Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(12,452)
- Faculty Publications (1,624)
- May 2023
- Supplement
Sian Flowers: Fresher by Sea - Video Supplement
By: Willy C. Shih
The setting for this case is the Sian Flowers, a company headquartered in Kitengela, Kenya that exports roses to predominantly Europe. Because cut flowers have a limited shelf life and consumers want them to retain their appearance for as long as possible, Sian or its... View Details
- May 11, 2020
- Article
Steer Your Family Businesses Through an Unplanned Transition
By: Josh Baron and Nick Di Loreto
In a perfect world, family businesses will transition leadership from one generation to the next along a predictable and well-planned process — whether that’s determined within the business, the ownership group, or the family itself — passing the baton after years of... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Setting Gendered Expectations? Recruiter Outreach Bias in Online Tech Training Programs
By: Jacqueline N. Lane, Karim R. Lakhani and Roberto Fernandez
Competence development in digital technologies, analytics, and artificial intelligence is increasingly important to all types of organizations and their workforce. Universities and corporations are investing heavily in developing training programs, at all tenure... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Culture as a Signal: Evidence from a Natural Field Experiment
By: Wei Cai, Dennis Campbell and Jiehang Yu
The importance of culture as an informal management control system is increasingly acknowledged in academia. While prior research mainly focuses on the value of culture on internal stakeholders (e.g., employees), we examine whether culture serves as a credible signal... View Details
- Article
Do Citizens’ Preferences Matter? Shaping Legislator Attitudes Towards Peace Agreements
By: Miguel García-Sánchez, Aila M. Matanock and Natalia Garbiras-Díaz
To what extent are legislators, responsible for the implementation of many peace agreements, responsive to citizens’ preferences? Examining the 2016 Colombian peace agreement, we embed an experiment in the 2019 wave of a survey of all the members of Congress. We inform... View Details
- May 2023
- Article
Do Internal Control Weaknesses Affect Firms' Demand for Financial Skills? Evidence from U.S. Job Postings
By: Janet Gao, Kenneth J. Merkley, Joseph Pacelli and Joseph H. Schroeder
Ineffective internal controls over financial reporting often relates to a lack of qualified personnel with sufficient accounting and technical expertise. In this study, we examine whether firms respond to internal control failures by increasing their demand for... View Details
- April 12, 2023
- Article
Using AI to Adjust Your Marketing and Sales in a Volatile World
By: Das Narayandas and Arijit Sengupta
Why are some firms better and faster than others at adapting their use of customer data to respond to changing or uncertain marketing conditions? A common thread across faster-acting firms is the use of AI models to predict outcomes at various stages of the customer... View Details
- April 2023 (Revised February 2024)
- Case
AI Wars
By: Andy Wu, Matt Higgins, Miaomiao Zhang and Hang Jiang
In February 2024, the world was looking to Google to see what the search giant and long-time putative technical leader in artificial intelligence (AI) would do to compete in the massively hyped technology of generative AI. Over a year ago, OpenAI released ChatGPT, a... View Details
- April 2023
- Article
A Field Experiment on Subgoal Framing to Boost Volunteering: The Trade-off Between Goal Granularity and Flexibility
By: Aneesh Rai, Marissa A. Sharif, Edward H. Chang, Katherine L. Milkman and Angela L. Duckworth
Research suggests that breaking overarching goals into more granular subgoals is beneficial for goal progress. However, making goals more granular often involves reducing the flexibility provided to complete them, and recent work shows that flexibility can also be... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Feature Importance Disparities for Data Bias Investigations
By: Peter W. Chang, Leor Fishman and Seth Neel
It is widely held that one cause of downstream bias in classifiers is bias present in the training data. Rectifying such biases may involve context-dependent interventions such as training separate models on subgroups, removing features with bias in the collection... View Details
- April 2023
- Article
Learning Down to Train Up: Mentors Are More Effective When They Value Insights from Below
By: Ting Zhang, Dan Wang and Adam D. Galinsky
Although mentorship is vital for individual success, potential mentors often view it as a costly burden. To understand what motivates mentors to overcome this barrier and more fully engage with their mentees, we introduce a new construct, learning direction, which... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
The Limits of Algorithmic Measures of Race in Studies of Outcome Disparities
By: David S. Scharfstein and Sergey Chernenko
We show that the use of algorithms to predict race has significant limitations in measuring and understanding the sources of racial disparities in finance, economics, and other contexts. First, we derive theoretically the direction and magnitude of measurement bias in... View Details
- March–April 2023
- Article
The New-Collar Workforce
By: Colleen Ammerman, Boris Groysberg and Ginni Rometty
Many workers today are stuck in low-paying jobs, unable to advance simply because they don’t have a bachelor’s degree. At the same time, many companies are desperate for workers and not meeting the diversity goals that could help them perform better while also reducing... View Details
- 2023
- Book
The Portfolio Life: How to Future-Proof Your Career, Avoid Burnout, and Build a Life Bigger than Your Business Card
Pouring yourself into a single full-time job is the riskiest move you can make. Your parents’ advice to focus on one career path? It doesn’t work anymore, for reasons ranging from recessions to student loan debt, the gig economy, climate disasters, and a global... View Details
- April 2023
- Article
The Preference Survey Module: A Validated Instrument for Measuring Risk, Time, and Social Preferences
By: Armin Falk, Anke Becker, Thomas Dohmen, David B. Huffman and Uwe Sunde
Incentivized choice experiments are a key approach to measuring preferences in economics but are also costly. Survey measures are a low-cost alternative but can suffer from additional forms of measurement error due to their hypothetical nature. This paper seeks to... View Details
- March 31, 2023
- Article
What Is the Optimal Pattern of a Customer Journey?
Even though customer experience (CX) leaders are becoming increasingly focused on optimizing their firms’ customer journeys, they face a clear challenge: Which touchpoints along the journey should they invest in? That is, which moments when the customer interacts with... View Details
- March 2023
- Supplement
Halftime for Heidelberg
By: Debora L. Spar
The case follows President Rob Huntington as he seeks to find a viable way forward for Heidelberg University.
Located in Tiffin, Ohio, Heidelberg is a small, private, four-year university. As with many similar institutions of higher education, it currently faces... View Details
Located in Tiffin, Ohio, Heidelberg is a small, private, four-year university. As with many similar institutions of higher education, it currently faces... View Details
- March 2023 (Revised January 2024)
- Case
Deepa Bachu (A): Design Thinking at Pensaar Design
By: Thomas Graeber, Joshua Schwartzstein and Amram Migdal
In this case, set in June 2019 in Bangalore, Karnataka, India, Deepa Bachu of Pensaar Design and her team work with client ITC Ltd. to use design thinking and behavioral experiments to improve workplace safety and strive toward the company’s zero-accident goal. The... View Details
Keywords: Buildings and Facilities; Design; Education; Training; Working Conditions; Business or Company Management; Production; Business Processes; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Outcome or Result; Performance Improvement; Programs; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Groups and Teams; Labor and Management Relations; Rank and Position; Safety; Attitudes; Behavior; Motivation and Incentives; Trust; Well-being; Consulting Industry; Pulp and Paper Industry; Manufacturing Industry; India
- March 2023
- Supplement
Deepa Bachu (B): Insights and Experiments at Pensaar Design
By: Thomas Graeber, Joshua Schwartzstein and Amram Migdal
In this case, set in June 2019 in Bangalore, Karnataka, India, Deepa Bachu of Pensaar Design and her team work with client ITC Ltd. to use design thinking and behavioral experiments to improve workplace safety and strive toward the company’s zero-accident goal. The... View Details
Keywords: Buildings and Facilities; Design; Training; Working Conditions; Business or Company Management; Production; Business Processes; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Outcome or Result; Performance Improvement; Programs; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Groups and Teams; Labor and Management Relations; Rank and Position; Safety; Attitudes; Behavior; Motivation and Incentives; Trust; Well-being; Consulting Industry; Pulp and Paper Industry; Manufacturing Industry; India
- March 2023
- Case
Ownership Works: Scaling a Profitable Social Mission
By: Ethan Rouen, Dennis Campbell and Andrew Robinson
Pete Stavros was on a high after his latest experiment with employee ownership. As the head of industrial investments for KKR, Stavros orchestrated the sale of CHI Overhead Doors, which turned into KKR’s best investment in more than two decades and created $360 million... View Details