Publications

September–October 2022
Article

Should Your Company Sell on Amazon?: Reach Comes at a Price

By: Ayelet Israeli, Leonard A. Schlesinger, Matt Higgins and Sabir Semerkant

Selling on Amazon allows brands to reach millions of consumers—but that exposure comes with costs. They include smaller margins, more competition, the risk of commoditization, and less knowledge about customers. In this article, the authors present a scorecard to... View Details

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August 28, 2018
Article

How Intermittent Breaks in Interaction Improve Collective Intelligence

By: Ethan Bernstein, Jesse Shore and David Lazer

People influence each other when they interact to solve problems. Such social influence introduces both benefits (higher average solution quality due to exploitation of existing answers through social learning) and costs (lower maximum solution quality due to a... View Details

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November 2010 (Revised April 2011)
Case

Magna International, Inc. (A)

By: Timothy A. Luehrman and Yuhai Xuan

Magna International, Inc., a Canadian-based automotive parts manufacturer, is considering whether and how to unwind its dual-class ownership structure. A family trust controlled by the founder owns a 0.65% economic interest in the company but has 66% of the votes via a... View Details

Keywords: Family Business; Restructuring; Cost vs Benefits; Governance Controls; Ownership Stake; Family Ownership; Auto Industry; Canada

May 2017 (Revised July 2017)
Supplement

Aadhaar: From Voluntary to Mandatory

By: Tarun Khanna, Anjali Raina and Rachna Chawla

Approximately 1.1 billion residents of India (99% of the population) had a unique biometric identity—Aadhaar—by 2017. In six years, the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) had achieved an unprecedented milestone in emerging and developed markets. The... View Details

March 1990 (Revised May 1993)
Case

USSR--1990

By: Willis M. Emmons III

Describes the political, economic, and social development of the USSR from 1921-90. Particular emphasis is placed on 1) institutional change, 2) the costs and benefits of central economic planning, and 3) the political economy of perestroika under Mikhail Gorbachev.... View Details

Keywords: Country; Strategy; Cost vs Benefits; Change; Government and Politics; Russia

10 Dec 2008
Working Paper Summaries

Market Reaction to the Adoption of IFRS in Europe

Keywords: by Christopher S. Armstrong, Mary E. Barth, Alan D. Jagolinzer & Edward J. Riedl; Banking

Web

Academic Programs | About

Certifications & Alumni Status All of our programs grant different levels of degrees or certifications and some, but not all, grant alumni status. We have created this guide for what each program confers and... View Details

09 Sep 2015
News

Even Harvard B-school alums are fretting over income inequality

19 Jan 2021
News

How to Be a “Glass-Shattering” Organization

Article

"Troll" Check? A Proposal for Administrative Review of Patent Litigation

By: Lauren Cohen, John Golden, Umit Gurun and Scott Duke Kominers

The patent system is commonly justified as a way to promote social welfare and, more specifically, technological progress. For years, however, there has been concern that patent litigation is undermining, rather than furthering, these goals. Particularly in the United... View Details

Keywords: Patent Trolls; Patents; Lawsuits and Litigation

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02 Jan 2020
News

Hospitals Merged. Quality Didn’t Improve.

February 2022
Case

Agora (A)

By: Lindsay N. Hyde, Thomas R. Eisenmann and Tom Quinn

Agora was a civic technology (civic tech) startup founded by Elsa Sze, who wanted to enhance the connection between political officials and their constituents by facilitating virtual “town halls,” making underrepresented voices heard and benefiting elected and... View Details

Keywords: Civic Technology; Government Administration; Conferences; Business Startups; Business Strategy

February 2013 (Revised March 2015)
Case

The LEGO Group: Publish or Protect?

By: Willy C. Shih and Sen Chai

Senior managers at the LEGO Group are faced with a quandary: Should they patent inventions coming out of their manufacturing process development work, should they keep them as trade secrets, or should they publish them so that they would go into the public domain and... View Details

February 2000 (Revised October 2000)
Case

Open Market, Inc.: The E-Commerce Wars

By: James I. Cash Jr., Janis Lee Gogan, Michael Haselkorn and Mani Subramani

Continues the story of Open Market, Inc., a company founded in 1994 to support electronic commerce on the Internet. Despite a very successful initial public offering, the firm had reached a growth plateau, and the management team was considering several strategic... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Technological Innovation; Management; Growth and Development Strategy; Marketing Channels; Product Marketing; Product Development; Competitive Strategy; Corporate Strategy; Information Technology Industry; Web Services Industry

Winter 2021
Article

Can Staggered Boards Improve Value? Causal Evidence from Massachusetts

By: Robert Daines, Shelley Xin Li and Charles C.Y. Wang

We study the effect of staggered boards (SBs) using a quasi-experiment: a 1990 law that imposed an SB on all Massachusetts-incorporated firms. The law led to an increase in Tobin's Q, investment in CAPEX and R&D, patents, higher-quality patented innovations, and... View Details

Keywords: Staggered Board; Entrenchment; Life-cycle; Tobin's Q; Innovation; Profitability; Investor Composition; Governing and Advisory Boards; Investment; Innovation and Invention; Institutional Investing; Value

SSRN

05 Jul 2023
HBS Case

What Kind of Leader Are You? How Three Action Orientations Can Help You Meet the Moment

the same sorts of results.” Given his prior success in reading the market, Johnson relied on a contextual orientation to develop various plans to reinvent the JCPenney way, including new concepts in retailing and new View Details

Keywords: by Ben Rand

June 2008 (Revised October 2009)
Case

InnoCentive.com (A)

By: Karim R. Lakhani

InnoCentive.com, a firm connecting R&D labs of large organizations to diverse external solvers through innovation contests, has to decide if it will enable collaboration in its community. Case covers the basics of a distributed innovation system works and the... View Details

Keywords: Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Open Source Distribution; Research and Development; Competition; Cooperation

February 2019 (Revised January 2020)
Teaching Note

Renegotiating NAFTA

By: Laura Alfaro and Sarah Jeong

On January 16, 2020, the Senate passed a landmark trade deal that would replace the 26-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Until the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) was signed, considerable debate had surrounded it. The new agreement... View Details

Keywords: NAFTA; Trade; Agreements and Arrangements; Policy; Cost vs Benefits; North America