Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(3,845)
- Faculty Publications (696)
- July 2021
- Article
Outsourcing Tasks Online: Matching Supply and Demand on Peer-to-Peer Internet Platforms
By: Zoë Cullen and Chiara Farronato
We study the growth of online peer-to-peer markets. Using data from TaskRabbit, an expanding marketplace for domestic tasks at the time of our study, we show that growth varies considerably across cities. To disentangle the potential drivers of growth, we look... View Details
- Summer 2021
- Article
Platform Leadership and Supply Chains: Intel, Centrino, and the Restructuring of Wi-Fi Supply
By: Roberto Fontana and Shane Greenstein
In this paper we examine Intel’s launch of Centrino and interpret it as platform leaders attempt to restructure a supply chain. We provide a narrative of key actions and how they coordinated changes and offer a framework of the predictable consequences for... View Details
- June 23, 2021
- Article
Research: When A/B Testing Doesn't Tell You the Whole Story
By: Eva Ascarza
When it comes to churn prevention, marketers traditionally start by identifying which customers are most likely to churn, and then running A/B tests to determine whether a proposed retention intervention will be effective at retaining those high-risk customers. While... View Details
Keywords: Customer Retention; Churn; Targeting; Market Research; Marketing; Investment Return; Customers; Retention; Research
- June 2021
- Article
Engineering Serendipity: When Does Knowledge Sharing Lead to Knowledge Production?
By: Jacqueline N. Lane, Ina Ganguli, Patrick Gaule, Eva C. Guinan and Karim R. Lakhani
We investigate how knowledge similarity between two individuals is systematically related to the likelihood that a serendipitous encounter results in knowledge production. We conduct a natural field experiment at a medical research symposium, where we exogenously... View Details
- 2021
- Working Paper
Regulatory Approval and Expanded Market Size
By: Benjamin Berger, Amitabh Chandra and Craig Garthwaite
Regulatory review of new medicines is often viewed as a hindrance to innovation by increasing the hurdle to bring products to market. However, a more complete accounting of regulation must also account for its potential market expanding effects through quality... View Details
- 2021
- Working Paper
The Great Unequalizer: Initial Health Effects of COVID-19 in the United States
By: Marcella Alsan, Amitabh Chandra and Kosali I. Simon
We measure inequities from the COVID-19 pandemic on mortality and hospitalizations in the United States during the early months of the outbreak. We discuss challenges in measuring health outcomes and health inequality, some of which are specific to COVID-19 and others... View Details
- 2021
- Working Paper
The Old Boys' Club: Schmoozing and the Gender Gap
By: Zoë B. Cullen and Ricardo Perez-Truglia
Offices are social places. Employees and managers take breaks together and talk about
family and hobbies. In this study, we show that employees’ social interactions with their managers
can be advantageous for their careers, and that this phenomenon contributes to the... View Details
- May 2021
- Case
Endeavor Kenya: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem
By: Lynda M. Applegate, Shikhar Ghosh and Christian Godwin
In 2016, Fiona Mungai became Endeavor Kenya’s first managing director. In this role, she helped the organization build its inaugural board and select its first Endeavor entrepreneur, a fintech company called Cellulant. Throughout this process, Mungai observed the power... View Details
Keywords: Business Ventures; Entrepreneurship; Human Resources; Leadership; Leading Change; Management; Growth and Development Strategy; Negotiation; Economy; Markets; Emerging Markets; Network Effects; Relationships; Strategy; Financial Services Industry; Technology Industry; Telecommunications Industry; Shipping Industry; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Africa; Kenya
- April 2021
- Teaching Note
Social Media War 2021: Snap vs. Facebook vs. TikTok
By: David B. Yoffie and Daniel Fisher
This teaching note provides analysis and a teaching plan for the Social Media War 2021: Snap vs. Facebook vs. TikTok case. View Details
- April 2021 (Revised March 2024)
- Case
Social Media War 2021: Snap vs. Facebook vs. TikTok
By: David B. Yoffie and Daniel Fisher
This case explores the competitive war between Snap, Facebook, and TikTok in 2021. The strategic focus is on Snapchat: how should it respond to the emergence of TikTok, and how should it compete with the dominant competitor in its space—Facebook. The case examines... View Details
- April 2021
- Case
Codecademy: Where to Next?
By: Jeffrey F. Rayport, Max Mailman and Sarah Ascherman
In March 2020, Zach Sims, co-founder and CEO of online education platform Codecademy, prepared for a meeting with his Chief of Staff Kunal Ahuja to discuss the company’s goals. Codecademy billed itself as the largest online resource for computer science literacy and... View Details
Keywords: Monetization Strategy; Business Model; Change Management; Venture Capital; Leading Change; Growth and Development Strategy; Growth Management; Management Teams; Marketing Channels; Product Marketing; Network Effects; Product Development; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Strategic Planning; Internet and the Web; Digital Platforms; United States
- 2021
- Article
Does Fair Ranking Improve Minority Outcomes? Understanding the Interplay of Human and Algorithmic Biases in Online Hiring
By: Tom Sühr, Sophie Hilgard and Himabindu Lakkaraju
Ranking algorithms are being widely employed in various online hiring platforms including LinkedIn, TaskRabbit, and Fiverr. Prior research has demonstrated that ranking algorithms employed by these platforms are prone to a variety of undesirable biases, leading to the... View Details
- March 2021 (Revised February 2025)
- Teaching Note
Afterpay U.S.: The Omnichannel Dilemma
By: Antonio Moreno and Anibha Singh
Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 519-086. In 2018, Nick Molnar, the founder of the Australia-based online payment service Afterpay began its expansion to the U.S. market. The service had gained a loyal following in Australia by enabling customers to pay for online... View Details
Keywords: Omnichannel Retail; Digital Marketing; Business Startups; Business Growth and Maturation; Business Model; Business Organization; For-Profit Firms; Change Management; Customer Value and Value Chain; Customer Relationship Management; Customer Satisfaction; Financing and Loans; Microfinance; Global Strategy; Marketing Strategy; Market Entry and Exit; Digital Platforms; Product Development; Supply Chain Management; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Networks; Network Effects; Internet and the Web; Financial Services Industry; Technology Industry; United States; Australia
- March 2021
- Article
Bayesian Signatures of Confidence and Central Tendency in Perceptual Judgment
By: Yang Xiang, Thomas Graeber, Benjamin Enke and Samuel Gershman
This paper theoretically and empirically investigates the role of Bayesian noisy cognition in perceptual judgment, focusing on the central tendency effect: the well-known empirical regularity that perceptual judgments are biased towards the center of the... View Details
- 2021
- Working Paper
First Law of Motion: Influencer Video Advertising on TikTok
By: Jeremy Yang, Juanjuan Zhang and Yuhan Zhang
This paper engineers an intuitive feature that is predictive of the causal effect of influencer video advertising on product sales. We propose the concept of m-score, a summary statistic that captures the extent to which a product is advertised in the most engaging... View Details
- March 2021
- Article
International Trade and Social Connectedness
By: Michael Bailey, Abhinav Gupta, Sebastian Hillenbrand, Theresa Kuchler, Robert J. Richmond and Johannes Stroebel
We use de-identified data from Facebook to construct a new and publicly available measure of the pairwise social connectedness between 170 countries and 332 European regions. We find that two countries trade more when they are more socially connected, especially for... View Details
- 2021
- Article
Leisure Beliefs and the Subjective Well-being of Nations
By: Lucia Macchia and A.V. Whillans
Here, we construct a data set of 79 countries (N = 220,000) and explore whether differences in the prioritization of time (leisure) vs. money (work) explain cross-country differences in happiness. Consistent with our predictions, countries whose citizens value leisure... View Details
Keywords: Leisure; Work; Subjective Well-being; Public Policy; Employment; Happiness; Governance; Policy
- March 2021
- Article
On the Direct and Indirect Real Effects of Credit Supply Shocks
By: Laura Alfaro, Manuel García-Santana and Enrique Moral-Benito
We explore the real effects of bank-lending shocks and how they permeate the economy through buyer-supplier linkages. We combine administrative data on all Spanish firms with a matched bank-firm-loan dataset of all corporate loans from 2003 to 2013 to estimate... View Details
- March 2021
- Article
Provider Teams Outperform Solo Providers in Managing Chronic Diseases and Could Improve the Value of Care
By: Maximilian J. Pany, Lucy Chen, Bethany Sheridan and Robert S. Huckman
Scope-of-practice regulations, including prescribing limits and supervision requirements, may influence the propensity of providers to form care teams. Therefore, policy makers need to understand the effect of both team-based care and provider type on clinical... View Details
- March 2021
- Article
The Customer May Not Always Be Right: Customer Compatibility and Service Performance
This paper investigates the impact of customer compatibility – the degree of fit between the needs of customers and the capabilities of the operations serving them – on customer experiences and firm performance. We use a variance decomposition analysis to quantify the... View Details