Publications

November 2024
Case

Dr. Bombay Ice Cream

By: William R. Kerr, Alexis Brownell and Michael Liu

This case examines the creation, launch, and rapid growth of Dr. Bombay Ice Cream, a joint venture between Happi Co., a consumer packaged goods incubator, and entertainment mogul Snoop Dogg, with his son, Cordell Broadus. The brand was inspired by a Bored Ape Yacht... View Details

Keywords: Joint Ventures; Growth Management; Brands and Branding; Product Launch; Product Positioning; Market Entry and Exit; Distribution Channels; Food and Beverage Industry; United States

Educators

Purchase

June 2, 2020
Article

How to 'Re-engineer' Your Business for Safety

By: Hubert Joly

Process reengineering was a massive trend in the 1990s. By focusing on improving either cost, quality, or service, a company could gain benefits in all three categories. Today, the principles that underpin process reengineering can be applied anew, with safety as a... View Details

Keywords: Re-engineering; COVID; Safety; Performance Improvement; Organizational Change and Adaptation

Register to Read

April 2018
Article

The Power of Voice in Stimulating Morality: Eliciting Taxpayer Preferences Increases Tax Compliance

By: Cait Lamberton, Jan-Emmanuel De Neve and Michael I. Norton

Decisions about paying taxes represent one of the most common moral quandaries faced by citizens. In the present research, we argue that taxpayer compliance can be raised by increasing “voice”: allowing taxpayers to express non-binding preferences about the way their... View Details

Keywords: Morality; Public Policy; Ethics; Moral Sensibility; Taxation; Policy; Attitudes; Governance Compliance

Article

The Allure of Unknown Outcomes: Exploring the Role of Uncertainty in the Preference for Potential

By: Daniella Kupor, Zakary L. Tormala and Michael I. Norton

Influence practitioners often highlight a target's achievements (e.g., "she is the city's top-rated chef"), but recent research reveals that highlighting a target's potential (e.g., "she could become the city's top-rated chef") can be more effective. We examine whether... View Details

Keywords: Risk and Uncertainty; Forecasting and Prediction; Performance Evaluation

2024
Working Paper

Health, Human Capital Development and the Longevity of Japanese Elites Since 710

By: Tom Nicholas and Hiroshi Shimizu

We examine the lifespan of over 40,000 elites in Japan born between 710 and 1912, including samurai warriors, feudal lords, business, political, cultural, and religious leaders at the apex of the social hierarchy. Japanese elites experienced increases in lifespan about... View Details

Keywords: Life Expectancy; Status and Position; Health; History; Human Capital; Japan

March 2000 (Revised September 2000)
Case

yesmail.com

David Tolmie wants yesmail.com to become a leader in "permission marketing." Yesmail sends clients promotional e-mail messages to targeted consumers who said "yes" when asked whether they wished to receive promotional offers in a set of categories of interest. Tolmie... View Details

Keywords: Marketing Communications

Rajiv Lal, is the Stanley Roth, Sr. Professor of Retailing at Harvard Business School. He is currently teaching an elective MBA course on the Business of Smart Connected Products/IOT. He has been responsible for the retailing curriculum and has served as the course... View Details

August 2019
Article

When and How to Diversify—A Multicategory Utility Model for Personalized Content Recommendation

By: Yicheng Song, Nachiketa Sahoo and Elie Ofek

Sometimes we desire change, a break from the same or an opportunity to fulfill different aspects of our needs. Noting that consumers seek variety, several approaches have been developed to diversify items recommended by personalized recommender systems. However,... View Details

Keywords: Recommender Systems; Personalization; Recommendation Diversity; Variety Seeking; Collaborative Filtering; Consumer Utility Models; Digital Media; Clickstream Analysis; Learning-to-rank; Consumer Behavior; Media; Customization and Personalization; Strategy; Mathematical Methods

2020
Working Paper

Is Accounting Useful for Forecasting GDP Growth? A Machine Learning Perspective

By: Srikant Datar, Apurv Jain, Charles C.Y. Wang and Siyu Zhang

We provide a comprehensive examination of whether, to what extent, and which accounting variables are useful for improving the predictive accuracy of GDP growth forecasts. We leverage statistical models that accommodate a broad set of (341) variables—outnumbering the... View Details

Keywords: Big Data; Elastic Net; GDP Growth; Machine Learning; Macro Forecasting; Short Fat Data; Accounting; Economic Growth; Forecasting and Prediction; Analytics and Data Science

SSRN

2014
Article

The Governance of Social Enterprises: Mission Drift and Accountability Challenges in Hybrid Organizations

By: Alnoor Ebrahim, Julie Battilana and Johanna Mair

We examine the challenges of governance facing organizations that pursue a social mission through the use of market mechanisms. These hybrid organizations, often referred to as social enterprises, combine aspects of both charity and business at their core. In this... View Details

Keywords: Governance; Hybrid Organizations; Nonprofit; Performance Measurement; Legal Form; Agency Theory; Stakeholder Management; Mission and Purpose; Social Enterprise; Corporate Accountability

March 2008
Article

When Growth Stalls

By: Matthew S. Olson, Derek C. M. van Bever and Seth Verry

This article includes a one-page preview that quickly summarizes the key ideas and provides an overview of how the concepts work in practice along with suggestions for further reading. An abrupt and lasting drop in revenue growth is a crisis that can strike even the... View Details

Keywords: Growth Strategy; Revenues; Crisis Management; Revenue; Growth and Development Strategy

29 Jul 2008
First Look

First Look: July 29, 2008

social categories (gender, tenure within the firm). In dyad-level models of the probability that pairs of individuals communicate, we find very large effects of formal organization structure and spatial collocation on the rate of... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

July 2017
Article

The Impact of 'Display-Set' Options on Decision-Making

By: Uma R. Karmarkar

The way a choice set is constructed can have a significant influence on how individuals perceive and evaluate their options and make decisions between them. Here, I examine whether a “display set” of visible but unavailable options can exert these same types of... View Details

Keywords: Decision Making Process; Heuristics; Similarity; Categorization; Marketing Insight; Marketing; Choice; Choice Architecture; Choice Sets; Display; Retail; Consumer Behavior; Decision Choices and Conditions; Decisions; Decision Making; Retail Industry; Consumer Products Industry

Research Summary

Overview

Professor Sawyer’s research focuses on U.S. political economy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, concentrating on the development of competition policy and the administrative state. While the conventional history of U.S. competition policy portrays the... View Details

2018
Working Paper

Measuring Gentrification: Using Yelp Data to Quantify Neighborhood Change

By: Edward L. Glaeser, Hyunjin Kim and Michael Luca

We demonstrate that data from digital platforms such as Yelp have the potential to improve our understanding of gentrification, both by providing data in close to real time (i.e., nowcasting and forecasting) and by providing additional context about how the local... View Details

Keywords: Geographic Location; Local Range; Transition; Analytics and Data Science; Measurement and Metrics; Forecasting and Prediction

19 Dec 2023
Research & Ideas

$15 Billion in Five Years: What Data Tells Us About MacKenzie Scott’s Philanthropy

higher demand and fewer resources. In 2023, Yield Giving made a significant push into health care, its top category of the year on an absolute basis. Many of these gifts went to community health providers serving populations with less... View Details

Keywords: by Matthew Lee, Brian Trelstad, and Ethan Tran

07 Nov 2023
Research & Ideas

When Glasses Land the Gig: Employers Still Choose Workers Who 'Look the Part'

professionally taken photo—can help an applicant stand out among blurry, amateur pictures. “Overall, the findings support our conjecture that perceptions of job fit can go above and beyond well-known prejudice variables (gender, race, and beauty) and that they are job... View Details

Keywords: by Scott Van Voorhis

Research Summary

Reinvention and “Frame Flexibility”

By: Ryan L. Raffaelli

Adopting a radical innovation creates pressure for leaders to reframe their mental models while they also sustain their organization's existing capabilities and product category variants. Yet at key junctures in a product class and during technological change, a... View Details

Keywords: Institutional Change; Innovation ＆ Entrepreneurship; Diffusion Processes; Technology Adoption; Cognition and Thinking; Identity; Emotions

August 2021
Article

Don't Take Their Word for It: The Misclassification of Bond Mutual Funds

By: Huaizhi Chen, Lauren Cohen and Umit Gurun

We provide evidence that bond fund managers misclassify their holdings, and that these misclassifications have a real and significant impact on investor capital flows. In particular, many funds report more investment grade assets than are actually held in their... View Details

Keywords: Mutual Funds; Economics; Finance; Measurement and Metrics; Risk and Uncertainty; Financial Services Industry

SSRN