Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(2,122)
- Faculty Publications (297)
- October 2013 (Revised July 2024)
- Teaching Note
Amazon in 2024
By: Sunil Gupta
Amazon launched its website in July 1995 to sell books online and by 2020 it has grown to become a digital giant with over $280 billion in annual sales. A large part of its growth came from expanding into a variety of businesses that some see as unrelated. Has it... View Details
- October 2013 (Revised August 2015)
- Case
Outotec (A): Project Capture
By: Robert J. Dolan and Doug J. Chung
Outotec was a market leader in providing mining solutions to large mining companies. The company’s specialization and proprietary technology created value for its customers and helped the firm differentiate from its competitors. Yet, Outotec was not pricing or... View Details
- October 2013 (Revised August 2015)
- Supplement
Outotec (B): Action Plan
By: Robert J. Dolan and Doug J. Chung
Outotec was a market leader in providing mining solutions to large mining companies. The company’s specialization and proprietary technology created value for its customers and helped the firm differentiate from its competitors. Yet, Outotec was not pricing or... View Details
- October 2013
- Case
Oaktree and the Restructuring of CIT Group (A)
By: Victoria Ivashina and David Scharfstein
CIT's prepackaged bankruptcy marked the first time a major financial institution was able to successfully restructure and emerge from Chapter 11 bankruptcy, challenging conventional views that a financial firm could not survive bankruptcy proceedings as a going... View Details
- September 2013 (Revised June 2019)
- Case
Marquee: Reinventing the Business of Nightlife
By: Anita Elberse, Ryan Barlow and Sheldon Wong
In January 2013, nightlife impresarios Jason Strauss and Noah Tepperberg are celebrating the re-opening of their famed New York City–based nightclub Marquee. While most clubs are over within their first one and a half years, Strauss and Tepperberg managed to keep... View Details
- August 2013 (Revised July 2024)
- Case
Amazon in 2024
By: Sunil Gupta and Margaret L. Rodriguez
Amazon launched its website in July 1995 to sell books online and by 2020 it has grown to become a digital giant with over $280 billion in annual sales. A large part of its growth came from expanding into a variety of businesses that some see as unrelated. Has it... View Details
- August 2013 (Revised September 2015)
- Case
Coursera
By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Hyunjin Kim
By providing free and open-access online courses at a large scale, Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) platforms seek to innovate the business models of the traditional higher education industry. In a little over a year, Coursera had grown at a rapid rate to emerge as a... View Details
- June 2013 (Revised November 2016)
- Case
Goldfinger: Charles W. Engelhard Jr. and Apartheid-era South Africa
By: Geoffrey Jones and Elliot R. Benton
This case considers the strategies of Charles W. Engelhard, an American mining magnate who made large investments in apartheid-era South Africa. Engelhard was widely believed to have been the model for the James Bond villan Auric Goldfinger. During the 1950s and 1960s... View Details
- 2013
- Dissertation
Designing Freemium: A Model of Consumer Usage, Upgrade, and Referral Dynamics
By: Clarence Lee, Vineet Kumar and Sunil Gupta
Abstract. Over the past decade "freemium" (free + premium) has become the dominant business model among internet start-ups for its ability to acquire and monetize a large install-base with limited marketing resources. Freemium is a hybrid strategy where a firm offers... View Details
- 2014
- Working Paper
Hidden Structure: Using Network Methods to Map System Architecture
By: Carliss Baldwin, Alan MacCormack and John Rusnak
In this paper, we describe an operational methodology for characterising the architecture of complex technical systems and demonstrate its application to a large sample of software releases. Our methodology is based upon directed network graphs, which allows us to... View Details
- May 2013
- Article
The Stock Selection and Performance of Buy-Side Analysts
Prior research on equity analysts focuses almost exclusively on those employed by sell-side investment banks and brokerage houses. Yet investment firms undertake their own buy-side research and their analysts face different stock selection and recommendation incentives... View Details
- February–March 2013
- Article
The Mobile Banking and Payment Revolution
By: Sunil Gupta
Mobile technology is revolutionizing the global banking and payment industry. It offers new opportunities for banks to provide added convenience to their existing customers in developed countries and reach a large population of unbanked customers in emerging markets.... View Details
- 2013
- Working Paper
Do Display Ads Influence Search?: Attribution and Dynamics in Online Advertising
By: Sunil Gupta
As firms increasingly rely on online media to acquire consumers, marketing managers feel comfortable justifying higher online marketing spend by referring to online metrics such as click-through rate (CTR) and cost per acquisition (CPA). However, these standard online... View Details
- January 2013 (Revised April 2015)
- Case
Affinity Labs: Valuing Customer Growth
By: Joseph B. Lassiter III and Elizabeth Kind
In November 2006, Chris Michel left Military.com, which he founded in 1999, to start Affinity Labs, a global network of online communities. That month, Michel raised a Series A round of venture funding and established a partnership with Monster, which he had sold... View Details
- December 2012
- Case
Blink Booking
By: William R. Kerr, Magnus Thor Torfason and Alexis Brownell
Rebeca Minguela hopes to create an arbitrage platform, similar to Rocket Internet, that can bring start-up ideas and opportunities to Spain. However, Blink Booking, her first venture and proof of concept, is rocked by a co-founder's breach of confidence and departure.... View Details
- November 2012 (Revised July 2014)
- Case
Andrew Sullivan and Faraway Ltd
By: Frank V. Cespedes and Alex Godden
The "Andrew Sullivan and Faraway Ltd" case series focuses on entrepreneurial selling, and is based on an older case study, "Deaver Brown and Cross River Inc." (9-394-042). It concerns two entrepreneurs, Andrew Sullivan and Hope Abasi, who have designed an innovative... View Details
Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Marketing; Sales; Management; Consumer Products Industry; United Kingdom
- November 2012 (Revised July 2014)
- Supplement
Andrew Sullivan and Faraway Ltd (B): Sam Cartwright of Mothercare
By: Frank V. Cespedes and Alex Godden
The "Andrew Sullivan and Faraway Ltd" case series focuses on entrepreneurial selling, and is based on an older case study, "Deaver Brown and Cross River Inc." (9-394-042). It concerns two entrepreneurs, Andrew Sullivan and Hope Abasi, who have designed an innovative... View Details
Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Sales; Marketing; Management; Consumer Products Industry; United Kingdom
- November 2012 (Revised July 2012)
- Supplement
Andrew Sullivan and Faraway Ltd (C): Anthony Pierce of John Lewis
By: Frank V. Cespedes and Alex Godden
The "Andrew Sullivan and Faraway Ltd" case series focuses on entrepreneurial selling, and is based on an older case study, "Deaver Brown and Cross River Inc." (9-394-042). It concerns two entrepreneurs, Andrew Sullivan and Hope Abasi, who have designed an innovative... View Details
Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Management; Sales; Marketing; Consumer Products Industry; United Kingdom
- September 2012
- Supplement
Hiroshi Mikitani Reflects and Provides Early Updates on Englishnization (November, 2011)
By: Tsedal Neeley
CEO of Rakuten, Hiroshi Mikitani, candidly responds to controversial questions about his Englishnization strategy and implementation across 7,100 employees a year and a half later: Did he make an impulsive move when he mandated English as the company language? Why does... View Details
- 2012
- Working Paper
The Need for (long) Chains in Kidney Exchange
By: Itai Ashlagi, David Gamarnik, Michael A. Rees and Alvin E. Roth
It has been previously shown that for sufficiently large pools of patient-donor pairs, (almost) efficient kidney exchange can be achieved by using at most 3-way cycles, i.e., by using cycles among no more than 3 patient-donor pairs. However, as kidney exchange has... View Details