Publications
Publications
Show Results For
- All HBS Web
(2,506)
- Faculty Publications (564)
- September 2016 (Revised October 2018)
- Case
LabCDMX: Experiment 50
By: Mitchell Weiss and Maria Fernanda Miguel
There were probably 30,000 public buses, minibuses, and vans in Mexico City. Though, in 2015, no one knew for certain since no comprehensive schedule existed. This was why el Laboratorio para la Ciudad (or LabCDMX) had spawned an effort to generate a map of the... View Details
- Summer 2016
- Article
Open Content, Linus' Law, and Neutral Point of View
By: Shane Greenstein and Feng Zhu
The diffusion of the Internet and digital technologies has enabled many organizations to use the open-content production model to produce and disseminate knowledge. While several prior studies have shown that the open-content production model can lead to high-quality... View Details
- August 2016
- Article
Cooperation Can Emerge in Prisoner’s Dilemma from a Multi-species Predator Prey Replicator Dynamic
By: Elisabeth Paulson and Christopher Griffin
In this paper we study a generalized variation of the replicator dynamic that involves several species and sub-species that may interact. We show how this dynamic comes about from a specific finite-population model, but also show that one must take into consideration... View Details
- June 2016 (Revised April 2018)
- Case
Boys & Girls Clubs of America: Driving Impact
By: V. Kasturi Rangan and Lisa C. Cox
With $1.8 billion in 2015 revenues, Boys & Girls Club of America had evolved over its 155-year-old history to occupy the lead position in the Youth Development space in the United States. Its new CEO Jim Clark had initiated yet another change process in 2015 to ensure... View Details
- June 2016
- Case
Big Spaceship: The Evolving Agency
By: Boris Groysberg and Matthew G. Preble
This case discusses the evolution of Big Spaceship, an advertising and marketing agency, from a product-focused business to a relationship-oriented one as clients seek deeper and more meaningful long-term partnerships. The 15-year-old company had already evolved... View Details
- June 2016
- Article
Social and Spatial Clustering of People at Humanity's Largest Gathering
By: Ian Barnett, Tarun Khanna and Jukka-Pekka Onnela
Macroscopic behavior of scientific and societal systems results from the aggregation of microscopic behaviors of their constituent elements, but connecting the macroscopic with the microscopic in human behavior has traditionally been difficult. Manifestations of... View Details
- Article
Physical and Situational Inequality on Airplanes Predict Air Rage
By: K. A. DeCelles and Michael I. Norton
We posit that the modern airplane is a social microcosm of class-based society, and that the increasing incidence of “air rage” can be understood through the lens of inequality. Research on inequality typically examines the effects of relatively fixed, macrostructural... View Details
- May 2016
- Article
When Performance Trumps Gender Bias: Joint Versus Separate Evaluation
By: Iris Bohnet, Alexandra van Geen and Max Bazerman
We examine a new intervention to overcome gender biases in hiring, promotion, and job assignments: an "evaluation nudge," in which people are evaluated jointly rather than separately regarding their future performance. Evaluators are more likely to focus on individual... View Details
- March 2016 (Revised September 2021)
- Case
South Africa: A Fractured Rainbow?
By: Richard H.K. Vietor and Haviland Sheldahl-Thomason
Twenty years after the end of Apartheid, South Africa's democracy persists, albeit with problems. A tripartite coalition — the African National Congress, the labor unions, and the Communist Party — still controls the political system but with diminishing economic... View Details
- March 2016 (Revised April 2019)
- Technical Note
ESG Metrics: Reshaping Capitalism?
By: George Serafeim
In the past twenty-five years, the world had seen an exponential growth in the number of companies reporting environmental, social and governance (ESG) data. Investor interest in ESG data also grew rapidly. A growing belief that increasing levels of social inequality... View Details
Keywords: Capitalism; Sustainability; Accountability; Corporate Social Responsibility; Responsibilities To Society; Environment; Social Impact Investment; ESG; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Environmental Sustainability; Measurement and Metrics; Integrated Corporate Reporting; Corporate Accountability; Accounting; Economic Systems
- 2016
- Working Paper
Popular Acceptance of Inequality Due to Innate Brute Luck and Support for Classical Benefit-Based Taxation
U.S. survey respondents' views on distributive justice are shown to differ in two specific, related ways from what is conventionally assumed in modern optimal tax research. A large share of respondents, and in some cases a large majority, resist the full equalization... View Details
- February 2016
- Teaching Note
Advanced Leadership Pathways: General Gale Pollock and Services for the Vision Impaired
By: Rosabeth M. Kanter, Tessa Natanay Hamilton and Ai-Ling Jamila Malone
Following a successful military career as an Army Nurse, achieving rank as Major General, becoming the first female Acting Surgeon General of the Army, and the 22nd Chief of the Army Nurse Corps, Pollock developed a vested interest in improving the lives of the... View Details
Keywords: Health
- 2016
- Teaching Note
Advanced Leadership Pathways: General Gale Pollock and Services for the Vision Impaired
By: Rosabeth M. Kanter, Tessa Natanay Hamilton and Ai-Ling Jamila Malone
Teaching note for case 314029. Following a successful military career as an Army Nurse, achieving rank as Major General, becoming the first female Acting Surgeon General of the Army, and the 22nd Chief of the Army Nurse Corps, Pollock developed a vested interest in... View Details
- February 2016
- Article
Unearned Status Gain: Evidence from a Global Language Mandate
By: Tsedal Neeley and Tracy Dumas
Theories of status rarely address unearned status gain—an unexpected and unsolicited increase in relative standing, prestige, or worth, attained not through individual effort or achievement, but from a shift in organizationally valued characteristics. We build theory... View Details
- January 2016
- Case
COFCO
By: David E. Bell and Natalie Kindred
In 2015, COFCO, China's state-owned agribusiness giant, was working to protect China's food security (a key national security priority) by extending its control of the global food system through overseas acquisitions. At the same time, COFCO sought to grow its market... View Details
Keywords: China; Consumer Products; Commodities; Commodity Trading; Grain Trade; Globalization; Internationalization; Mergers And Acquisitions; Foreign Acquisitions; COFCO; Frank Ning; Gaoning; Nidera; Noble; Competition; Branded Products; Food; Markets; Marketing; Business and Government Relations; Agribusiness; Animal-Based Agribusiness; Plant-Based Agribusiness; Policy; Trade; Goods and Commodities; Food and Beverage Industry; China
- December 2015
- Background Note
Incentive Systems
By: Brian J. Hall
This note serves as a supplement to any course on incentive design within organizations. The note focuses on the principal difficulties in designing incentive systems, including the tradeoff between objective and subjective performance metrics, how to design incentive... View Details
- December 2015
- Article
Introduction: New Perspectives on Corporate Capital Structure
By: Viral Acharya, Heitor Almeida and Malcolm Baker
The National Bureau of Economic Research held a symposium titled "New Perspectives on Corporate Capital Structures" on April 5–6, 2013 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In its call for the submission of theoretical and empirical papers for the symposium, the NBER noted that... View Details
- 2015
- Case
Advanced Leadership Pathways: Torsten Thiele and the Global Ocean Trust
By: Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Brian Hoffstein
Following a successful career in finance, Torsten Thiele devoted himself full-time to the challenging cause of ocean conservation and stewardship. In August 2015, Thiele had already come a long way in spearheading initiatives towards the protection of the ocean: from... View Details
- November 2015
- Article
Modularity and Intellectual Property Protection
By: Carliss Y. Baldwin and Joachim Henkel
Modularity is a means of partitioning technical knowledge about a product or process. When state-sanctioned intellectual property (IP) rights are ineffective or costly to enforce, modularity can be used to hide information and thus protect IP. We investigate the impact... View Details
- 2019
- Working Paper
Self-Interest: The Economist's Straitjacket
By: Robert Simons
This paper examines contemporary economic theories that focus on the design and management of business organizations. In the first part of the paper, a taxonomy is presented that describes the different types of economists interested in this subject—market economists,... View Details
Keywords: Self-interest; Economist; Moral Philosophers; Regulation; Capture; Organization Design; Economy Theory; Organization Theory; Management Theory; Commitment; Controls; Governance; Customers; Conflict of Interests; Business or Company Management; Competition; Organizational Design; Business Education; Agency Theory; Economics; Theory; Boundaries