Publications

Find at Harvard

November 2016 (Revised July 2018)
Case

Selling on Amazon at Tower Paddle Boards

By: Thales S. Teixeira and David Lopez-Lengowski

By June 2012, Stephan Aarstol felt that he had successfully passed the first critical stage of his ecommerce business. As the founder and CEO of a standup paddleboard (SUP) business, he had built a strong relationship with Asian manufacturers, built a small warehouse... View Details

Keywords: Tower Paddle Boards; Amazon; E-commerce; Online Shopping; Distribution; Internet and the Web; Business Growth and Maturation; Marketing Channels; Distribution Channels; Decision Choices and Conditions; Consumer Products Industry; Retail Industry

March 2014
Background Note

Setting Price Effectively

By: Nava Ashraf and Kristin Johnson

Price is one of the most powerful instruments a manager can use to influence the take-up of her product, especially in a subsidized and noncompetitive market as is common for global health products. However, the question of whether and how to price has been the subject... View Details

July 2003 (Revised April 2005)
Case

Branding Citigroup's Consumer Business

By: Rohit Deshpande and Carin-Isabel Knoop

In Spring 1998, Citicorp and Travelers merged to create a financial powerhouse that united the bank with Travelers' consumer finance and brokerage businesses, including Salomon Smith Barney and Primerica. It was the first U.S. financial services company to combine... View Details

Keywords: Mergers and Acquisitions; Customer Focus and Relationships; Customer Relationship Management; Decisions; Asset Management; Investment Banking; Management Teams; Brands and Branding; Relationships; Business and Shareholder Relations; Banking Industry; United States

March 2002 (Revised July 2004)
Case

Price of Light, The: Privatization, Regulation and Valuation in Brazil

Asks students to produce a valuation for Rio Light, a Brazilian power company that is state owned and to be sold in March 1996. If successful, the privatization would bring in over $2 billion to the Brazilian treasury. But success was far from assured. Members of the... View Details

Keywords: Valuation; Energy Generation; Privatization; Corporate Governance; Energy Industry; Brazil

Find at Harvard

September 1983 (Revised October 1984)
Case

Boston Whaler, Inc.: Managing the Dealer Network

Mr. Joseph Lawler, newly-appointed president of Boston Whaler, Inc. (BWI), believes that better dealer management is the key to his company's continued growth. BWI manufactured a high-price, high performance line of power and other boats for the recreational,... View Details

Keywords: Distribution Channels; Product Marketing; Consumer Products Industry

14 Dec 2017
News

The best thing I read all year — 2017

Web

MBA Experience - Leadership

S.Bernstein Fall Power & Influence Associate Professors Julie Battilana and Lakshmi Ramarajan Fall & Spring People Analytics: Leading in a Data-Driven World Professor Jeffrey Polzer Spring 200 Leadership roles available in Student... View Details

July 2018 (Revised July 2018)
Teaching Note

Argentina Power—Don’t Cry for Me Argentina

By: Nori Gerardo Lietz and Sayiddah Fatima McCree

Teaching Note for HBS No. 218-041. This case concerns a complex potential energy infrastructure investment in Argentina by a global conglomerate shortly after Mauricio Macri (“Macri”) became President of Argentina in 2015. The central issues are (i) why was a country... View Details

Keywords: Argentina; Argentine Exceptionalism; Infrastructure Finance; Investing; Finance; Inflation and Deflation; Government and Politics; Energy Generation; Infrastructure; Utilities Industry; Energy Industry; Financial Services Industry; Argentina; South America

02 Jul 2015
Working Paper Summaries

Mums the Word! Cross-national Effects of Maternal Employment on Gender Inequalities at Work and at Home

Keywords: by Kathleen L. McGinn & Elizabeth Long Lingo

September 2023 (Revised April 2024)
Case

Atomwise: Strategic Opportunities in AI for Pharma

By: Satish Tadikonda

Abraham Heifets and his co-founder, Izhar Wallach, had founded Atomwise to develop i) an AI engine to transform drug discovery by creating better medicines faster, and ii) a machine learning-based discovery engine that combined the power of convolutional neural... View Details

Keywords: Business Model; Business Startups; AI and Machine Learning; Science-Based Business; Technological Innovation; Biotechnology Industry; Pharmaceutical Industry

August 2019 (Revised July 2023)
Course Overview Note

Demystifying the Family Enterprise

By: Christina R. Wing and Madeline Keulen

90% of the GDP in the world is created through family-owned businesses. Family businesses are frequently thought to be exclusively mom-and-pop, small businesses. Most fail to realize that Walmart, Fidelity, Cargill, Koch Industries, and Ford, to name a few, are all... View Details

Keywords: Family Office; Family Business; Family Ownership

2020
Working Paper

Machine Learning for Pattern Discovery in Management Research

Supervised machine learning (ML) methods are a powerful toolkit for discovering robust patterns in quantitative data. The patterns identified by ML could be used as an observation for further inductive or abductive research, but should not be treated as the result of a... View Details

Keywords: Machine Learning; Theory Building; Induction; Decision Trees; Random Forests; K-nearest Neighbors; Neural Network; P-hacking; Analytics and Data Science; Analysis

SSRN

Article

An Invitation to Market Design

By: Scott Duke Kominers, Alexander Teytelboym and Vincent P. Crawford

Market design seeks to translate economic theory and analysis into practical solutions to real-world problems. By redesigning both the rules that guide market transactions and the infrastructure that enables those transactions to take place, market designers can... View Details

Keywords: Matching; Trading; Scrip; Liquidity; Efficiency; Equity; Allocation Rules; Marketplaces; Market Design; Marketplace Matching; Auctions

Find at Harvard

Read Now

October 2014 (Revised February 2017)
Case

Europe, Russia, and the Age of Gas Revolution

By: Rawi Abdelal, Leonardo Maugeri and Sogomon Tarontsi

The 2014 Ukraine crisis once again exposed the mutually limiting knot—a web of commercial relationships and oil and gas pipelines—that historically tied the European Union and Russia closely. In this crisis, a familiar conundrum preoccupied minds in the corridors of... View Details

Keywords: International Relations; Business and Government Relations; Energy Sources; Energy Industry; European Union; Russia; Ukraine