Publications

March 2020 (Revised March 2024)
Case

CIAM: Home-Grown Shareholder Activism in France

By: Charles C.Y. Wang, Tonia Labruyere and Vincent Dessain

The case discusses the strategy of CIAM, a French activist investment firm, involved in a case of a buy-out of minority shareholders in the telecommunications sector. Altice NV, an international telecommunications company based in the Netherlands that owned more than... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Governance; Private Equity; Strategy; Valuation; Investment Activism; Financial Services Industry; France

March 2020 (Revised May 2020)
Case

Generation Investment Management

By: Vikram S. Gandhi and Sarah Mehta

By January 2020, sustainable investment firm Generation Investment Management (Generation), founded in London in 2004, had grown from a shared vision among seven founders to a 90-person firm managing $27 billion in public and private equity. Throughout its history,... View Details

March 2020
Case

Thingtesting: Launching a Brand Discovery and Testing Digital Community

By: Ayelet Israeli and Jill Avery

Thingtesting, a brand discovery and testing digital community devoted to uncovering and exploring direct-to-consumer brands, had just received seed funding and was contemplating a second year of growth. The new year brought many challenges, as founder Jenny Gyllander... View Details

March–April 2020
Article

Building A Culture of Experimentation

By: Stefan Thomke

Why don’t organizations test more? After examining this question for several years, I can tell you that the central reason is culture. As companies try to scale up their experimentation capacity, they often find that the obstacles are not tools and technology but... View Details

Keywords: Experimentation; Culture; Innovation; Online; Customer Experience; Organizational Culture; Innovation and Invention; Internet and the Web; Attitudes; Decision Making; Change; Leadership

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March 2020
Article

Diagnosing Missing Always at Random in Multivariate Data

By: Iavor I. Bojinov, Natesh S. Pillai and Donald B. Rubin

Models for analyzing multivariate data sets with missing values require strong, often assessable, assumptions. The most common of these is that the mechanism that created the missing data is ignorable—a twofold assumption dependent on the mode of inference. The first... View Details

Keywords: Missing Data; Diagnostic Tools; Sensitivity Analysis; Hypothesis Testing; Missing At Random; Row Exchangeability; Analytics and Data Science; Mathematical Methods

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2020
Working Paper

A Framework for Product Impact-Weighted Accounts

By: George Serafeim and Katie Trinh

While there has been significant progress in the measurement of an organization’s environmental and social impacts from its operations, metrics to evaluate the impact of products once they come to market lag far behind. In this paper, we provide a framework for... View Details

Keywords: Social Impact; Product Life Cycle; Environment; Sustainability; Measurement; Metrics; Impact Investing; ESG; ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) Performance; ESG Reporting; Product; Environmental Sustainability; Measurement and Metrics; Framework; Financial Statements

2021
Working Paper

Impact Investing: A Theory of Financing Social Enterprises

By: Benjamin N. Roth

I present a model of financing social enterprises to delineate the role of impact investors relative to “pure” philanthropists. I characterize the optimal scale and structure of a social enterprise when financed by grants, and when financed by investments. Impact... View Details

Keywords: Impact Investing; Social Entrepreneurship; Finance; Investment; Mathematical Methods

January 2020
Case

SK Group: Social Progress Credits

By: George Serafeim, Ethan Rouen and David Freiberg

SK Group was one of the largest companies South Korea. A family-run conglomerate consisting of around 120 subsidiaries and employing more than 100,000, SK was tightly knit into the fabric of Korean society. SK viewed their future success as contingent upon the strength... View Details

January 2020 (Revised July 2020)
Supplement

MoviePass: The 'Get Big Fast' Strategy

By: Benjamin C. Esty and Daniel Fisher

In August 2017, MoviePass dramatically lowered its subscription price from $50 per month to just $10 for up to one movie per day. The idea was to rapidly scale the business to the point where they could generate incremental revenue streams form related businesses... View Details

January–February 2020
Article

Are You Undervaluing Your Customers?: It’s Time to Start Measuring and Managing Their Worth

By: Rob Markey

Leaders recognize that they should manage their businesses to maximize the value of the customer base. But too often, earnings pressures result in cost-cutting measures that hurt customers.

Loyalty-leading companies operate differently. They create systems for... View Details

Keywords: Customer Experience; Customer Value; Customer Centric Initiative; Customer Focused Organization; Customer Lifetime Value; Customer Focus and Relationships; Customer Value and Value Chain; Operations; Business Strategy

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December 2019
Supplement

Mãe Terra and Unilever (B)

By: Lynn S. Paine, Ruth Costas and Mariana Cal

Unilever is making strides to integrate the operations of Mãe Terra—one of Brazil's leading brands for packaged organic foods—into its own structures, after acquiring the company in 2017. Mãe Terra’s CEO, Alexandre Borges, must decide whether to implement his original... View Details

Keywords: Brand Management; Sustainability; Mergers and Acquisitions; Mission and Purpose; Social Enterprise; Corporate Governance; Governing and Advisory Boards; Environmental Sustainability; Organizational Culture; Food and Beverage Industry; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Brazil; Latin America

2020
Working Paper

Cutting the Gordian Knot of Employee Health Care Benefits and Costs: A Corporate Model Built on Employee Choice

By: Regina E. Herzlinger and Barak D. Richman

The U.S. employer-based health insurance tax exclusion created a system of employer-sponsored insurance (ESI) with limited insurance choices and transparency that may lock employed households into health plans that are costlier or different from those they prefer to... View Details

Keywords: After-tax Income; Consumer-driven Health Care; Health Care Costs; Health Insurance; Income Inequality; Tax Policy; Health Care and Treatment; Cost; Insurance; Employees; Income; Taxation; Policy; United States

November 2019
Supplement

Hapag-Lloyd AG: Complying with IMO 2020

By: Benjamin C. Esty, Mette Fuglsang Hjortshoej and Emer Moloney

A new environmental regulation known as IMO 2020 was creating what one industry analyst called “the biggest shakeup for the oil and shipping industries in decades.” According to the new regulation, all ocean-going ships would have to limit their sulfur emissions by... View Details

Keywords: Valuation; Ship Transportation; Strategic Planning; Game Theory; Pollutants; Supply Chain; Corporate Accountability; Capital Budgeting; Environmental Sustainability; Shipping Industry; Transportation Industry; Germany

November 2019
Case

Hapag-Lloyd AG: Complying with IMO 2020

By: Benjamin C. Esty, Mette Fuglsang Hjortshoej and Emer Moloney

Keywords: Valuation; Ship Transportation; Strategic Planning; Game Theory; Pollutants; Supply Chain; Corporate Accountability; Capital Budgeting; Environmental Sustainability; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Governance Compliance; Shipping Industry; Transportation Industry; Germany

November 2019 (Revised September 2022)
Case

TripAdvisor: An Itinerary for Growth

By: Jeffrey F. Rayport, Spencer Rascoff and Susie L. Ma

In 2019, TripAdvisor was one of the best-known and most-trafficked online travel sites. For nearly 20 years, its founder and CEO Steve Kaufer had steered TripAdvisor through many phases of growth and profitability, but recently the company’s growth had started to slow.... View Details

Keywords: Business Growth and Maturation; Decision Making; Business or Company Management; Growth Management; Innovation and Invention; Brands and Branding; Operations; Customer Value and Value Chain; Information Technology; Travel Industry; Massachusetts