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  • 20 Oct 2016
  • News

Smart Moves

wear and tear. We can help in areas like traffic-signal timing, congestion-based pricing on toll roads, and ramp congestion.” For example, based on analytics supplied by INRIX, Los Angeles reprogrammed traffic signals throughout the... View Details
Keywords: Robert S. Benchley; Support Activities for Transportation; Transportation
  • 10 Feb 2003
  • Research & Ideas

Commodity Busters: Be a Price Maker, Not a Price Taker

with beating Microsoft. His battle was futile. He left the company as Novell began a long downward slide. The fighter pilot mentality of several U.S. airlines led to a price war in which billions of dollars were lost. Even in small... View Details
Keywords: by Benson P. Shapiro
  • 04 Apr 2018
  • Research & Ideas

Smart Cities are Complicated and Costly: Here's How to Build Them

Chombosan Much promotion of smart cities assumes that municipalities will take a proactive, top-down, technology-first approach to urban progress. Thus far, these initiatives look for some forward-thinking city official (or immensely... View Details
Keywords: by John Macomber; Construction; Green Technology
  • September–October 2021
  • Article

Frontiers: Can an AI Algorithm Mitigate Racial Economic Inequality? An Analysis in the Context of Airbnb

By: Shunyuan Zhang, Nitin Mehta, Param Singh and Kannan Srinivasan
We study the effect of Airbnb’s smart-pricing algorithm on the racial disparity in the daily revenue earned by Airbnb hosts. Our empirical strategy exploits Airbnb’s introduction of the algorithm and its voluntary adoption by hosts as a quasi-natural experiment. Among... View Details
Keywords: Smart Pricing; Pricing Algorithm; Machine Bias; Discrimination; Racial Disparity; Social Inequality; Airbnb Revenue; Revenue; Race; Equality and Inequality; Prejudice and Bias; Price; Mathematical Methods; Accommodations Industry
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  • June 2022 (Revised August 2022)
  • Case

Dollar Tree: Breaking the Buck

By: Jill Avery and Marco Bertini
For thirty-five years, Dollar Tree, a discount retail chain selling general merchandise, had held its fixed price point steady, pricing all of its household items, food, stationery, books, seasonal items, gifts, toys, and clothing that made up its diverse and... View Details
Keywords: Retailing; Pricing; Pricing Strategy; Discount Retailing; Discount Store; Marketing; Brands and Branding; Marketing Strategy; Price; Inflation and Deflation; Consumer Behavior; Retail Industry; United States
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  • September–October 2022
  • Article

Should Your Company Sell on Amazon?: Reach Comes at a Price

By: Ayelet Israeli, Leonard A. Schlesinger, Matt Higgins and Sabir Semerkant
Selling on Amazon allows brands to reach millions of consumers—but that exposure comes with costs. They include smaller margins, more competition, the risk of commoditization, and less knowledge about customers. In this article, the authors present a scorecard to... View Details
Keywords: Retail; Retailing; Online Business; Ecommerce; E-commerce; E-Commerce Strategy; Omnichannel Retail; Omnichannel Retailing; Amazon; Amazon.com; Sales; Digital Marketing; Internet and the Web; Business Model; Retail Industry; Consumer Products Industry; Fashion Industry; Advertising Industry; Battery Industry; Apparel and Accessories Industry; Beauty and Cosmetics Industry; Distribution Industry; Electronics Industry; Food and Beverage Industry; United States
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  • 09 Mar 2022
  • Research & Ideas

War in Ukraine: Soaring Gas Prices and the Return of Stagflation?

are already seeing higher prices at the pump, for one thing—and in some areas, those prices could spike even higher, says Harvard Business School Professor Rawi Abdelal. Abdelal, HBS’s Herbert F. Johnson... View Details
Keywords: by Avery Forman; Energy
  • 13 Nov 2019
  • Research & Ideas

Don't Turn Your Marketing Function Over to AI Just Yet

Imagine a future in which a smart marketing machine can predict the needs and habits of individual consumers and the dynamics of competitors across industries and markets. This device would collect data to answer strategic questions, guide managerial decisions, and... View Details
Keywords: by Kristen Senz
  • 19 Nov 2021
  • News

2021’s Best Things to Buy on Black Friday

  • 04 Feb 2002
  • Research & Ideas

How a Juicy Brand Came Back to Life

price most observers found generous. The debacle cost both the chairman and president of Quaker their jobs and hastened the end of Quaker's independent existence (it's now a unit of PepsiCo). But that's not the end of the story. In... View Details
Keywords: by John Deighton; Food & Beverage
  • 11 May 2021
  • News

Law Firms Are Building A.I. Expertise as Regulation Looms

  • 07 Aug 2015
  • Research & Ideas

Obama’s Clean Power Plan: Can Nuclear Power Beat the Global Threat of Coal?

evolution, he analogizes them to mainframes, minicomputers, and microprocessor-based systems, respectively. Lassiter talks about the promise of next-generation nuclear power, and introduces some of the key players in the field. "If you could burn thorium and uranium,... View Details
Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Energy; Utilities
  • 13 Mar 2017
  • Research & Ideas

Hiding Products From Customers May Ultimately Boost Sales

on rapid rotations. New research considers the wisdom of frequent assortment rotation in cases in which a retailer has many new varieties of a product to sell—nine different silver necklaces, say, or 17 different toaster ovens. Is it View Details
Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Retail; Fashion
  • 17 Feb 2003
  • Research & Ideas

Rating Fund Managers by the Company They Keep

data helping managers, it depends on how they use it. The most obvious application is for managers to try to copy their more skilled colleagues. This could be an effective strategy, and lead to more efficiently priced stocks, if markets... View Details
Keywords: by Ann Cullen
  • July 2012 (Revised April 2014)
  • Case

Research In Motion: The Mobile OS Platform War

By: Alan MacCormack, Brian Dunn and Chris F. Kemerer
The case describes competition in the market for smart phones in the US, and the position of one player, Research In Motion (RIM) who manufacture the popular Blackberry line of products. Early in 2011, RIM is in trouble. Its stock price has plummeted, amidst poor... View Details
Keywords: Innovation; Product Development; Technology Strategy; Platform Strategy; Software; Hardware; Technological Innovation; Innovation Strategy; Information Infrastructure; Mobile and Wireless Technology; Digital Platforms; Applications and Software; Telecommunications Industry; Technology Industry; Canada; United States
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    Michael I. Norton

    Michael I. Norton is the Harold M. Brierley Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. He holds a B.A. in Psychology and English from Williams College and a Ph.D. in Psychology from Princeton University. Prior to joining HBS, Professor... View Details

    Keywords: advertising; consumer products; e-commerce industry; marketing industry; nonprofit industry
    • 10 Jun 2002
    • Research & Ideas

    How to Look at Globalization Now

    theoretical model that looks beyond its idiosyncratic elements. Looking at prices alone is insufficient to look at the relative viability of globally standardized vs. locally customized products.— Pankaj Ghemawat The case concerns STAR... View Details
    Keywords: by Martha Lagace
    • 2010
    • Book

    The New Science of Retailing: How Analytics Are Transforming the Supply Chain and Improving Performance

    By: Marshall Fisher and Ananth Raman
    Retailers today are drowning in data but lacking in insight: They have huge volumes of information at their disposal. But they're unsure of how to sort through it and use it to make smart decisions. The result? They're struggling with profit-sapping supply chain... View Details
    Keywords: Profit; Knowledge Use and Leverage; Logistics; Supply Chain Management; Mathematical Methods; Retail Industry
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      Rajiv Lal

      Rajiv Lal, is the Stanley Roth, Sr. Professor of Retailing at Harvard Business School. He is currently teaching an elective MBA course on the Business of Smart Connected Products/IOT. He has been responsible for the retailing curriculum and has served as the course... View Details

      • 25 May 2021
      • Research & Ideas

      White Airbnb Hosts Earn More. Can AI Shrink the Racial Gap?

      uncovered a problem that prevented greater racial equity gains: Black hosts were 41 percent less likely than white hosts to take advantage of the smart pricing application. And for the Black hosts who didn’t... View Details
      Keywords: by Lane Lambert; Technology; Accommodations