Faculty & Research

• HBS Book

The world has changed dramatically in just the past few years—and so has the game of negotiation. COVID-19, Zoom, political polarization, the online economy, increasing economic globalization, and greater workplace diversity—all have transformed the who, what, where, and how of negotiation. Today, traditional negotiating tactics, while still effective, need to be tailored to vastly different situations and circumstances. In Negotiation: The Game Has Changed, legendary Harvard Business School professor Max Bazerman, a pioneer in the field of negotiation, shows you how to negotiate successfully today by adapting proven negotiation principles and strategies to the challenging new contexts you face—from negotiating across cultural and political differences to trying to reach an agreement over Zoom or during a supply chain crisis.

• Journal of Financial Economics 165 (March 2025).

We study the socially optimal level of illiquidity in an economy populated by households with taste shocks and present bias with naive beliefs. The government chooses mandatory contributions to accounts, each with a different pre-retirement withdrawal penalty. Collected penalties are rebated lump sum. When households have homogeneous present bias, β, the social optimum is well approximated by a single account with an early-withdrawal penalty of 1 − β. When households have heterogeneous present bias, the social optimum is well approximated by a two-account system: (i) an account that is completely liquid and (ii) an account that is completely illiquid until retirement.

• Health Care Initiative

We measure whether expert patients – those trained as physicians and nurses – have fewer emergency department visits and the reasons for these differences. Relative to similar patients physicians and nurses had 19.8% and 5.1% fewer ED visits, principally due to fewer avoidable visits. The differences in avoidable visits between physicians and other patients were largest for diagnoses commonly requiring prescriptions, which physicians often self-prescribed. Our results suggest that improving access to prescriptions for acute symptoms, more than improving patient education, may reduce avoidable health care.

• Featured Case

In 2023, Bill Anderson became CEO of Bayer AG, a 160-year-old life sciences giant looking to strengthen its pharma pipeline, manage debt, and cut through bureaucracy. His bold response: Dynamic Shared Ownership (DSO), a radical model replacing traditional hierarchies with self-organizing teams. By 2025, Bayer was on track to cut €2 billion in costs, but questions remained—could fewer bosses truly drive innovation, or was this an unsustainable gamble? As Amazon, Citibank, and Dell explored similar shifts, Bayer found itself at the center of a corporate management revolution. Would DSO redefine leadership, or prove a cautionary tale?

• Featured Case

This case examines factors contributing to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) in March 2023, an event as unpredicted as it was quick. SVB funded nearly half of all U.S. venture-backed startups and at the end of 2022 held $173 billion in deposits, largely comprising the venture capital those startups had raised. On February 28, 2023, Moody’s warned SVB about a potential credit rating downgrade, reflecting concerns over "funding, liquidity, and profitability" which factored in substantial unrealized losses on SVB’s debt securities. To strengthen its balance sheet, SVB sold $21 billion in securities on March 8, but the move shocked its customers, as it resulted in a realized loss of $2 billion. The ensuing bank run intensified as SVB proved unable to placate investor fears or raise capital to plug that hole, and SVB was placed in receivership on the morning of March 10.

• HBS Working Paper

We show that when firms compete via supply functions, transferring high-cost capacity to the largest, most efficient firm—thereby diversifying its production technologies while increasing concentration—can lower prices by prompting the leader to expand output and competitors to aggressively defend market shares. However, large transfers prove anticompetitive, as sizable capacity differences discourage price undercutting. Exploiting renewable intermittencies in Colombia’s electricity market, where firms are technology-diversified, we consistently find a U-shape relationship between prices and concentration. Counterfactually reallocating 30% of competitors’ high-cost capacities to the leader cuts prices 10%, while larger transfers raise them, revealing how capacity and efficiency influence market power.

• Working Paper

This paper examines the short-run impact of the 2025 U.S. tariffs on consumer prices using a unique integration of high-frequency retail pricing data, product-level country-of-origin information, and detailed tariff classifications. By linking daily prices from major U.S. retailers to Harmonized System (HS) codes and import origins, we construct custom price indices that isolate the direct effects of tariff changes across product categories and trading partners. Our analysis reveals rapid pricing responses, though their magnitude remains modest relative to the announced tariff rates and varies by country of origin. Both imported and domestic goods are affected, suggesting broader pricing and supply chain spillovers. These findings offer timely evidence for policymakers, businesses, and consumers navigating the immediate consequences of trade policy changes.