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- Article
Understanding the Advice of Commissions-Motivated Agents: Evidence from the Indian Life Insurance Market
By: Santosh Anagol, Shawn Cole and Shayak Sarkar
We conduct a series of field experiments to evaluate the quality of advice provided by life insurance agents in India. Agents overwhelmingly recommend unsuitable, strictly dominated products, which provide high commissions to the agent. Agents cater to the beliefs of... View Details
Keywords: Advice; Customers; Insurance; Service Operations; Motivation and Incentives; Ethics; India
- 2016
- Working Paper
Meet the Oligarchs: Business Legitimacy, State Capacity and Taxation
By: Rafael Di Tella, Juan Dubra and Alejandro Lagomarsino
We analyze the role of people’s beliefs about the rich in the determination of public policy in the context of a randomized online survey experiment. A question we study is the desirability of government-private sector meetings, a variable we argue is connected to... View Details
- December 2016 (Revised January 2017)
- Supplement
Accounting for the iPhone Upgrade Program (B)
By: Jonas Heese, Krishna G. Palepu, H. David Sherman and Monica Baraldi
In October 2016, Apple Inc. announced the financial results for its fiscal year 2016. CEO Tim Cook commented on a very successful fiscal year 2016 and focused on all the positive financial results. However, Apple’s 2016 annual report was also telling another story.... View Details
- November 2016 (Revised February 2017)
- Case
BrightStar Care: The Evolution of a Leadership Team
By: Boris Groysberg, Colleen Ammerman and John D. Vaughan
BrightStar Care was a rapidly growing franchise of home health care agencies. Founded by husband and wife team JD and Shelly Sun as a single agency near Chicago in 2002, BrightStar had opened nearly 300 franchises across the United States by 2016, generating over $300... View Details
Keywords: Health Care Services; Entrepreneurs; Board Of Directors; Boards Of Directors; Health Care Industry; Growth Strategy; Organizational Change; Brand Positioning; Entrepreneurial Organizations; Entrepreneurial Management; Franchising; Family-owned Business; Home Health Care; Managing Growth; Management Styles; Organizational Development; Talent Management; Women Executives; Women And Leadership; Business Startups; Family Business; Small Business; Talent and Talent Management; Governing and Advisory Boards; Health Care and Treatment; Human Capital; Leadership Development; Leadership Style; Business or Company Management; Growth and Development Strategy; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques; Management Skills; Management Style; Management Succession; Management Systems; Management Teams; Brands and Branding; Marketing Strategy; Strategy
- 2017
- Working Paper
Self-Employment Dynamics and the Returns to Entrepreneurship
By: Eleanor W. Dillon and Christopher T. Stanton
Small business owners and others in self-employment have the option to transition to paid work. If there is initial uncertainty about entrepreneurial earnings, this option increases the expected lifetime value of self-employment relative to pay in a single year. This... View Details
- 2017
- Working Paper
A Welfarist Role for Nonwelfarist Rules: An Example with Envy
I propose and formalize an argument for why economists working in the welfarist normative tradition should include nonwelfarist principles in how they judge economic policy. The key idea behind this argument is that the world is too complex, and our ability to model it... View Details
- Working Paper
How Do Venture Capitalists Make Decisions?
By: Paul A. Gompers, William Gornall, Steven N. Kaplan and Ilya A. Strebulaev
We survey 885 institutional venture capitalists (VCs) at 681 firms to learn how they make decisions across eight areas: deal sourcing, investment selection, valuation, deal structure, post-investment value-added, exits, internal firm organization, and relationships... View Details
- 2016
- Report
Problems Unsolved and a Nation Divided: The State of U.S. Competitiveness 2016
In this report, the authors synthesize their views on U.S. competitiveness and unveil the findings of the 2016 HBS surveys on U.S. competitiveness. Specifically, the report documents the faltering performance of the U.S. economy and the erosion of America’s business... View Details
- Article
What Do Private Equity Firms Say They Do?
By: Paul A. Gompers, Steven N. Kaplan and Vladimir Mukharlyamov
We survey 79 private equity investors with combined assets under management (AUM) of over $750 billion about their practices in firm valuation, capital structure, governance, and value creation. Investors rely primarily on internal rate of return (IRR) and multiples to... View Details
- June 2016 (Revised October 2016)
- Technical Note
The Role of the Chief Financial Officer
By: C. Fritz Foley and Michael Lemm
This note profiles the role of the modern chief financial officer (CFO). It presents insights based on a variety of surveys and descriptions of HBS graduates who hold or have held the CFO role. Although the role varies significantly from one organization to another,... View Details
- Article
Gathering Data for Archival, Field, Survey, and Experimental Accounting Research
By: Robert Bloomfield, Mark W. Nelson and Eugene F. Soltes
In the published proceedings of the first Journal of Accounting Research Conference, Vatter (1966) lamented that “Gathering direct and original facts is a tedious and difficult task, and it is not surprising that such work is avoided.” For the 50th JAR Conference,... View Details
- Article
International Data on Measuring Management Practices
By: Nicholas Bloom, Renata Lemos, Raffaella Sadun, Daniela Scur and John Van Reenen
We examine methods used to survey firms on their management and organizational practices. We contrast the strengths and weaknesses of "open-ended questions" (e.g., World Management Survey) with "closed questions" (e.g., Management and Organizational Practices Surveys).... View Details
- Article
Learning from Potentially Biased Statistics: Household Inflation Perceptions and Expectations in Argentina
By: Alberto Cavallo, Guillermo Cruces and Ricardo Perez-Truglia
When forming expectations, households may be influenced by perceived bias in the information they receive. In this paper, we study how individuals learn from potentially biased statistics using data from both a natural experiment and a survey experiment during a... View Details
- Spring 2016
- Article
Net Neutrality: A Fast Lane to Understanding the Tradeoffs
By: Shane Greenstein, Martin Peitz and Tommaso Valletti
The last decade has seen a strident public debate about the principle of "net neutrality." The economic literature has focused on two definitions of net neutrality. The most basic definition of net neutrality is to prohibit payments from content providers to internet... View Details
- 2016
- Working Paper
Wesley Mitchell's Business Cycles after 100 Years
This article looks back at the publication and influence of Wesley Mitchell's Business Cycles, published in 1913. It surveys some of the key ideas in the book and explains the reasons why it resonated with a variety of people, including economists,... View Details
- 2016
- Working Paper
Popular Acceptance of Inequality Due to Innate Brute Luck and Support for Classical Benefit-Based Taxation
U.S. survey respondents' views on distributive justice are shown to differ in two specific, related ways from what is conventionally assumed in modern optimal tax research. A large share of respondents, and in some cases a large majority, resist the full equalization... View Details
- February 2016 (Revised May 2016)
- Case
Dinr: My First Start-up (A)
By: Shikhar Ghosh and Kristina Maslauskaite
In May 2012, a young employee at Google's London office, Markus Berger, was thinking whether he should quit his job and go after his dream of becoming an entrepreneur. Berger's idea was to create Dinr, a company that would offer an upscale food ingredient delivery... View Details
- 2016
- Working Paper
What Factors Drive Director Perceptions of Their Board's Effectiveness?
By: Boris Groysberg, Paul M. Healy and Richard Ellis Crum
We use a survey of directors to collect data on their ratings of board effectiveness as well as board internal dynamics and key processes. Controlling for many of the governance metrics examined by prior research, we find that directors’ ratings of their boards’... View Details
- Article
Men as Cultural Ideals: Cultural Values Moderate Gender Stereotype Content.
By: Amy Cuddy, Elizabeth Baily Wolf, Peter Glick, Susan Crotty, Jihye Chong and Michael I. Norton
Four studies tested whether cultural values moderate the content of gender stereotypes, such that male stereotypes more closely align with core cultural values (specifically, individualism vs. collectivism) than do female stereotypes. In Studies 1 and 2, using... View Details
- September 2015 (Revised March 2025)
- Technical Note
FIELD Global Capstone: Developing Customer Empathy
By: Jill Avery
The Design Thinking process begins with empathizing with potential customers. Empathizing, being aware of, interpreting, and understanding the thoughts of others, as well as being able to vicariously experience them oneself, requires the careful and deliberate study of... View Details