Publications

March 2019
Technical Note

Control or Flexibility? Structured Empowerment Offers Both—Lessons from Retail & Service Chains (Abridged)

By: Tatiana Sandino

This note explains how several retail and service organizations use a practice described here as “structured empowerment” to balance control and flexibility as they grow. I define structured empowerment as a practice that grants employees both (a) the power to make... View Details

Keywords: Service Operations; Standards; Employees; Service Delivery; Decision Making; Power and Influence; Retail Industry; Service Industry

September 2006 (Revised April 2007)
Case

Medtronic Vision 2010

By: Lynda M. Applegate

Describes the company's year-long efforts to transition from a medical device company selling products to physicians for use with patients suffering chronic end-stage disease, to a medical technology company providing life-long solutions for people with chronic... View Details

Keywords: Business Plan; Transition; Decision Choices and Conditions; Corporate Entrepreneurship; Financial Management; Financing and Loans; Health Care and Treatment; Innovation and Invention; Strategic Planning; Health Industry

October 2009
Article

Shaping Online Consumer Choice by Partitioning the Web

By: Jolie M. Martin and Michael I. Norton

This research explores how partitioning attributes in online search interfaces changes the valuations of those attributes-and impacts subsequent choice-such that attributes that are displayed as separate categories tend to receive greater decision weight than... View Details

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Information Management; Demand and Consumers; Research; Internet and the Web; Valuation

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2023
Working Paper

Insufficiently Justified Disparate Impact: A New Criterion for Subgroup Fairness

By: Neil Menghani, Edward McFowland III and Daniel B. Neill

In this paper, we develop a new criterion, "insufficiently justified disparate impact" (IJDI), for assessing whether recommendations (binarized predictions) made by an algorithmic decision support tool are fair. Our novel, utility-based IJDI criterion evaluates false... View Details

Keywords: AI and Machine Learning; Forecasting and Prediction; Prejudice and Bias

January 2013 (Revised February 2013)
Case

EverTrue: Mobile Technology Development (A)

By: William R. Kerr and Alexis Brownell

Brent Grinna is evaluating different options for the technology development of his start-up's iPhone app, including hiring local programmers, finding a CTO, or outsourcing. He only has a little over two months before he presents his alumni networking app to Brown... View Details

Keywords: Start-up; Mobile App; oDesk; Outsourcing; CTO; Minimum Viable Product; App Development; Business Startups; Decisions; Entrepreneurship; Mobile and Wireless Technology; Intellectual Property; Product Development; Globalization; Technology Industry; Massachusetts; Boston; India

2021
Working Paper

Salience

By: Pedro Bordalo, Nicola Gennaioli and Andrei Shleifer

We review the fast-growing work on salience and economic behavior. Psychological research shows that salient stimuli attract human attention “bottom up” due to their high contrast with surroundings, their surprising nature relative to recalled experiences, or their... View Details

Keywords: Salience; Economic Behavior; Bottom Up Attention; Microeconomics; Decision Making; Behavior

Web

Harvard Business School Online Courses & Learning Platforms

hrs/week Pay by July 31 $1,850 Certificate New Strategic Financial Analysis Professor Suraj Srinivasan Explore the intersection of accounting, strategy, and finance, and learn how to evaluate a business’s performance, prospects, and value to View Details

09 Apr 2021
Blog Post

Reflections on Student Conferences in 2020

than ever before to measure their emissions, and it is encouraging to see companies actually using these metric to make better decisions - from making sustainable procurement... View Details

13 Mar 2023
News

How Leaders Should Leave

25 Sep 2006
Research & Ideas

How Software Platforms Revolutionize Business

springboards that allow specialized producers to leverage their infrastructure and create new innovations and by bringing digital technology to a wide variety of sectors and users, again by providing flexible infrastructures that make it... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Video Game; Web Services

09 May 2011
Research & Ideas

Moving From Bean Counter to Game Changer

Buried in the middle layers of many organizations resides a strata of highly skilled experts, from HR managers to risk evaluators, whose collective wisdom and experience could prove invaluable in informing strategic decisions at the... View Details

Keywords: by Kim Girard; Banking

May 2021
Article

Choice Architecture in Physician–patient Communication: A Mixed-methods Assessment of Physicians' Competency

By: J. Hart, K. Yadav, S. Szymanski, A. Summer, A. Tannenbaum, J. Zlatev, D. Daniels and S.D. Halpern

Background: Clinicians’ use of choice architecture, or how they present options, systematically influences the choices made by patients and their surrogate decision makers. However, clinicians may incompletely understand this influence.... View Details

Keywords: Choice Architecture; Health Care and Treatment; Interpersonal Communication; Decision Choices and Conditions; Competency and Skills

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06 Sep 2011
Research & Ideas

How Small Wins Unleash Creativity

of the most common ways that managers unwittingly undermine daily progress is by failing to make timely decisions or provide clear, consistent goals. Here's an example from a work diary in a consumer... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

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

April 2019 (Revised January 2025)
Case

Clear Link Technologies, LLC: Driving Sales with Peer Effects

By: Christopher Stanton, Richard Saouma and Olivia Hull

The importance of a good peer or coworker is widely discussed, but understanding the glue that makes coworkers valuable is less understood. This case sheds light on the importance of peers and the practices and environments that make a group greater than the sum of its... View Details

November 2013 (Revised January 2015)
Case

Obamacare

By: Matthew Weinzierl and Katrina Flanagan

One vote in June, 2012, decided the fate of President Barack Obama's crowning first-term achievement: universal health insurance. Chief Justice John Roberts of the U.S. Supreme Court cast the deciding vote to uphold the keystone of the reform: the mandate to purchase... View Details

Keywords: Universal Health Insurance; Adverse Selection; Leviathan; Courts and Trials; Judgments; Insurance; Health Care and Treatment; Government and Politics; Insurance Industry; Public Administration Industry; Health Industry; United States

Article

Reputation When Threats and Transfers Are Available

By: Ernesto Dal Bo, Pedro Dal Bo and Rafael Di Tella

We present a model where a long-run player is allowed to use both money transfers and threats to influence the decisions of a sequence of short-run players. We show that threats might be used credibly (even in arbitrarily short repeated games) by a long-lived player... View Details

Keywords: Crime and Corruption; Decision Choices and Conditions; Game Theory; Mathematical Methods; Interests; Power and Influence; Reputation

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February 2024
Case

ReSpo.Vision: The Kickstart of an AI Sports Revolution

By: Paul A. Gompers, Elena Corsi and Nikolina Jonsson

This case study explores the growth journey of Polish computer vision sports start-up ReSpo.Vision in an emerging entrepreneurial ecosystem. By providing 3D data and analysis to soccer clubs, ReSpo.Vision achieved significant milestones with a €1 million seed round, an... View Details

Keywords: Business Startups; Business Plan; Experience and Expertise; Talent and Talent Management; Decisions; Decision Choices and Conditions; Forecasting and Prediction; Entrepreneurship; Venture Capital; AI and Machine Learning; Analytics and Data Science; Applications and Software; Business Strategy; Sports Industry; Technology Industry; Poland; Europe