Publications

June 2004
Case

Aventis SA (A): Planning for a Merger

By: Joshua D. Margolis and Carin-Isabel Knoop

Eight executives at Hoechst and Rhone-Poulenc must make four crucial decisions on the eve of merging their companies to become Aventis--what would become the world's third largest pharmaceutical firm. In addition to formulating a vision and strategy, the two firms must... View Details

Keywords: Problems and Challenges; Mergers and Acquisitions; Horizontal Integration; Organizational Design; Organizational Culture; Pharmaceutical Industry; United States

December 2023
Case

Gabriela Santana Goldstein

By: Leslie Perlow and Hannah Weisman

Gabriela Santana Goldstein was pursuing her passion, working as the Head of Business for a telehealth startup, when her father went into sudden cardiac arrest and family duty called. The case discusses Goldstein’s difficult decision to leave her dream job, and her path... View Details

Keywords: Personal Development and Career; Well-being; Work-Life Balance; Family and Family Relationships; Decisions; Health Industry; United States; Boston; New York (city, NY)

March 1994
Supplement

Kevin Simpson at Haemonetics, Video

By: Linda A. Hill

Contains excerpts from an interview with Kevin Simpson (HBS 1990) about his decision to join Haemonetics, a medical equipment company, after receiving his MBA. Simpson discusses his experiences on the job during the first three months while he was the assistant to the... View Details

Keywords: Interpersonal Communication; Experience and Expertise; Decisions; Recruitment; Medical Devices and Supplies Industry

The “veil of ignorance” is a moral reasoning device designed to promote impartial decision-making by denying decision-makers access to potentially biasing information about who will benefit most or least from the available options. Veil-of-ignorance reasoning was... View Details

07 May 2016
News

Harvard’s Anita Elberse Teaches Entertainment Ropes To Execs (And Celebrities)

March 2010
Article

I'll Have the Ice Cream Soon and the Vegetables Later: A Study of Online Grocery Purchases and Order Lead Time

By: Katherine L. Milkman, Todd Rogers and Max Bazerman

How do decisions made for tomorrow or two days in the future differ from decisions made for several days in the future? We use data from an online grocer to address this question. In general, we find that as the delay between order completion and delivery increases,... View Details

Keywords: Time Management; Service Delivery; Internet and the Web; Decisions; Customers; Retail Industry

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05 Nov 2013
First Look

First Look: November 5

firms that are well-connected to each other through social ties, and that such acquisitions are more likely to subsequently be divested for performance-related reasons. Taken together, our results suggest that social ties between the acquirer and the target lead to... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

February 1999
Case

Sports Agents: Is There a Firm Advantage?

By: Stephen A. Greyser and Brian R. Harris

Focuses on the decision of a young tennis player on what kind of agent to have as his representative. The choice is between someone in a large sports management/marketing firm and an independent agent representing a small number of individual athletes. Outlines the... View Details

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Knowledge Management; Marketing Communications; Marketing Strategy; Organizational Structure

April 1984
Supplement

Johnson & Johnson (B): Hospital Services, James Burke, Video

By: Francis Aguilar

James Burke, chairman and CEO of Johnson & Johnson, discusses the decision to establish a hospital services company. The problem is that this new unit, created to serve 14 Johnson & Johnson companies, runs counter to the corporate culture where autonomy and... View Details

Keywords: Business Startups; Decision Making; Organizational Culture; Problems and Challenges; Health Industry

08 Oct 2008
Research & Ideas

Book Excerpt: A Sense of Urgency

organization off its complacent platform and into a good direction. But it didn't happen. Instead of mobilizing people into action, the crisis led many managers into making fewer decisions because they... View Details

Keywords: by John P. Kotter

15 Aug 2017
First Look

First Look at New Research and Ideas, August 15, 2017

about favorable future policy changes. A lab experiment involving monetary bets on the future popularity of politicians and a field experiment involving political donations (N = 660,542) demonstrated that BFF can influence people’s View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

2012
Working Paper

The First Deal: The Division of Founder Equity in New Ventures

By: Thomas F. Hellmann and Noam Wasserman

This paper examines the division of founder shares in entrepreneurial ventures, focusing on the decision of whether or not to divide the shares equally among all founders. To motivate the empirical analysis we develop a simple theory of costly bargaining, where... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Equity

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23 May 2013
Working Paper Summaries

Board Games: Timing of Independent Directors’ Dissent in China

Keywords: by Juan Ma & Tarun Khanna

Article

Bringing Probability Judgments into Policy Debates via Forecasting Tournaments

By: Philip E. Tetlock, Barbara A. Mellers and J. Peter Scoblic

Political debates often suffer from vague-verbiage predictions that make it difficult to assess accuracy and improve policy. A tournament sponsored by the U.S. intelligence community revealed ways in which forecasters can better use probability estimates to make... View Details

Keywords: Tournaments; Politics; Depolarization; Knowledge Creation; Forecasting and Prediction; Government and Politics

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2018
Working Paper

Bayesian Ensembles of Binary-Event Forecasts: When Is It Appropriate to Extremize or Anti-Extremize?

By: Kenneth C. Lichtendahl Jr., Yael Grushka-Cockayne, Victor Richmond R. Jose and Robert L. Winkler

Many organizations face critical decisions that rely on forecasts of binary events. In these situations, organizations often gather forecasts from multiple experts or models and average those forecasts to produce a single aggregate forecast. Because the average... View Details

Keywords: Forecast Aggregation; Linear Opinion Pool; Generalized Additive Model; Generalized Linear Model; Stacking.; Forecasting and Prediction

SSRN

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04 Sep 2007
Working Paper Summaries

Why Do Intermediaries Divert Search?

Keywords: by Andrei Hagiu & Bruno Jullien

March 2003 (Revised November 2009)
Case

Hudson Manufacturing Company

By: Paul A. Gompers and Vanessa del Valle Broussard

Concerns the decision by Brett Keith and Owen Colligan to purchase Hudson Manufacturing, a maker of heaters and air filtration units for the military. Keith and Colligan have organized a search fund and identified Hudson as a potential buyout. The decline in the... View Details

Keywords: Mergers and Acquisitions; Decision Choices and Conditions; Investment; Pollutants; Industrial Products Industry; Manufacturing Industry

September 2003
Case

Upromise 2002

By: William A. Sahlman

Describes a set of decisions confronting the senior management of a company that has established a loyalty rewards program allocating cash to tax-advantaged college savings accounts for participants. The company has recruited a new CEO and needs to raise additional... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Entrepreneurship; Venture Capital; Management Teams; Capital; Internet and the Web; Decisions