Publications

2003
Conference Paper

Follow the Money: What Really Drives Technology Innovation in Construction

By: John D. Macomber

Technology enthusiasts, academics, and software companies remain concerned about the slow pace of innovation in the construction industry. Tools are widely available that seem to provide eminently sensible and clearly apparent improvement to the process of design and... View Details

Keywords: Buildings and Facilities; Technological Innovation; Construction; Design; Performance Improvement; Motivation and Incentives; Knowledge Management; Adoption; Business Model; Capital Structure; Supply Chain

2014
Article

Investors Prefer Entrepreneurial Ventures Pitched by Attractive Men

By: Alison Wood Brooks, Laura Huang, Sarah Kearney and Fiona Murray

Entrepreneurship is a central path to job creation, economic growth, and prosperity. In the earliest stages of start-up business creation, the matching of entrepreneurial ventures to investors is critically important. The entrepreneur's business proposition and... View Details

Keywords: Prejudice and Bias; Entrepreneurship; Investment; Gender

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13 Jan 2003
Research & Ideas

The Subconscious Mind of the Consumer (And How To Reach It)

Additionally, there is now a lot of evidence that personal interviews yield deep insights that can't be obtained from focus groups. So, my preference is to conduct in-depth, one-on-one interviews that are enriched by using various techniques from clinical View Details

Keywords: by Manda Mahoney

Web

Research Areas - Doctoral

environment in which businesses operate. Drawing from perspectives of economic theory, political science, and history, they examine the “rules” and policies established by government and other non-business institutions that affect... View Details

September 2020
Article

Community-Level Postmaterialism and Anti-Migrant Attitudes:: An Original Survey on Opposition to Sub-Saharan African Migrants in the Middle East

By: Matt Buehler, Kristin Fabbe and Kyung Joon Han

Why do native citizens of the Middle East and North Africa express greater opposition to certain types of migrants, refugees, and displaced persons? Why, particularly, do they express greater opposition to sub-Saharan African migrants? This article investigates these... View Details

Keywords: Postmaterialism; Immigration; Attitudes; Prejudice and Bias; Surveys; Africa; Middle East

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October 1998 (Revised December 1998)
Case

CompUSA The Computer Superstore

By: Ananth Raman and Anna Sheen McClelland

Examines the CompUSA organization, focusing especially on the operations and the company culture. Highlights the economics of PC retailing and the importance of a responsive supply chain for their product category. The description of company culture emphasizes the role... View Details

Keywords: Supply Chain; Organizational Culture; Motivation and Incentives; Supply Chain Management; Computer Industry; Retail Industry; United States

07 Aug 2018
First Look

New Research and Ideas, August 8, 2018

improvements in delivering specific healthcare services and justify further investigation of process improvements. Publisher's link: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=54827 in press Journal of Personality and Social View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

21 Aug 2012
First Look

First Look: August 21

who are at the very top of the ability distribution (non-superstars), react positively to increased competition from superstars. For them, we find some evidence of increased effort and no increase in errors of logic, consistent with both View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

July 1991 (Revised December 2018)
Compilation

Slavery

By: Thomas K. McCraw

Explores the general history of slavery in the United States. Through detailed exhibits and a text consisting of excerpts from six first-hand observations of slavery, this note is designed to present the ethics, economics (especially the perverse incentive systems),... View Details

Keywords: Slavery; Human Capital; History; Ethics; Social Issues; Motivation and Incentives; United States

21 Sep 2010
First Look

First Look: September 21, 2010

PublicationsA History of Irish Economic Thought Authors:Thomas Boylan, Renee Prendergast, and John Turner, eds. Publication:London: Routledge, 2010 Abstract For a country that can boast a distinguished tradition of political economy... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

May 2001
Article

The Open Source Movement: Key Research Questions

By: Josh Lerner and Jean Tirole

The paper analyzes the incentives of individual programmers and of commercial companies to participate in open source projects. While these incentives are in our opinion well accounted for by the economic paradigm, much empirical and theoretical work is still needed to... View Details

Keywords: Motivation and Incentives; Open Source Distribution

20 Jun 2023
Research & Ideas

Looking to Leave a Mark? Memorable Leaders Don't Just Spout Statistics, They Tell Stories

information or story, the study finds. “This is one of the first studies in economics that actually tries to study the role of memory and similarity in a controlled way.” Stories have a longer lifespan in memory not because of any... View Details

Keywords: by Scott Van Voorhis

08 Dec 2015
First Look

December 8, 2015

that may arise. Publisher's link: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=50144 2015 The Cambridge Handbook of Consumer Psychology The Consumer Psychology of Online Privacy: Insights and Opportunities... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

Article

Putting Patients First: Social Marketing Strategies for Treating HIV in Developing Nations

By: Zoe Chance and Rohit Deshpandé

It is more than mere coincidence that the highest rates of HIV occur in the world's poorest countries. Of the over 40 million people currently living with HIV, 95 percent are in the developing world. The first part of this paper explores the economics of HIV and... View Details

Keywords: Health Disorders; Developing Countries and Economies; Poverty; Health Care and Treatment; Social Marketing; Perspective; Customer Focus and Relationships; Profit; Africa; Asia; South America

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14 Nov 2023
Research & Ideas

The Network Effect: Why Companies Should Care About Employees’ LinkedIn Connections

produce more patented innovations, and those innovations are typically more scientifically and economically valuable. “We found that companies that are more central are having a bigger impact—the innovation they produce is more successful... View Details

Keywords: by Ben Rand

January 2011
Case

Clean Edge Razor: Splitting Hairs in Product Positioning

By: John A. Quelch and Heather Beckham

After three years of development, Paramount Health and Beauty Company is preparing to launch a new technologically advanced vibrating razor called Clean Edge. The innovative new design of Clean Edge provides superior performance by stimulating the hair follicles to... View Details

Keywords: Project Management; Interdepartmental Relations; Organizational Change; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Leadership; Conflict Management; Product Positioning; Marketing Strategy; Relationships; Product Development; Consumer Products Industry; Beauty and Cosmetics Industry

2023
Book

How the Harvard Business School Changed the Way We View Organizations

By: Jay W. Lorsch

The story of the field of organizational behavior (which overlaps considerably with the origin story of Harvard Business School) and how it created the “medical model” of systems thinking—anchored in the practices of listening, observing, testing, and only then... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Behavior; Systems Thinking; Medical Model; Organizations; Behavior; System; History

August 2023
Article

Can Security Design Foster Household Risk-Taking?

By: Laurent Calvet, Claire Célérier, Paolo Sodini and Boris Vallée

This paper shows that securities with a non-linear payoff design can foster household risk-taking. We demonstrate this effect empirically by exploiting the introduction of capital guarantee products in Sweden from 2002 to 2007. The fast and broad adoption of these... View Details

Keywords: Financial Innovation; Household Finance; Structured Products; Stock Market Participation; Finance; Innovation and Invention; Household; Personal Finance; Risk and Uncertainty; Behavior; Market Participation

June 1993 (Revised November 2007)
Case

Duckworth Industries, Inc.--Incentive Compensation Programs

By: William E. Fruhan Jr.

A private company is considering an introduction of a long-run incentive compensation system in which payoffs to managers are determined by the economic value added for shareholders by their individual business units. The proposed new system is compared to a number of... View Details

Keywords: Executive Compensation; Management Teams; Business and Shareholder Relations; Motivation and Incentives; Value Creation