Publications

December 1986 (Revised November 1990)
Case

Club Med (B)

Highlights the issue of high employee turnover in a multi-site, international subsidiary of a large resort company. Also described are service-quality problems the company has because the amount of value added through employee interaction with customers is high.... View Details

Keywords: Globalized Firms and Management; Retention; Recruitment; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues; Tourism Industry; United States

Article

Machine Learning Approaches to Facial and Text Analysis: Discovering CEO Oral Communication Styles

By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Dan Wang, Natalie A. Carlson and Tarun Khanna

We demonstrate how a novel synthesis of three methods—(1) unsupervised topic modeling of text data to generate new measures of textual variance, (2) sentiment analysis of text data, and (3) supervised ML coding of facial images with a cutting-edge convolutional neural... View Details

Keywords: CEOs; Communication Style; Machine Learning; Spoken Communication; Nonverbal Communication; Personal Characteristics; Analysis; Performance

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28 Jan 2011
Working Paper Summaries

Agglomerative Forces and Cluster Shapes

Keywords: by William R. Kerr & Scott Duke Kominers; Technology

November 2019 (Revised May 2020)
Case

Collibra

By: Lynda M. Applegate, Jeffrey F. Rayport and Julia Kelley

Founded in 2008 at Vrije Universiteit Brussels, Collibra was a data intelligence company that found product-market fit in the years after the global financial crisis when many companies were under pressure from consumers and governments to improve their data management... View Details

November–December 2024
Article

Outcome-Driven Dynamic Refugee Assignment with Allocation Balancing

By: Kirk Bansak and Elisabeth Paulson

This study proposes two new dynamic assignment algorithms to match refugees and asylum seekers to geographic localities within a host country. The first, currently implemented in a multi-year pilot in Switzerland, seeks to maximize the average predicted employment... View Details

Keywords: AI and Machine Learning; Refugees; Geographic Location; Employment

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12 Dec 2023
Blog Post

Bridging Science and Business: My Summer Internship at Eli Lilly

Johnson's JJDC to AI and Data Strategy at Moderna, and even philanthropic efforts in Alzheimer's research within Bill Gates' private investment office, my classmates and I didn't just scatter across the biotech industry—we purposefully... View Details

08 Jul 2020
News

We Have an Unemployment Crisis. Now What?

07 Mar 2013
HBS Seminar

Mike Toffel, Harvard Business School

July 2019 (Revised May 2021)
Case

Acelerex

By: John R. Wells and Benjamin Weinstock

In early 2019, Randell Johnson, Founder and Chief Executive of Acelerex, was reflecting on the company’s first year of rapid growth and the challenges of scaling the business that lay ahead. Acelerex was riding the waves of change taking place in electrical power grids... View Details

Keywords: Energy; Energy Sources; Growth Management; Expansion; Global Strategy; Cash Flow; Energy Industry; Web Services Industry; Consulting Industry

William Kerr is the D’Arbeloff Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. Bill is Senior Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Research, co-director of Harvard’s Managing the Future of Work initiative, and faculty chair of the... View Details

Keywords: communications; computer; consulting; high technology; information technology industry; management consulting; manufacturing; telecommunications; venture capital industry

September 2003
Case

Valuing a Cross-Border LBO: Bidding on the Yell Group

By: Mihir A. Desai, Paolo Notarnicola and Mark Veblen

A team of private equity investors must value the leveraged buyout of a Yellow Pages business that operated in both the United States and the United Kingdom. In the process, they must wrestle with issues of how to conduct cross-border valuations and how to value a... View Details

Keywords: Leveraged Buyouts; Cash Flow; Private Equity; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues; Valuation

January 2003 (Revised March 2004)
Case

Army Crew Team, The

By: Scott A. Snook and Jeffrey T. Polzer

The coach of the varsity Army crew team at West Point assembled his top eight rowers into the first crew team and the second tier of rowers into the second team using objective data on individual performance. As the second boat continually beat the first boat in races,... View Details

Keywords: Groups and Teams; Performance; New York (state, US)

2025
Working Paper

Enhancing Treatment Effect Prediction on Privacy-Protected Data: An Honest Post-Processing Approach

By: Ta-Wei Huang and Eva Ascarza

As firms increasingly rely on customer data for personalization, concerns over privacy and regulatory compliance have grown. Local Differential Privacy (LDP) offers strong individual-level protection by injecting noise into data before collection. While... View Details

Keywords: Targeted Intervention; Conditional Average Treatment Effect Estimation; Differential Privacy; Honest Estimation; Post-processing; Analytics and Data Science; Consumer Behavior; Marketing

SSRN

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2005
Working Paper

Money Illusion in the Stock Market: The Modigliani-Cohn Hypothesis

By: Randolph B. Cohen, Christopher Polk and Tuomo Vuolteenaho

Modigliani and Cohn [1979] hypothesize that the stock market suffers from money illusion, discounting real cash flows at nominal discount rates. While previous research has focused on the pricing of the aggregate stock market relative to Treasury bills, the... View Details

Keywords: Stocks; Price; Cash Flow

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January 2018 (Revised April 2021)
Case

Capital Allocation at HCA

By: W. Carl Kester and Emily R. McComb

In early 2017, HCA Holdings, an investor-owned hospital management company, faced a strategically important capital allocation decision. After the exit of its private equity sponsors in 2016, HCA had to determine how best to allocate its substantial annual free cash... View Details

Keywords: Capital Allocation; Cash Distribution Policy; Dividends; Share Repurchases; Growth Strategy And Execution; Growth Investing; Capital Expenditures; Debt Management; Debt Reduction; Debt Policy; Hospital Management; Investor-owned Hospital Chains; Capital Budgeting; Capital Structure; Cash Flow; Corporate Finance; Decision Choices and Conditions; Health Industry; United States

November 2019
Case

Gillette: Cutting Prices to Regain Share

By: Benjamin C. Esty and Daniel Fisher

After losing market share to low-priced competitors such as Harry’s and Dollar Shave Club for several years, Gillette decided to fight back by launching new products and increasing advertising. When these efforts failed to stem the losses, Gillette decided to cut the... View Details

Keywords: Marketing Strategy; Product Positioning; Business Strategy; Competition; Price; Public Equity; Retail Industry; Consumer Products Industry; United States

Edward Chang (he/him/his) is an Assistant Professor of Business Administration in the Negotiation, Organizations & Markets Unit at Harvard Business School. He teaches Inclusion in the MBA required curriculum and Negotiations in the MBA elective curriculum.
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October 1989 (Revised August 1995)
Case

Tysons Corner

By: William J. Poorvu

Hollinswood Associates, a joint venture partnership, has developed and operated a Marriott Hotel in Tysons Corner, Virginia. The partnership has been very successful in the past but it is now facing a significant cash flow deficit. Designed to examine how a partnership... View Details

Keywords: Conflict Management; Change Management; Partners and Partnerships; Joint Ventures; Cash Flow; Investment; Accommodations Industry; Real Estate Industry; Virginia