Publications

31 May 2017
What Do You Think?

Can Amazon Do What Walmart Couldn’t, Stop the 'Wheel of Retailing'?

years later another colleague relies on Amazon for delivery of dog food to a remote location in Maine at a price comparable to the local supermarket.) There is no question that Bezos has built a retailing juggernaut, one that is capturing the largest share of market in... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett; Retail

22 Jul 2019
Book

How to Be a Digital Platform Leader

as technology suppliers and innovators in their own right. When facing a decision to adopt an innovation platform and join the ecosystem, complementors must trust someone else’s technology (the platform) to... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

24 Jul 2018
First Look

New Research and Ideas, July 24, 2018

compared to a market price of $23. Elizabeth Kemp, the portfolio manager of a long-only technology fund at Sand Hill Road Capital, had bought 500,000 shares at the IPO price and had to decide whether to harvest her gain or to double down... View Details

Keywords: Dina Gerdeman

30 Jan 2020
Research & Ideas

The Upside of Highlighting a Product's Downsides

their products and downplay risks, fearing that any negative sentiment might hurt demand. But research led by Ryan W. Buell, a professor in the HBS Technology and Operations Management Unit, and doctoral... View Details

Keywords: by Danielle Kost

25 Sep 2019
Research & Ideas

The Economic Cost of Physician Burnout

sign up for the job to stare at a screen. They are doing this to provide care for people,” says one of the study’s co-authors, Joel Goh, a visiting scholar in the Technology & Operations Management Unit at Harvard Business School. “It... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Health

28 Mar 2017
First Look

First Look at New Research, March 28

https://cb.hbsp.harvard.edu/cbmp/product/617010-PDF-ENG Harvard Business School Case 817-002 Classtivity: Payal's Pirouette A few months after launching a new fitness technology product, the small staff of New York startup Classtivity... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

04 Aug 2011
What Do You Think?

How Dangerous Is Common Sense to Managers?

helpful, such as the best route to take to work to avoid traffic. Newer technologies such as the Internet, social networks, and specialized hardware may come to the rescue by providing easy ways of surveying customers, testing View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

January 2024 (Revised June 2024)
Case

School of Rock: Tuning into Structured Empowerment (A)

By: Tatiana Sandino, Jeffrey Rayport, Samuel Grad and Stacy Straaberg

In summer 2021, School of Rock was a youth-oriented music education company with 291 franchise- and company-owned schools globally. Before CEO Rob Price’s hire in 2017, School of Rock’s nonconformist rock ‘n’ roll culture led to variability in teaching styles,... View Details

2023
Working Paper

PRIMO: Private Regression in Multiple Outcomes

By: Seth Neel

We introduce a new differentially private regression setting we call Private Regression in Multiple Outcomes (PRIMO), inspired the common situation where a data analyst wants to perform a set of l regressions while preserving privacy, where the covariates... View Details

Keywords: Analytics and Data Science; Mathematical Methods

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September 2013 (Revised August 2015)
Background Note

Leadership and Teaming

By: Ethan Bernstein

Small differences in the leadership of teams can have large consequences for the success of their efforts. Many initiatives fail not because of a fatal error in judgment or insufficient ideas, knowledge, motivation, or capabilities to deliver a solution. They fail... View Details

2023
Working Paper

Design-Based Confidence Sequences: A General Approach to Risk Mitigation in Online Experimentation

By: Dae Woong Ham, Michael Lindon, Martin Tingley and Iavor Bojinov

Randomized experiments have become the standard method for companies to evaluate the performance of new products or services. In addition to augmenting managers’ decision-making, experimentation mitigates risk by limiting the proportion of customers exposed to... View Details

Keywords: Performance Evaluation; Research and Development; Analytics and Data Science; Consumer Behavior

SSRN

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December 2019
Case

Steemit: A New Social Media?

By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell, Alexander White and Karen Elterman

This case discusses the alternative social media site Steemit, including the principles it was founded on in 2016 and the challenges it faced in 2019. Steemit was a blockchain-based platform that aimed to differentiate itself from other social media companies by... View Details

Web

Frequently Asked Questions | HBS Online

observations, or even asking interesting questions) CORe Connections assignments Comments on others’ in-course responses and CORe Connections Beyond the participation elements stated above, the quality of your contributions will be the most important determinant to... View Details

January 2000 (Revised April 2000)
Case

StarMedia: Launching a Latin American Revolution

By: Thomas R. Eisenmann and Jon K Rust

By the fall of 1999, StarMedia had sprinted to a sizable lead in the race to acquire Latin American Internet users. Its pan-regional, horizontal portal was the first to target Spanish- and Portuguese-language speakers on the Internet, registering 1.2 billion page views... View Details

Keywords: Private Ownership; History; Risk Management; Business Cycles; Corporate Entrepreneurship; Infrastructure; Media; Emerging Markets; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues; Web; Information Technology Industry; Information Technology Industry

12 Jul 2011
First Look

First Look: July 12

asymmetric information concerning the value of a new technology affect the strategies of the platforms and the market outcome. We find that the incumbent dominates the market by setting the welfare-maximizing quantity when the difference... View Details

Keywords: Carmen Nobel

March 2024
Supplement

Teamworks: Tackling a Forecasting Fumble (B)

By: N. Louis Shipley, Stacy Straaberg and Tom Quinn

In late March 2018, Teamworks CEO Zach Maurides learned Q1 2018 sales were at risk for a large forecasting miss. Founded in 2004, Teamworks’s software application assisted support staff in messaging, scheduling, and sharing documents with collegiate and professional... View Details

Keywords: Acquisition; Business Growth and Maturation; Communication Strategy; Decisions; Forecasting and Prediction; Business Cycles; Technological Innovation; Sports; Growth and Development Strategy; Resource Allocation; Marketing; Sales; Business Strategy; Expansion; Valuation; Technology Industry; Technology Industry; United States; North Carolina