Publications

11 Apr 2014
Working Paper Summaries

Learning By Thinking: How Reflection Improves Performance

Keywords: by Giada Di Stefano, Francesca Gino, Gary Pisano & Bradley Staats

June 2012
Article

The Economic Value of Celebrity Endorsements

By: Anita Elberse and Jeroen Verleun

What is the payoff to enlisting celebrity endorsers? Although effects on stock returns are relatively well documented, little is known about any impact on sales—arguably a metric of more direct importance to advertising practitioners. In this study of athlete... View Details

Keywords: Stocks; Value; Advertising; Sales; Brands and Branding; Decisions; Economics; Marketing Strategy; Investment Return

Article

Advertising, the Matchmaker

By: Bharat N. Anand and Ron Shachar

We empirically study the informational role of advertising in matching consumers with products when consumers are uncertain about both observable and unobserved program attributes. Our focus is on the network television industry, in which the products are television... View Details

Keywords: Advertising; Information; Consumer Behavior; Television Entertainment; Risk and Uncertainty; Product; Decision Choices and Conditions; Advertising Industry

25 Jun 2009
Working Paper Summaries

Why Do Countries Adopt International Financial Reporting Standards?

Keywords: by Karthik Ramanna & Ewa Sletten; Accounting

July 2004
Supplement

World Vision International: The AIDS Initiative

By: Christopher A. Bartlett

Management discusses the organizational and governance challenges of operating a global network of partner organizations. Then key managers reflect on the decision World Vision must make on the AIDS Hope Initiative--a new strategic direction that challenges many of the... View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Goals and Objectives; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Problems and Challenges; Core Relationships; Welfare; Value; Health Industry

December 2011
Article

Platform Envelopment

By: Thomas R. Eisenmann, Geoffrey Parker and Marshall Van Alstyne

Due to network effects and switching costs in platform markets, entrants generally must offer revolutionary functionality. We explore a second entry path that does not rely upon Schumpeterian innovation: platform envelopment. Through envelopment, a provider in one... View Details

Keywords: Digital Platforms; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Economic Systems; Development Economics; Business or Company Management; Business Strategy; Network Effects; Information Technology Industry; Technology Industry

March 2021 (Revised March 2024)
Case

M-KOPA: Empowering Lives

By: V. Kasturi Rangan, Wale Lawal and Pippa Tubman Armerding

The Pay As You Go solar power company in East Africa had sales of $71 million in 2019. It wished to grow to $300 million by 2025. M-KOPA, founded by three entrepreneurs in 2011, had grown nicely in Kenya and Uganda to reach nearly 750,000 households with an innovative... View Details

Keywords: Mobile Payment; Go-to-market Strategy; Business At The Base Of The Pyramid; Business Growth; Social Entrepreneurship; Renewable Energy; Business Model; Growth and Development Strategy; Expansion; Marketing Strategy; Developing Countries and Economies; Kenya; Uganda; Nigeria

Educators

April 2022 (Revised May 2022)
Case

Mastercard Labs (A) (Abridged)

By: Linda A. Hill, Sunil Gupta, Emily Tedards and Julia Kelley

When Ajaypal (Ajay) Banga became the CEO of Mastercard in 2010, he shifted the company’s competitive focus from card networks to cash itself. Mastercard’s new vision of a “World Beyond Cash” distilled into a three-pronged framework: Grow the core business, Diversify... View Details

Educators

This paper examines the relative importance of platform quality, indirect network effects, and consumer expectations on the success of entrants in platform-based markets. We develop a theoretical model and find that an entrant's success depends on the strength of... View Details

May 20, 2024
Article

Porter’s Five Forces and Competitive Advantage in Web3

By: Scott Duke Kominers and Liang Wu

Competitive strategy — the art of crafting and executing plans to achieve an advantageous position in the market — is integral to any business, and especially relevant for platforms because it determines their ability to achieve network effects and scale. But web3... View Details

Keywords: Five Forces Framework; Competitive Strategy; Business Strategy; Network Effects; Digital Transformation

24 Sep 2019
Blog Post

Launching a Career in Clean Energy

Established in 2010, the HBS Business & Environment Initiative (BEI) works to deepen understanding of the environmental challenges facing business leaders and inspire new ideas and practical, effective solutions. BEI has established a... View Details

Career Coach

Doug Lester

a career. Coaching sessions with Doug can range from broadly conceptual, touching on issues related to meaning in work and life, to highly focused and tactical, including formulating effective networking... View Details

Keywords: Auto/Transportation/Logistics; Consumer Products; Education; Emerging Markets; Entertainment / Media; Entrepreneurship; Government; Health Care; Hospitality; Insurance; Publishing / Communications / Advertising; Real Estate; Retail; Social Enterprise; Technology

2023
Article

Exploiting Discovered Regression Discontinuities to Debias Conditioned-on-observable Estimators

By: Benjamin Jakubowski, Siram Somanchi, Edward McFowland III and Daniel B. Neill

Regression discontinuity (RD) designs are widely used to estimate causal effects in the absence of a randomized experiment. However, standard approaches to RD analysis face two significant limitations. First, they require a priori knowledge of discontinuities in... View Details

Keywords: Regression Discontinuity Design; Analytics and Data Science; AI and Machine Learning

July 1997
Article

National Champions and Corruption: Some Unpleasant Interventionist Arithmetic

By: Alberto Ades and Rafael Di Tella

We present a hold-up model of investment where active industrial policy promotes both corruption and investment. Since corruption deters investment, the effect of industrial policy on investment is lower than when corruption is absent. We find evidence suggesting that... View Details

Keywords: Crime and Corruption

03 Mar 2020
News

From Disruption to Collision: The New Competitive Dynamics

January–February 2019
Article

Why Some Platforms Thrive and Others Don't

By: Feng Zhu and Marco Iansiti

In the digital economy, scale is no guarantee of continued success. After all, the same factors that help an online platform expand quickly—such as the low cost of adding new customers—work for challengers too. What, then, allows platforms to fight off rivals and grow... View Details

Keywords: Digital Platforms; Competition; Network Effects; Competitive Strategy

Register to Read

May–June 2021
Article

Capturing Value in Platform Business Models that Rely on User-Generated Content

By: Hemang Subramanian, Sabyasachi Mitra and Sam Ransbotham

Business models increasingly depend on inputs from outside traditional organizational boundaries. For example, platforms that generate revenue from advertising, subscription, or referral fees often rely on user-generated content (UGC). But there is considerable... View Details

Keywords: Business Model; Network Effects; Mergers and Acquisitions; Valuation; Risk and Uncertainty