Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(4,862)
- Faculty Publications (1,204)
- March 2020
- Case
Thingtesting: Launching a Brand Discovery and Testing Digital Community
By: Ayelet Israeli and Jill Avery
Thingtesting, a brand discovery and testing digital community devoted to uncovering and exploring direct-to-consumer brands, had just received seed funding and was contemplating a second year of growth. The new year brought many challenges, as founder Jenny Gyllander... View Details
Keywords: Influencer Marketing; Monetization; Female Ceo; Female Entrepreneur; Female Protagonist; Influencers; Influencer; Direct-to-consumer; Marketing; Brands and Branding; Marketing Strategy; Venture Capital; Entrepreneurship; Marketing Communications; Financial Services Industry; Financial Services Industry; Financial Services Industry; London; United Kingdom; United States; Europe; North America
- March 2020 (Revised April 2021)
- Case
Odebrecht's 'Transformation Journey' (A)
By: Suraj Srinivasan, Lynn S. Paine, Ruth Costas and Mariana Cal
At the center of one of the largest corruption scandals in Latin America, Brazilian conglomerate Odebrecht signed a leniency agreement with American, Swiss and Brazilian prosecutors in 2016 admitting to paying bribes in 12 countries. In an effort to regain financial... View Details
Keywords: Board Of Directors; Organizational Transformations; Business Ethics; Corruption; Internal Controls; Business And Government; International Business; Engineering And Construction; Family Businesses; Corporate Misconduct; Corporate Governance; Governing and Advisory Boards; Transformation; Organizational Culture; Crisis Management; Ethics; Engineering; Family Business; Crime and Corruption; Emerging Markets; Construction Industry; Brazil; Latin America
- March 2020 (Revised February 2023)
- Case
Political Legitimacy and Global Capital Markets: Malaysia's 1MDB (A)
By: Meg Rithmire and Courtney Han
In May 2018, Malaysia’s 14th General Election saw a change of power that many thought they would never witness in their lifetimes. The political party that had ruled Malaysia for 60 year was kicked out of office by a 92 year-old challenger, Mahathir Mohamed, who had... View Details
- 2021
- Working Paper
Corporate Environmental Impact: Measurement, Data and Information
By: David Freiberg, DG Park, George Serafeim and T. Robert Zochowski
As an organization’s environmental impact has become a central societal consideration, thereby affecting industry and organizational competitiveness, interest in measuring and analyzing environmental impact has increased. We develop a methodology to derive comparable... View Details
Keywords: Environment; Impact; Measurement; Environmental Ratings; Corporate Valuation; Financial Materiality; Sustainability; Environmental Impact; Environmental Strategy; Impact-Weighted Accounts; IWAI; Environmental Sustainability; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Measurement and Metrics; Valuation
- Working Paper
Rebates in the Pharmaceutical Industry: Evidence from Medicines Sold in Retail Pharmacies in the U.S.
By: Pragya Kakani, Michael Chernew and Amitabh Chandra
Rising list prices are often used to illustrate the burden of prescription drug spending, but payers routinely negotiate rebates from manufacturers that generate differences between list and net prices. List prices are easily available and affect patient cost-sharing,... View Details
- February 2020
- Case
Rotoplas: Bringing More and Better Water
By: John D. Macomber and Carla Larangeira
Private companies were being turned to for potable water in the world’s megacities due to impacts of climate change including droughts and flooding. Mexico City had endured several water-related crises, with its population suffering from floods, droughts, water... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
A Framework for Product Impact-Weighted Accounts
By: George Serafeim and Katie Trinh
While there has been significant progress in the measurement of an organization’s environmental and social impacts from its operations, metrics to evaluate the impact of products once they come to market lag far behind. In this paper, we provide a framework for... View Details
- February 2020 (Revised June 2020)
- Case
From Cradle to Heaven: Taikang Insurance Group
By: William C. Kirby, Shu Lin, John P. McHugh and Yuanzhuo Wang
Taikang Insurance Group was a leading Chinese insurance and financial services institution. It operated in the insurance, asset management, and health and senior care industries. Due to China’s underdeveloped social welfare state, Taikang saw an opportunity for the... View Details
- 2020
- Book
Experimentation Works: The Surprising Power of Business Experiments
By: Stefan Thomke
Don’t fly blind. See how the power of experiments works for you. When it comes to improving customer experiences, trying out new business models, or developing new products, even the most experienced managers often get it wrong. They discover that intuition,... View Details
- February 2020
- Case
Halftime for Heidelberg
By: Debora L. Spar
The case follows President Rob Huntington as he seeks to find a viable way forward for Heidelberg University.
Located in Tiffin, Ohio, Heidelberg is a small, private, four-year university. As with many similar institutions of higher education, it currently faces a... View Details
- 2020
- Article
Mutual Funds: Skill and Performance
By: Jonathan B. Berk, Jules van Binsbergen and Max Miller
The authors summarize the recent literature on mutual fund manager skill and performance. They discuss the latest contributions in the field and reinterpret them through the lens of the rational expectations framework (efficient market hypothesis). They further discuss... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
The Effects of Information on Credit Market Competition: Evidence from Credit Cards
By: C. Fritz Foley, Agustin Hurtado, Andres Liberman and Alberto Sepulveda
We show empirically that public credit information increases competition in credit markets. We access data that cover all credit card borrowers in Chile and include details about relationship borrowers have with each lender. We exploit a natural experiment whereby a... View Details
- February 2020
- Article
Why Prosocial Referral Incentives Work: The Interplay of Reputational Benefits and Action Costs
By: Rachel Gershon, Cynthia Cryder and Leslie K. John
While selfish incentives typically outperform prosocial incentives, in the context of customer referral rewards, prosocial incentives can be more effective. Companies frequently offer “selfish” (i.e., sender-benefiting) referral incentives, offering customers financial... View Details
- January 2020
- Case
SK Group: Social Progress Credits
By: George Serafeim, Ethan Rouen and David Freiberg
SK Group was one of the largest companies South Korea. A family-run conglomerate consisting of around 120 subsidiaries and employing more than 100,000, SK was tightly knit into the fabric of Korean society. SK viewed their future success as contingent upon the strength... View Details
Keywords: Impact; Impact Investing; Impact Measurement; Social Value; Social Development; Conglomerates; Measurement Of Purpose; ESG; ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) Performance; Capital Markets; Innovation; Environmental Impact; Collaboration; Social Enterprise; Social and Collaborative Networks; Social Issues; Measurement and Metrics; Value Creation; Cooperation; Environmental Sustainability; Employment; Accounting; Energy Industry; Telecommunications Industry; Chemical Industry; South Korea
- January 2020 (Revised July 2020)
- Case
Chemours (A)
By: David G. Fubini and David Lane
The July 2015 spin-off of DuPont’s performance chemicals division as the independent company Chemours burdened new CEO Mark Vergnano and his team with perilous challenges. Despite market-leading offerings in several areas, the company faced a glutted market for its... View Details
- December 2019
- Case
CME Group in 2019
By: José B. Alvarez, Forest Reinhardt and Natalie Kindred
Chicago-based CME Group is the world’s largest futures and options marketplace, with annual trading volume of over 4.8 billion contracts in 2018. This case is set in late 2019, as heightened perceptions of risk stemming from the U.S.-China trade war are driving record... View Details
- December 2019 (Revised June 2024)
- Case
The Dutch East India Company in 1612 (A)
By: Lynn S. Paine and Giuseppe Dari-Mattiacci
The Dutch East India Company’s board of directors must decide what to do about an impending legal requirement to liquidate the company’s assets and return to shareholders their capital and any profits earned during a ten-year lock-up period. The charter granted to the... View Details
- December 2019 (Revised June 2024)
- Supplement
The Dutch East India Company in 1612 (B)
By: Lynn S. Paine and Giuseppe Dari-Mattiacci
The case relates the decision made in the A case and what happened in the aftermath. View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Internal Models, Make Believe Prices, and Bond Market Cornering
By: Ishita Sen and Varun Sharma
Exploiting position-level heterogeneity in regulatory incentives to misreport and novel data on regulators, we document that U.S. life insurers inflate the values of corporate bonds using internal models. We estimate an additional $9-$18 billion decline in regulatory... View Details
- November 2019 (Revised May 2020)
- Case
Collibra
By: Lynda M. Applegate, Jeffrey F. Rayport and Julia Kelley
Founded in 2008 at Vrije Universiteit Brussels, Collibra was a data intelligence company that found product-market fit in the years after the global financial crisis when many companies were under pressure from consumers and governments to improve their data management... View Details
Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Governance; Innovation and Invention; Technological Innovation; Markets; Information Technology; Applications and Software; Technology Adoption; Digital Platforms; Internet and the Web; Customer Focus and Relationships; Customer Satisfaction; Expansion; Information Technology Industry; Technology Industry; Europe; Belgium; Brussels; North and Central America; United States; New York (city, NY); New York (state, US)