Publications

August 2007
Article

Remedying Education: Evidence from Two Randomized Experiments in India

By: A. Banerjee, Shawn A. Cole, E. Duflo and L. Linden

This paper presents the results of two randomized experiments conducted in schools in urban India. A remedial education program hired young women to teach students lagging behind in basic literacy and numeracy skills. It increased average test scores of all children in... View Details

Keywords: Literacy; Teaching; Performance Improvement; Competency and Skills; India

February 1975 (Revised November 1986)
Background Note

Note on the Use of Experience Curves in Competitive Decision Making

Describes the experience curve concept, details of its application, uses in competitive analysis, and a number of caveats and limitations. View Details

Keywords: Decision Making

Educators

18 Dec 2023

Diverse Student Voices: The First-Gen Experience at HBS

Join us for a 20-minute chat with a current student and get a peek into their daily life at HBS. On this episode, we’re talking with Dennis Cha, MS/MBA 2024. This virtual event is open to all prospective students. View Details

March 2020
Teaching Note

onefinestay: Building a Luxury Experience in the Sharing Economy

By: Jill Avery and Anat Keinan

onefinestay was a two-sided marketplace that offered high-end home rentals to travelers who sought a more authentic and local experience than a typical upscale hotel might provide. After five years of rapid growth, it was time to do a comprehensive analysis of the... View Details

June 1998
Background Note

Share Buy-Backs: The European and Japanese Experience

By: Marc L. Bertoneche

Keywords: Stock Shares; Europe; Japan

July 2021 (Revised November 2022)
Case

Carvana: Pioneering the Online Car Buying Experience

By: Robert J. Dolan

Educators

16 Jul 2020
News

How is the virtual recruitment experiment going?

03 Apr 2017
Video

What I've Gained from the MBA Experience

24 May 2021
News

The Role Experiments Play in Addressing Discrimination

03 Oct 2014
News

An Open Office Experiment that Actually Worked

Keywords: workspace; office culture; open concept

24 Apr 2014
News

Using storytelling to transform the retail experience

Stories make sales. That’s the philosophy of Jennifer Lee Koss (AB 2001, MBA 2008), cofounder of BRIKA, an online shop for modern and elevated craft. BRIKA (from fabricá, the Spanish word for factory) enhances the appeal of its well-crafted goods (many of them... View Details

Web

MBA Experience | Social Enterprise | Harvard Business School

experience by choosing elective courses and independent projects specific to social enterprise. Courses Independent Projects Impact Investing Careers MBA students can engage in a wide variety of career development programs that support... View Details

Article

Loss Aversion, Diminishing Sensitivity, and the Role of Experience in Repeated Decisions

Three experiments are presented that explore the assertion that loss aversion and diminishing sensitivity drive the effect of experience on choice behavior. The experiments are focused on repeated choice tasks where decision makers choose repeatedly between... View Details

Keywords: Experience and Expertise; Decision Choices and Conditions; Mathematical Methods; Loss

2008
Working Paper

Variation in Experience and Team Familiarity: Addressing the Knowledge Acquisition-Application Problem

By: Robert S. Huckman and Bradley R. Staats

Prior work in organizational learning has failed to find a consistent effect of variation in experience on performance. While some studies find a positive relationship between these two variables, others find no effect or even a negative relationship. In this paper, we... View Details

Keywords: Experience and Expertise; Learning; Knowledge Acquisition; Knowledge Use and Leverage; Organizational Culture; Performance Improvement; Groups and Teams; Familiarity; India

16 Apr 2019
Blog Post

How Being an Introvert Influenced My Business School Experience

Bismah Rahmat is a second-year student at HBS (Class of 2019). Here, Bismah shares her experience of how being an introvert specifically impacted her experience at the school as well as her summer internship... View Details

2021
Article

Fundraising for Stigmatized Groups: A Text Message Donation Experiment

By: Katerina Linos, Laura Jakli and Melissa Carlson

As government welfare programming contracts and NGOs increasingly assume core aid functions, they must address a long-standing challenge—that people in need often belong to stigmatized groups. To study other-regarding behavior, we fielded an experiment through a... View Details

Keywords: Demographics; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; Communication Strategy; Civil Society or Community; Non-Governmental Organizations; Welfare; Greece

20 Jun 2017
Working Paper Summaries

Conversational Peers and Idea Generation: Evidence from a Field Experiment

Keywords: by Sharique Hasan and Rembrand Koning

2010
Article

Induced Variation in Administrative Systems: Experimenting with Contexts for Innovation

By: Adrian Caldart, Roberto Vassolo and Luciana Silvestri

Research on intra-organizational evolution determined that variation results from the autonomous strategic behavior of the firm. We revisit this idea by examining a case of induced variation, where a multinational firm experimented with different, coexisting,... View Details

Keywords: Integrated Design; Emerging Economies; Organizational Design; Innovation and Management