Publications

November 2011 (Revised May 2013)
Case

The Freelancers Union (A)

By: Michel Anteby and Erin McFee

Sara Horowitz faces a major strategic decision. Founder and CEO of the Freelancers Union, Horowitz has worked tirelessly to operationalize her new mutualist ideals, which comprise collective strength, independence, and shared protections. In 2008, she plans to move the... View Details

Keywords: Labor Unions

2025
Working Paper

With a Little Help from My Family: Informal Startup Financing

By: Brian K. Baik, Johan Ludvig S. Karlsen and Katja Kisseleva

Using Norwegian administrative data, we identify family equity investments in startups and examine their effects on investor returns and firm behavior. Informal investors earn lower returns than external individuals, and the firms they back are less likely to secure... View Details

Keywords: Early Stage Finance; Informal Investment; Household Finance; Risk Taking; Entrepreneurial Finance; Entrepreneurship; Personal Finance; Family and Family Relationships; Business Startups; Investment; Norway

SSRN

2014
Working Paper

Don't Take 'No' for an Answer: An Experiment with Actual Organ Donor Registrations

By: Judd B. Kessler and Alvin E. Roth

Over 10,000 people in the U.S. die each year while waiting for an organ. Attempts to increase organ transplantation have focused on changing the registration question from an opt-in frame to an active choice frame. We analyze this change in California and show it... View Details

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Health Care and Treatment; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; Health Industry

January 1991 (Revised November 1994)
Case

Black Caucus Groups at Xerox Corp. (A)

In 1970 Xerox had a very progressive affirmative action program yet, once hired, black employees faced serious problems, due both to overt discrimination and to their exclusion from the informal networks of support, information and mentoring that the other salespeople... View Details

Keywords: Prejudice and Bias; Alliances; Race Characteristics; Employees; Consumer Products Industry; Electronics Industry; United States

23 Nov 2021
Book

What It Takes to Build an Organizational Culture That Wins

to be designed to support a range of strategies. This lays waste to the notion that culture and strategy must be in perfect alignment at all times. The range of strategies... View Details

Keywords: by Avery Forman

Research Summary

Current Research

Professor Gardner’s research investigates two primary research questions, both particularly relevant to the management of professional service firms: (1) How are project teams able to most effectively use their members’ expertise in order... View Details

2023
Working Paper

'De Gustibus' and Disputes about Reference Dependence

By: Thomas Graeber, Pol Campos-Mercade, Lorenz Goette, Alexandre Kellogg and Charles Sprenger

Existing tests of reference-dependent preferences assume universal loss aversion. This paper examines the implications of heterogeneity in gain-loss attitudes for such tests. In experiments on labor supply and exchange behavior we measure gain-loss attitudes and then... View Details

Keywords: Behavioral Economics; Decision Choices and Conditions; Forecasting and Prediction

June 1999 (Revised March 2004)
Case

Sirona

By: Walter Kuemmerle and Chad S Ellis

Sirona, the dental systems business of Siemans AG is being sold through an auction. In September 1997, buyout firm Schroder Ventures has to decide whether to make a binding offer for the business. Schroder has done extensive due diligence with support from a team of... View Details

Keywords: Leveraged Buyouts; Valuation; Health Industry; Germany

February 2017 (Revised May 2018)
Case

The Flint, Michigan Sit-Down Strike

By: Tom Nicholas, Christopher T. Stanton and Matthew Preble

For roughly six weeks between late December 1936 and February 1937, a major strike at several critical General Motors (GM) plants in Flint, Michigan, essentially halted the corporation’s U.S. production and resulted in significant gains for the nascent United... View Details

January 2007
Article

Acquisitions and Firm Growth: Creating Unilever's Ice Cream and Tea Business

By: G. Jones and Peter Miskell

This article provides a longitudinal case study of the use of acquisitions by the Anglo-Dutch multinational Unilever to build the world's largest ice cream and tea businesses. The study supports recent resource-based theory which argues that complementary rather than... View Details

Keywords: Mergers and Acquisitions; Integration; Value; Knowledge Use and Leverage; Business and Shareholder Relations; Interests; Business Ventures; Employees; Food and Beverage Industry

Find at Harvard

February 2021
Article

Platform Diffusion at Temporary Gatherings: Social Coordination and Ecosystem Emergence

By: Tommy Pan Fang, Andy Wu and David R. Clough

Software platforms create value by cultivating an ecosystem of complementary products and services. Existing explanations for how a prospective complementor chooses platforms to join assume the complementor has rich information about the range of available platforms.... View Details

Find at Harvard

June 2021
Article

From Predictions to Prescriptions: A Data-driven Response to COVID-19

By: Dimitris Bertsimas, Léonard Boussioux, Ryan Cory-Wright, Arthur Delarue, Vassilis Digalakis Jr, Alexander Jacquillat, Driss Lahlou Kitane, Galit Lukin, Michael Lingzhi Li, Luca Mingardi, Omid Nohadani, Agni Orfanoudaki, Theodore Papalexopoulos, Ivan Paskov, Jean Pauphilet, Omar Skali Lami, Bartolomeo Stellato, Hamza Tazi Bouardi, Kimberly Villalobos Carballo, Holly Wiberg and Cynthia Zeng

The COVID-19 pandemic has created unprecedented challenges worldwide. Strained healthcare providers make difficult decisions on patient triage, treatment and care management on a daily basis. Policy makers have imposed social distancing measures to slow the disease, at... View Details

Keywords: COVID-19; Health Pandemics; AI and Machine Learning; Forecasting and Prediction; Analytics and Data Science

March 2022
Case

The Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses Program: 2009-2021

By: Leonard A. Schlesinger and Julia Kelley

In December 2021, more than a decade after its founding, Goldman Sachs’s 10,000 Small Businesses program was still going strong — and the firm now needed to evaluate potential program modifications to reach a wider group of small business owners. Launched in the... View Details

March 2009 (Revised September 2011)
Case

UBS and Auction Rate Securities (A)

By: Daniel Baird Bergstresser, Shawn A. Cole and Siddharth Bhaskar Shenai

UBS, a global financial services company, must decide whether to continue to support the market for Auction Rate Securities in the face of a growing financial crisis. These instruments, underwritten by UBS, were marketed to clients as highly liquid and safe... View Details

Keywords: Cost vs Benefits; Financial Crisis; Asset Pricing; Financial Liquidity; Financial Instruments; Government Legislation; Risk and Uncertainty; Financial Services Industry

22 Jul 2020
Blog Post

Why We Started the HBS Black Investment Club

INSPIRED BY RECENT EVENTS The protests against the unjust murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and countless others since have mobilized the nation to take a stand in support View Details

October 1990 (Revised March 1993)
Background Note

Note on Cable Television Regulation

By: Willis M. Emmons III

Examines the evolution of the U.S. cable television industry since its inception in the early 1950s. Particular emphasis is given to the roles played by technology, consumer demand, and regulation at both the local and federal level. Designed to facilitate a conceptual... View Details

Keywords: Information Technology; Demand and Consumers; Government Legislation; Business Growth and Maturation; Monopoly; Television Entertainment; Telecommunications Industry; Media and Broadcasting Industry