Publications

23 Mar 2022
Blog Post

Learning Curve: The Brother-and-Sister Team Behind a New Edtech Nonprofit

technology so that we can reach out in a low-cost, scalable way,” Mahajan explains. Rocket targets the least educated and most impoverished families in India. Many parents earn between one and two dollars a day doing construction or... View Details

26 Nov 2001
Op-Ed

Why Corporate Budgeting Needs To Be Fixed

Corporate budgeting is a joke, and everyone knows it. It consumes a huge amount of executives' time, forcing them into endless rounds of dull meetings and tense negotiations. It encourages managers to lie and cheat, lowballing targets and... View Details

Keywords: by Michael C. Jensen

08 Dec 2020
Research & Ideas

Why Companies Hunt for Talent on Digital Platforms, Not in Resume Piles

retail. Despite the allure of these filtering and targeting features, Koning advises companies to initially keep searches “broad and fuzzy” and avoid fixating too quickly on specific attributes. “If you are saying, we only want to look at... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Employment

2023
Working Paper

Debiasing Treatment Effect Estimation for Privacy-Protected Data: A Model Auditing and Calibration Approach

By: Ta-Wei Huang and Eva Ascarza

Data-driven targeted interventions have become a powerful tool for organizations to optimize business outcomes by utilizing individual-level data from experiments. A key element of this process is the estimation of Conditional Average Treatment Effects (CATE), which... View Details

Keywords: Analytics and Data Science; Consumer Behavior; Marketing

August 2017 (Revised September 2022)
Case

Fuyao Glass America: Sourcing Decision

By: Willy Shih

In today's global economy, what are the factors that go into production location choice? This case is set in the world's second largest automotive glass producer as it expands from China into the United States. To meet a very aggressive cost target, management is faced... View Details

Keywords: Supply Chains; Globalization Of Supply Chain; Manufacturing Footprint; Manufacturing; Manufacturing Strategy; Global Strategy; Supply Chain; Globalization; Supply Chain Management; Production; Logistics; Strategy; Auto Industry; Manufacturing Industry; United States; China

07 Feb 2019
Book

How Big Companies Can Outrun Disruption

“Larger companies are rarely seen as fountains of innovation,” says Harvard Business School professor Gary Pisano. Yet scale, if properly exploited, can still be an engine for transformation. In his new book Creative Construction: The DNA of Sustained Innovation, he... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

May 1992 (Revised January 2000)
Supplement

ABB: Accountability Times Two (A)

By: Robert L. Simons

Describes the complexity of setting and reconciling performance targets in a global, matrix company. The president of the Finnish industry and rail transport company has received targets from two bosses--his regional superior and his business area superior. Each has... View Details

Keywords: Performance Expectations; Complexity; Multinational Firms and Management; Finland

2007
Working Paper

Hedge Fund Investor Activism and Takeovers

By: Robin Greenwood and Michael Schor

We examine long-horizon stock returns around hedge fund activism in a comprehensive sample of 13D filings by portfolio investors between 1993 and 2006. Abnormal returns surrounding investor activism are high for the subset of targets that are... View Details

Keywords: Mergers and Acquisitions; Private Equity; Investment Return; Investment Activism; Investment Portfolio; Corporate Governance

16 May 2000
Research & Ideas

Getting the Message: How the Internet is Changing Advertising

graphics, to target the right audience, and to measure responses instantly. But many experts contend that Internet advertising is still in its infancy. There is a widely held belief that in the future we will compare today's Web ads with... View Details

Keywords: by Susan Young

June 2014
Article

Acquirer-Target Social Ties and Merger Outcomes

By: Joy Ishii and Yuhai Xuan

This paper investigates the effect of social ties between acquirers and targets on merger performance. Using data on educational background and past employment, we construct a measure of the extent of cross-firm social connection between directors and senior executives... View Details

Keywords: Mergers; Acquisitions; Social Ties; Social Connections; Mergers and Acquisitions; Relationships; Outcome or Result

2007
Other Unpublished Work

Hedge Fund Investor Activism and Takeovers

By: Robin Greenwood and Michael Schor

Keywords: Mergers and Acquisitions; Private Equity; Investment Return; Investment Activism; Investment Portfolio; Corporate Governance

SSRN

December 2014
Article

Private Equity, Jobs, and Productivity

By: Steven J. Davis, John Haltiwanger, Kyle Handley, Ron Jarmin, Josh Lerner and Javier Miranda

Private equity critics claim that leveraged buyouts bring huge job losses. To investigate this claim, we construct and analyze a new dataset that covers U.S. private equity transactions from 1980 to 2005. We track 3,200 target firms and their 150,000 establishments... View Details

Keywords: Private Equity; Leveraged Buyouts; Performance Productivity; Jobs and Positions; United States

January 2011 (Revised October 2014)
Case

Dropbox: 'It Just Works'

By: Thomas R. Eisenmann, Michael Pao and Lauren Barley

Dropbox is a venture-backed Silicon Valley startup, founded in 2006, that provides online storage and backup services to millions of customers using a "freemium" (free + premium offers) business model. The case recounts Dropbox's history from conception through... View Details

Keywords: Business Model; Growth and Development Strategy; Management Practices and Processes; Distribution; Product Design; Product Development; Internet; Service Industry; California

December 2014
Other Article

Private Equity, Jobs, and Productivity—Online Appendix

By: Steven J. Davis, John Haltiwanger, Kyle Handley, Ron Jarmin, Josh Lerner and Javier Miranda

Keywords: Job Cuts and Outsourcing; Private Equity; Performance Productivity

October 2023
Article

Improving Regulatory Effectiveness Through Better Targeting: Evidence from OSHA

By: Matthew S. Johnson, David I. Levine and Michael W. Toffel

We study how a regulator can best target inspections. Our case study is a U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) program that randomly allocated some inspections. On average, each inspection averted 2.4 serious injuries (9%) over the next five years.... View Details

Keywords: Safety Regulations; Regulations; Regulatory Enforcement; Machine Learning Models; Safety; Operations; Service Operations; Production; Forecasting and Prediction; Decisions; United States

2020
Working Paper

Improving Regulatory Effectiveness Through Better Targeting: Evidence from OSHA

By: Matthew S. Johnson, David I. Levine and Michael W. Toffel

We study how a regulator can best target inspections. Our case study is a US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) program that randomly allocated some inspections. On average, each inspection averted 2.4 serious injuries (9%) over the next five years.... View Details

Keywords: Government Administration; Working Conditions; Safety; Quality; Production; Analysis; Resource Allocation; Manufacturing Industry; United States

SSRN

August 2019
Case

Bark Gift Shop Ltd.

By: Susanna Gallani, Jan Bouwens and Peter Kroos

This case describes a setting in which the CFO of Bark Gift Shop Ltd., a gift items retailer, discovers an undesired pattern in the performance data suggesting that her shop managers that perform well during the first part of the year, purposely reduce their effort in... View Details

Keywords: Data Analytics; Employees; Behavior; Performance; Management; Goals and Objectives; Motivation and Incentives; Analysis

Acquirer-Target Social Ties and Merger Outcomes

This paper investigates the effect of social ties between acquirers and targets on merger performance. We find that the extent of cross-firm social connection between directors and senior executives at the acquiring and the target firms has a significantly negative... View Details

October 2018
Article

Competing with Complementors: An Empirical Look at Amazon.com

By: Feng Zhu and Qihong Liu

Platform owners sometimes enter complementors' product spaces to compete against them directly. Prior studies have offered two possible explanations for such entries: platform owners may target the most successful complementors so as to appropriate value from their... View Details

Keywords: Amazon; Complementors; Co-opetition; Entry; Platform-based Markets; Competition; Digital Platforms; Competitive Strategy