Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(5,991)
- Faculty Publications (1,378)
- 2022
- Article
Towards Robust Off-Policy Evaluation via Human Inputs
By: Harvineet Singh, Shalmali Joshi, Finale Doshi-Velez and Himabindu Lakkaraju
Off-policy Evaluation (OPE) methods are crucial tools for evaluating policies in high-stakes domains such as healthcare, where direct deployment is often infeasible, unethical, or expensive. When deployment environments are expected to undergo changes (that is, dataset... View Details
- August 2022
- Article
What Makes a Good Image? Airbnb Demand Analytics Leveraging Interpretable Image Features
By: Shunyuan Zhang, Dokyun Lee, Param Vir Singh and Kannan Srinivasan
We study how Airbnb property demand changed after the acquisition of verified images (taken by Airbnb’s photographers) and explore what makes a good image for an Airbnb property. Using deep learning and difference-in-difference analyses on an Airbnb panel dataset... View Details
- July 2022 (Revised October 2022)
- Case
Sixty Years of Sylvia’s
By: Christina R. Wing, Carlton Burrell Jr., Chika-Dike Nwokike and Abby Patrick
Sylvia’s Restaurant, approaching its sixtieth anniversary this August, is a testament to the values instilled by the matriarch herself, Sylvia Woods. Despite living through an era of racial oppression and poverty, Sylvia accessed financing and established her financial... View Details
- July 2022 (Revised August 2022)
- Case
Athletic Brewing Company: Crafting the U.S. Non-Alcoholic Beer Category
By: Ayelet Israeli and Anne V. Wilson
Athletic Brewing Company (“Athletic,” for short) was founded by Bill Shufelt and John Walker in 2017. In creating Athletic, Shufelt and Walker opened the first U.S. brewery and taproom fully devoted to the production of non-alcoholic (NA) craft beer. By 2021, Athletic... View Details
- July 15, 2022
- Article
Does Elon Musk Have a Strategy?
By: Andy Wu and Goran Calic
Does Elon Musk have a strategy? Or is he just out there winging it? Looking at Musk’s many companies, common themes stand out across three areas: what fits into his vision for problems to solve, how he designs an organization as a solution to those problems, and why he... View Details
- Winter 2022
- Article
Determinants of Small Business Reopening Decisions After COVID Restrictions Were Lifted
By: Dylan Balla-Elliott, Zoë B. Cullen, Edward L. Glaeser, Michael Luca and Christopher Stanton
The COVID-19 pandemic led to dramatic economic disruptions, including government-imposed restrictions that temporarily shuttered millions of American businesses. We use a nation-wide survey of thousands of small business owners to establish three main facts about... View Details
- July 2022
- Article
The Passionate Pygmalion Effect: Passionate Employees Attain Better Outcomes in Part Because of More Preferential Treatment by Others
By: Ke Wang, Erica R. Bailey and Jon M. Jachimowicz
Employees are increasingly exhorted to “pursue their passion” at work. Inherent in this call is the belief that passion will produce higher performance because it promotes intrapersonal processes that propel employees forward. Here, we suggest that the pervasiveness of... View Details
- June 2022 (Revised August 2022)
- Case
Sustainability Reporting at Dollar Tree, Inc.
By: Suraj Srinivasan and Li-Kuan Ni
The cases discusses the ESG strategy of Dollar Tree Inc., a U.S. Fortune 500 company in the deep discount retail industry and the and shareholder pressure faced by the company. In 2022, the company faced a shareholder resolution from a renowned shareholder advocacy... View Details
Keywords: ESG; Sustainability; Shareholder Activism; Dollar Tree; Sustainability Reporting; ESG Reporting; Board Of Directors; Shareholder Engagement; GHG; Environmental Accounting; Integrated Corporate Reporting; Trends; Communication; Announcements; Voting; Environmental Management; Climate Change; Environmental Sustainability; Values and Beliefs; Corporate Accountability; Corporate Disclosure; Corporate Governance; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Policy; Reports; Business or Company Management; Risk Management; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Outcome or Result; Strategic Planning; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Situation or Environment; Opportunities; Civil Society or Community; Social Issues; Public Opinion; Strategy; Adaptation; Alignment; Business Strategy; Corporate Strategy; Value Creation; Retail Industry; United States; Virginia
- June 10, 2022
- Article
Does Your Company’s Culture Reinforce Its Strategy and Purpose?
By: Hubert Joly
Good strategy has traditionally been seen as the key to business success. More recently, purpose has become an essential element of doing business. But something else is missing: culture, or the essential elements of how an organization and its employees behave, as... View Details
- June 2022
- Article
Conservatism Gets Funded? A Field Experiment on the Role of Negative Information in Novel Project Evaluation
By: Jacqueline N. Lane, Misha Teplitskiy, Gary Gray, Hardeep Ranu, Michael Menietti, Eva C. Guinan and Karim R. Lakhani
The evaluation and selection of novel projects lies at the heart of scientific and technological innovation, and yet there are persistent concerns about bias, such as conservatism. This paper investigates the role that the format of evaluation, specifically information... View Details
- Article
Multitasking While Driving: A Time Use Study of Commuting Knowledge Workers to Assess Current and Future Uses
By: Thomaz Teodorovicz, Andrew L. Kun, Raffaella Sadun and Orit Shaer
Commuting has enormous impact on individuals, families, organizations, and society. Advances in vehicle automation may help workers employ the time spent commuting in productive work-tasks or wellbeing activities. To achieve this goal, however, we need to develop a... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
Causal Inference During A Pandemic: Evidence on the Effectiveness of Nebulized Ibuprofen as an Unproven Treatment for COVID-19 in Argentina
By: Sebastian Calonico, Rafael Di Tella and Juan Cruz Lopez Del Valle
Many medical decisions during the pandemic were made without the support of causal evidence obtained in clinical trials. We study the case of nebulized ibuprofen (NaIHS), a drug that was extensively used on COVID-19 patients in Argentina amidst wild claims about its... View Details
- Article
How Much Should We Trust Staggered Difference-In-Differences Estimates?
By: Andrew C. Baker, David F. Larcker and Charles C.Y. Wang
We explain when and how staggered difference-in-differences regression estimators, commonly applied to assess the impact of policy changes, are biased. These biases are likely to be relevant for a large portion of research settings in finance, accounting, and law that... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
Passing the Mic: Career and Firm Outcomes of Executive Interactions
By: Wei Cai, Ethan Rouen and Yuan Zou
We exploit a unique feature of conference calls to study one type of interaction among executives—directly inviting colleagues to respond to analysts’ questions. We find that the frequency of initiating interaction is positively associated with an executive’s ability,... View Details
- 2022
- Article
Probing GNN Explainers: A Rigorous Theoretical and Empirical Analysis of GNN Explanation Methods.
By: Chirag Agarwal, Marinka Zitnik and Himabindu Lakkaraju
As Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are increasingly employed in real-world applications, it becomes critical to ensure that the stakeholders understand the rationale behind their predictions. While several GNN explanation methods have been proposed recently, there has... View Details
- May 2022
- Article
When Harry Fired Sally: The Double Standard in Punishing Misconduct
By: Mark Egan, Gregor Matvos and Amit Seru
We examine gender differences in misconduct punishment in the financial advisory industry. We find evidence of a “gender punishment gap”: following an incident of misconduct, female advisers are 20% more likely to lose their jobs and 30% less likely to find new jobs... View Details
- April 2022
- Teaching Note
Banorte Móvil: Data-Driven Mobile Growth
By: Ayelet Israeli and Carla Larangeira
In mid-2019, Carlos Hank was deliberating over the results for Banorte Móvil—the mobile application for Banorte, Mexico’s most profitable and second-largest financial institution. Hank, who had been appointed as Banorte´s Chairman of the Board in January 2015, had... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
THEMIS: A Framework for Cost-Benefit Analysis of COVID-19 Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions
By: Dimitris Bertsimas, Michael Lingzhi Li and Saksham Soni
Since December 2019, the world has been ravaged by the COVID-19 pandemic, with over 150 million confirmed cases and 3 million confirmed deaths worldwide. To combat the spread of COVID-19, governments have issued unprecedented non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs),... View Details
Keywords: COVID-19; Health Pandemics; Policy; Framework; Cost vs Benefits; Outcome or Result; United States; Germany; Brazil; Singapore; Spain
- 2022
- Working Paper
Transferable Skills? Founders as Venture Capitalists
By: Paul A. Gompers and Vladimir Mukharlyamov
In this paper we explore whether or not the experience as a founder of a venture capital-backed startup influences the performance of founders who become venture capitalists (VCs). We find that nearly 7% of VCs were previously founders of a venture-backed startup.... View Details
- March 2022 (Revised March 2024)
- Case
Hometown Foods: Changing Price amid Inflation
During the early part of the 2021 Covid-19 pandemic, Hometown Foods, a large seller of flour-based products, thrived as consumers hoarded baked goods and took up baking to pass the time and find comfort. Then, amid growing shortages in commodities, a vaccine arrived,... View Details