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Publications
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- Faculty Publications (2,580)
- February 2024
- Module Note
Data-Driven Marketing in Retail Markets
By: Ayelet Israeli
This note describes an eight-class sessions module on data-driven marketing in retail markets. The module aims to familiarize students with core concepts of data-driven marketing in retail, including exploring the opportunities and challenges, adopting best practices,... View Details
Keywords: Data; Data Analytics; Retail; Retail Analytics; Data Science; Business Analytics; ＂Marketing Analytics＂; Omnichannel; Omnichannel Retailing; Omnichannel Retail; DTC; Direct To Consumer Marketing; Ethical Decision Making; Algorithmic Bias; Privacy; A/B Testing; Descriptive Analytics; Prescriptive Analytics; Predictive Analytics; Analytics and Data Science; E-commerce; Marketing Channels; Demand and Consumers; Marketing Strategy; Retail Industry
- February 2024
- Case
Adventures Inc: 21st Century Brand Building
By: Boris Groysberg and Sarah L. Abbott
Founded in 2020, Adventures worked with celebrities in Brazil to create and launch digitally native brands. The idea was to match the celebrity’s skill in creating content and entertaining fans with Adventures’ skill in consumer packaged goods marketing and operations.... View Details
Keywords: Digital Brand; Influencer Marketing; Growth And Scaling; Capital Constraints; Brand Portfolio Strategy; CPG; Start-up; Celebrity Endorsement; Digital Marketing; Growth and Development Strategy; Entrepreneurship; Advertising; Social Media; Business Startups; Joint Ventures; Brands and Branding; Brazil
- February 2024 (Revised May 2025)
- Case
Shore Capital Partners: The Next Ten Years
By: Boris Groysberg and Kerry Herman
Private equity firm Shore Capital Partners is at an inflection point, after 12 years of phenomenal growth and success. Now, as the partners consider options, should Shore remain micro-cap focused, or move into more mid-cap investments? Should Shore hold investments... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Platform Information Provision and Consumer Search: A Field Experiment
By: Lu Fang, Yanyou Chen, Chiara Farronato, Zhe Yuan and Yitong Wang
Despite substantial efforts to help consumers search in more intuitive ways, text search remains the predominant tool for product discovery online. In this paper, we explore the effects of visual and textual cues for search refinement on consumer search and purchasing... View Details
- February 2024
- Article
Pricing Power in Advertising Markets: Theory and Evidence
By: Matthew Gentzkow, Jesse M. Shapiro, Frank Yang and Ali Yurukoglu
Existing theories of media competition imply that advertisers will pay a lower price in equilibrium to reach consumers who multi-home across competing outlets. We generalize, extend, and test this prediction. We find that television outlets whose viewers watch more... View Details
- Working Paper
Visual Uniqueness in Peer-to-Peer Marketplaces: Machine Learning Model Development, Validation, and Application
By: Flora Feng, Charis Li and Shunyuan Zhang
Peer-to-peer (P2P) marketplaces have seen exponential growth in recent years featured by unique offerings from individual providers. Despite the perceived value of uniqueness, scalable quantification of visual uniqueness in P2P platforms like Airbnb has been largely... View Details
- January 2024
- Case
Mariam Braimah: Designing a Career in Tech
By: Lakshmi Ramarajan, Hannah Riley Bowles and Michael Norris
In 2022, Mariam Braimah, a digital designer working at Netflix, is considering the next move in her career. She has spent several years at Netflix, and in her spare time, using her savings, has founded a design-focused fellowship program and a consumer insights company... View Details
- January 11, 2024
- Article
Understanding the Tradeoffs of the Amazon Antitrust Case
By: Chiara Farronato, Andrey Fradkin, Andrei Hagiu and Dionne Lomax
Regulators in the United States and Europe have been taking on Big Tech, challenging what they say are the companies’ anti-competitive and predatory strategies that harm consumers and third-party users of their platforms. This article examines the FTC’s case against... View Details
- January 2024 (Revised February 2024)
- Course Overview Note
Managing Customers for Growth: Course Overview for Students
By: Eva Ascarza
Managing Customers for Growth (MCG) is a 14-session elective course for second-year MBA students at Harvard Business School. It is designed for business professionals engaged in roles centered on customer-driven growth activities. The course explores the dynamics of... View Details
- January 2024 (Revised June 2025)
- Exercise
Travelogo: Understanding Customer Journeys
By: Eva Ascarza, Nicolas Padilla and Oded Netzer
In late May 2023, Sarah Merino, the newly appointed manager of the Customer Insights group at Travelogo—an online travel booking platform—initiates a comprehensive analysis of clickstream data to understand the varied behaviors and needs of their users. In preparation... View Details
- January 2024
- Case
Vibrant Health
By: Henry McGee and Sarah Mehta
This case is about nutritional supplements company Vibrant Health, among the 100 largest Black-owned businesses in the U.S. After acquiring the company from its white founder in 2007, co-owners Ted and Paige Parker significantly grew its sales. Set in September 2023,... View Details
- January 2024
- Case
National Football League and Private 5G
By: Andy Wu, Grant Son and Shuoyu Chen
On September 9, 2021, the National Football League (NFL) designated Verizon as its official 5G partner in a 10-year deal, committed to enhance the experience for NFL teams, players, and fans in stadiums. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said, “Verizon will help us... View Details
- January 2024
- Article
Dog Eat Dog: Balancing Network Effects and Differentiation in a Digital Platform Merger
By: Chiara Farronato, Jessica Fong and Andrey Fradkin
Digital platforms are increasingly the subject of regulatory scrutiny. In comparison to multiple competitors, a single platform may increase consumer welfare if network effects are large or may decrease welfare due to higher prices or reduction in platform variety. We... View Details
- 2024
- Book
The Everything Token: How NFTs and Web3 Will Transform the Way We Buy, Sell, and Create
By: Steve Kaczynski and Scott Duke Kominers
We demystify the coming digital revolution, showing how NFTs will transform our online and offline interactions.
NFTs aren’t just pictures on the internet, or a fad that has come and gone. Rather, they’re a new technology for creating digital assets and... View Details
NFTs aren’t just pictures on the internet, or a fad that has come and gone. Rather, they’re a new technology for creating digital assets and... View Details
Keywords: Economic Systems; Microeconomics; Entrepreneurship; Cultural Entrepreneurship; Information Technology; Innovation and Invention; Innovation Strategy; Digital Platforms; Digital Strategy; Digital Transformation; Internet and the Web; Technology Adoption; Marketing; Marketing Strategy; Product Marketing; Product Positioning; Markets; E-commerce; Market Design; Value; Customer Value and Value Chain; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Innovation and Management; Organizational Structure; Customer Ownership; Ownership; Consumer Products Industry; Consumer Products Industry; Consumer Products Industry; Consumer Products Industry; Consumer Products Industry; Consumer Products Industry; Consumer Products Industry; Consumer Products Industry; Consumer Products Industry
- 2025
- Working Paper
Enhancing Treatment Effect Prediction on Privacy-Protected Data: An Honest Post-Processing Approach
By: Ta-Wei Huang and Eva Ascarza
As firms increasingly rely on customer data for personalization, concerns over privacy and regulatory compliance have grown. Local Differential Privacy (LDP) offers strong individual-level protection by injecting noise into data before collection. While... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Rapport in Organizations: Evidence from Fast Food
By: Achyuta Adhvaryu, Parker Howell, Anant Nyshadham and Jorge Tamayo
Common identity often provides a foundation for workplace rapport. Using personnel and productivity data from a large fast food chain in Colombia, we study whether mismatched gender identity across managers and workers affects the team’s ability to deal with demand... View Details
Keywords: Productivity; Workplace Relationships; Rapport; Managers; People Management; Labor Allocation; Staffing; Scheduling; Quick-serve Restaurants; Management; Relationships; Gender; Labor and Management Relations; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Employees; Food and Beverage Industry; Colombia
- December 2023 (Revised February 2024)
- Case
21Seeds: Taking Shots at Breakout Growth
21Seeds, a female-founded flavor-infused tequila startup launched in 2019, had made inroads into the alcoholic beverage industry by focusing on an underserved consumer segment in spirits—women, primarily in their 30s and 40s, many of whom were moms—and by following a... View Details
- December 2023 (Revised July 2024)
- Case
Boortmalt: The Master Maltster
By: Forest Reinhardt, Jose B Alvarez, Damien McLoughlin, Lena Duchene and Emer Moloney
By May 2023, Boortmalt was the world’s leading producer of malt, with a production capacity of 3 million tonnes, 15% of global market share, and 27 malting plants across five continents. It had recently acquired a major competitor and had sustained an EBITDA growth of... View Details
Keywords: Plant-Based Agribusiness; Mergers and Acquisitions; Talent and Talent Management; Customer Focus and Relationships; Values and Beliefs; Financing and Loans; Employee Relationship Management; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Innovation Leadership; Knowledge Sharing; Leadership Style; Business or Company Management; Growth and Development Strategy; Growth Management; Management Style; Resource Allocation; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Strategic Planning; Environmental Sustainability; Organizational Culture; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Belgium; Europe
- December 2023 (Revised August 2024)
- Supplement
Microsoft Azure and the Cloud Wars (B)
By: Andy Wu and Matt Higgins
By 2023, the global market for cloud infrastructure had consolidated into a three-horse race. As of Q4 2022, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google collectively accounted for 66% of the global market. AWS had a market share of 33%, Microsoft Azure had 23%, and Google Cloud had... View Details
- December 2023 (Revised August 2024)
- Case
Monsters in the Machine? Tackling the Challenge of Responsible AI
By: Paul M. Healy and Debora L. Spar
In November of 2022, the small tech company OpenAI released ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot which quickly captured the public’s imagination—becoming the world’s fastest-growing consumer application within months of its release. Though observers from across... View Details