Publications
Publications
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(3,009)
- Faculty Publications (431)
- October 2012
- Article
The Gifts We Keep on Giving: Documenting and Destigmatizing the Regifting Taboo
By: Gabrielle S. Adams, Francis J. Flynn and Michael I. Norton
Five studies investigate whether the practice of "regifting"-a social taboo-is as offensive to givers as regifters assume. Participants who imagined regifting thought that the original givers would be more offended than givers reported feeling, to such an extent that... View Details
- December 2012
- Case
Blink Booking
By: William R. Kerr, Magnus Thor Torfason and Alexis Brownell
Rebeca Minguela hopes to create an arbitrage platform, similar to Rocket Internet, that can bring start-up ideas and opportunities to Spain. However, Blink Booking, her first venture and proof of concept, is rocked by a co-founder's breach of confidence and departure.... View Details
- Winter 2013
- Article
The New Patent Intermediaries: Platforms, Defensive Aggregators and Super-Aggregators
By: Andrei Hagiu and David B. Yoffie
The patent market consists mainly of privately negotiated, bilateral transactions, either sales or cross-licenses, between large companies. There is no eBay, Amazon, New York Stock Exchange, or Kelley's Blue Book equivalent for patents, and when buyers and sellers do... View Details
- 2012
- Chapter
When Identities, Interests, and Information Collide: How Subgroups Create Hidden Profiles in Teams
By: Jeffrey T. Polzer, Lisa Kwan and Lisa B. Kwan
Purpose—We review how team members' identities and interests affect team functioning, paying special attention to subgroup dynamics triggered by fault lines and coalitions. This review sets the stage for describing novel pathways through which identities and... View Details
- 2014
- Working Paper
Search-Based Peer Firms: Aggregating Investor Perceptions Through Internet Co-Searches
By: Charles M.C. Lee, Paul Ma and Charles C.Y. Wang
Applying a "co-search" algorithm to Internet traffic at the SEC's EDGAR web-site, we develop a novel method for identifying economically-related peer firms and for measuring their relative importance. Our results show that firms appearing in chronologically adjacent... View Details
- November 2012 (Revised December 2017)
- Case
TerraPower
John Gilleland, CEO of TerraPower, returned to his office after a lengthy meeting with potential investors. It was October 2012, and TerraPower was in the process of raising a $200M Series C round to finance the ongoing development of its next-generation nuclear... View Details
- November 2012
- Case
Ahold versus Tesco—Analyzing Performance
By: Suraj Srinivasan and Penelope Rossano
The case relates to understanding and comparing the performance of two leading retail companies—Ahold and Tesco. The case introduces the tools of Dupont and Modified Dupont Decomposition. While performance as measured by return on equity has been similar for the two... View Details
- November 2012
- Article
The Organization of Firms Across Countries
By: Nicholas Bloom, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen
We argue that social capital as proxied by trust increases aggregate productivity by affecting the organization of firms. To do this we collect new data on the decentralization of investment, hiring, production, and sales decisions from Corporate Headquarters to local... View Details
Keywords: Decentralization; Social Capital; Theory Of The Firm; Firm Objectives, Organization, And Behavior; Business Economics; Management Of Technological Innovation And R＆D; Technological Change: Choices And Consequences; Diffusion Processes; Organizational Structure; Performance Productivity; Trust; Technology Adoption; Multinational Firms and Management
- 2013
- Working Paper
Securities Litigation Risk for Foreign Companies Listed in the U.S.
By: Beiting Cheng, Suraj Srinivasan and Gwen Yu
We study securities litigation risk faced by foreign firms listed on U.S. exchanges. We take into account not only the propensity for foreign firms to commit violations of U.S. securities laws but also the costs that investors face when suing foreign firms. We find... View Details
- 2012
- Working Paper
What Do Managers Do? Exploring Persistent Performance Differences among Seemingly Similar Enterprises
By: Robert Gibbons and Rebecca Henderson
Social networks and social groups have both been seen as important to discouraging malfeasance and supporting the global pro-social norms that underlie social order, but have typically been treated either as pure substitutes or as having completely independent effects.... View Details
- July 2012
- Module Note
Corporate Strategy
By: Bharat N. Anand
This note provides an overview of strategies for multi-business firms. The note describes (i) what is meant by "corporate advantage," (ii) the different approaches that multi-business firms can pursue in order to create corporate advantage, (iii) the specific corporate... View Details
Keywords: Corporate Strategy
- 2012
- Working Paper
Clusters, Convergence, and Economic Performance
By: Mercedes Delgado, Michael E. Porter and Scott Stern
This paper evaluates the role of regional cluster composition in the economic performance of industries, clusters, and regions. On the one hand, diminishing returns to specialization in a location can result in a convergence effect: the growth rate of an industry... View Details
- July 2012
- Article
The IKEA Effect: When Labor Leads to Love
By: Michael I. Norton, Daniel Mochon and Dan Ariely
In four studies in which consumers assembled IKEA boxes, folded origami, and built sets of Legos, we demonstrate and investigate boundary conditions for the IKEA effect—the increase in valuation of self-made products. Participants saw their amateurish creations as... View Details
- July 2012
- Article
The Real Consequences of Market Segmentation
By: Sergey Chernenko and Adi Sunderam
We study the real effects of market segmentation due to credit ratings using a matched sample of firms just above and just below the investment-grade cutoff. These firms have similar observables, including average investment rates. However, flows into high-yield mutual... View Details
- June 2012
- Article
Consequence-Cause Matching: Looking to the Consequences of Events to Infer Their Causes
By: Robyn A. LeBoeuf and Michael I. Norton
We show that people non-normatively infer event causes from event consequences. For example, people inferred that a product failure (computer crash) had a large cause (widespread computer virus) if it had a large consequence (job loss), but that the identical failure... View Details
- April 2012 (Revised February 2017)
- Case
Dovernet
By: Robert Simons and Natalie Kindred
This case illustrates the implications of using stringent performance measurement systems to create performance pressure, motivate employee achievement, and sharpen a firm's competitiveness. It opens by describing the downsides of the ruthlessly competitive culture at... View Details
- April 2012
- Article
Broadening Focus: Spillovers, Complementarities and Specialization in the Hospital Industry
By: Jonathan R. Clark and Robert S. Huckman
The long-standing argument that focused operations outperform others stands in contrast to claims about the benefits of broader operational scope. The performance benefits of focus are typically attributed to reduced complexity, lower uncertainty, and the development... View Details
- March 2012 (Revised October 2013)
- Supplement
Gene Patents (B)
By: Richard Hamermesh and Phillip Andrews
The case updates events since the Court's ruling against Myriad Genetics on March 29, 2010 and should be used in conjunction with Gene Patents (A). On July 29, 2011, a US Appeals Court reversed the prior ruling against Myriad. On September 16, 2011, the first major... View Details
Keywords: Courts and Trials; Patents; Genetics; Judgments; Investment; Biotechnology Industry; United States
- 2012
- Working Paper
Earnings Management from the Bottom Up: An Analysis of Managerial Incentives Below the CEO
By: Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Julie Wulf
Performance-based pay is an important instrument to align the interests of managers with the interests of shareholders. However, recent evidence suggests that high-powered incentives also provide managers with incentives to manipulate the firm's reported earnings. The... View Details
- 2012
- Article
The Excess Burden of Government Indecision
By: Francisco J. Gomes, Laurence J. Kotlikoff and Luis M. Viceira
Governments are known for procrastinating when it comes to resolving painful policy problems. Whatever the political motives for waiting to decide, procrastination distorts economic decisions relative to what would arise with early policy resolution. In so doing, it... View Details