Ngwe; Retail

January 2021 (Revised March 2021)
Exercise

E-Commerce Analytics for CPG Firms (C): Free Delivery Terms

By: Ayelet Israeli and Fedor (Ted) Lisitsyn

The E-Commerce Analytics group at the traditional CPG firm was in charge of compiling various online sales reports, as well as making data-driven recommendations for sales and marketing tactics. In a series of exercises, students address different data challenges for... View Details