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ethics
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- May 2020 (Revised December 2022)
- Case
Soofa: Displaying the Right Path?
By: Jeffrey J. Bussgang, Amy Klopfenstein and Amram Migdal
In November 2019, Sandra Richter, co-founder and CEO of Soofa, a network of advertising-supported digital bulletin boards, must decide between two different fundraising and expansion plans for her company. One plan entails raising $15 million in a Series A round and... View Details
Keywords: Business Ventures; Business Model; Business Plan; Business Startups; Entrepreneurship; Decision Making; Decisions; Ethics; Geography; Geopolitical Units; Finance; Investment; Markets; Market Entry and Exit; Demand and Consumers; Network Effects; Media; Society; Urban Development; Sustainable Cities; Information Technology; Information Infrastructure; Digital Platforms; Strategy; Business Strategy; Expansion; Relationships; Partners and Partnerships; Capital; Venture Capital; Advertising Industry; Technology Industry; Media and Broadcasting Industry; North and Central America; United States; Massachusetts; Cambridge
- May 2020
- Case
Big Boom Beverages: Fight or Flight?
By: Stephen A. Greyser and William Ellet
Four college friends market a beverage that combines ingredients like those in a drink they consumed in college bars. It includes a caffeinated energy drink, malt liquor, and a soft drink flavoring. They launch the business, Big Boom Beverages (BBB), with their own... View Details
- May 2020
- Teaching Note
Big Boom Beverages: Fight or Flight? (Brief Case)
By: Stephen A. Greyser and William Ellet
Teaching Note for HBS Brief Case No. 920-557. The case addresses analysis and decisions related to the entrepreneurial life of a distinctive energy beverage, including its niche market launch, early problems, reformulation, social media impact, market success, and... View Details
- April 29, 2020
- Article
How Should We Allocate Scarce Medical Resources?
By: Max Bazerman, Regan Bernhard, Joshua D. Greene, Karen Huang and Netta Barak-Corren
Who should get a ventilator if there aren’t enough to go around? Research on decision making leads to three concrete guidelines that policy-makers and physicians can use to make fair choices when allocating scarce, life-saving resources. The key to making fair and... View Details
Keywords: COVID-19; Health Pandemics; Resource Allocation; Decision Making; Policy; Fairness; Ethics
- 2020
- Working Paper
Spreading the Health: Americans' Estimated and Ideal Distributions of Death and Health(care)
By: Sorapop Kiatpongsan and Michael I. Norton
The 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act intensified debates over the role of government in the distribution of healthcare. A nationally-representative sample of Americans reported their estimated and ideal distributions of healthcare (unmet need for... View Details
- 2021
- Working Paper
Issue Salience and Political Stereotypes
By: Pedro Bordalo, Marco Tabellini and David Yang
U.S. voters exaggerate the differences in attitudes held by Republicans and Democrats on a range of socioeconomic and political issues, and higher perceived polarization is associated with greater political engagement and affective polarization. In this paper, we... View Details
- April 2020 (Revised April 2023)
- Supplement
TransDigm in 2017: The Beginning of the End or the End of the Beginning?
By: Benjamin C. Esty and Daniel Fisher
TransDigm was a highly acquisitive company that manufactured a wide range of highly engineered aerospace parts for both military and commercial customers. Over the ten years ending in 2016, its stock price had increase ten times, and both EBITDA and revenues had grown... View Details
- April 2020 (Revised April 2023)
- Case
TransDigm in 2017: The Beginning of the End or the End of the Beginning?
By: Benjamin C. Esty and Daniel Fisher
TransDigm was a highly acquisitive company that manufactured a wide range of highly engineered aerospace parts for both military and commercial customers. Over the ten years ending in 2016, its stock price had increased ten times, and both EBITDA and revenues had grown... View Details
Keywords: Value Capturing; Pricing Strategy; Supplier Power; Buyer Power; Porter's Five Forces; Bargaining Power; Aerospace; Acquisition Strategy; Value Drivers; Ethical Behavior; Regulation; Growth Strategy; Business Ethics; Defense; Procurement; Sustainability; Value-Based Business Strategy; Acquisition; Ethics; Private Equity; Financial Strategy; Growth Management; Performance Evaluation; Business Strategy; Competitive Strategy; Horizontal Integration; Value Creation; Competitive Advantage; Monopoly; Aerospace Industry; Air Transportation Industry; United States
- 2020
- Book
Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire
Free market capitalism is one of humanity’s greatest inventions and the greatest source of prosperity the world has ever seen. But this success has been costly. Capitalism is on the verge of destroying the planet and destabilizing society as wealth rushes to the top.... View Details
- Article
Signing at the Beginning vs at the End Does Not Decrease Dishonesty
By: Ariella S. Kristal, A.V. Whillans, Max Bazerman, Francesca Gino, Lisa Shu, Nina Mazar and Dan Ariely
Honest reporting is essential for society to function well. However, people frequently lie when asked to provide information, such as misrepresenting their income to save money on taxes. A landmark finding published in PNAS (Shu, Mazar, Gino, Ariely, and Bazerman,... View Details
- March 2020 (Revised May 2021)
- Case
Employee Activism
By: Ethan Rouen and Akari Furukawa
Liz O’Sullivan, an employee at a fast-growing technology company called Clarifi, had a moral dilemma: She disagreed with Clarifi’s decision to sell its image-recognition technology to the U.S. Department of Defense for possible use in weaponized drones. This case... View Details
- 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 11, 2020
- Editorial
A Bolder Vision for Business Schools
By: P. Tufano
Business schools teach to a model that dates back to the 1950s. Given the growing demands on business to take a lead in confronting societal challenges, business schools need to update how they train business leaders and how they compete, argues Oxford’s Saïd School... View Details
- March 2020 (Revised August 2020)
- Case
Culture at Google
By: Nien-hê Hsieh, Amy Klopfenstein and Sarah Mehta
Beginning in 2017, technology (tech) company Google faced a series of employee-relations issues that threatened its unique culture of innovation and open communication. Issues included protests surrounding Google’s contracts with the U.S. government, restrictions of... View Details
Keywords: Human Resources; Employee Relationship Management; Recruitment; Retention; Resignation and Termination; Labor; Working Conditions; Employment; Labor Unions; Wages; Law; Lawsuits and Litigation; Rights; Ethics; Values and Beliefs; Fairness; Organizations; Organizational Culture; Mission and Purpose; Social Psychology; Attitudes; Behavior; Conflict Management; Trust; Motivation and Incentives; Prejudice and Bias; Power and Influence; Information Technology; Internet and the Web; Information Infrastructure; Society; Social Issues; Culture; Civil Society or Community; Demographics; Diversity; Ethnicity; Gender; Race; Technology Industry; North and Central America; United States; California
- January–March 2020
- Article
Inaction and Decision Making in Moral Conflicts
By: Netta Barak-Corren and Max Bazerman
People regularly face conflicts in which obeying one moral requirement means transgressing another. Moral conflicts require difficult decisions: a person believes she should take both actions, but doing both is impossible. In this paper, we examine a common form of... View Details
- February 2020 (Revised June 2021)
- Case
CRISPR and the Ethics of Germline Editing
By: Amitabh Chandra, Spencer Lee-Rey and Douglas Melton
- February 2020
- Article
Being 'Good' or 'Good Enough': Prosocial Risk and the Structure of Moral Self-regard
By: Julian Zlatev, Daniella M. Kupor, Kristin Laurin and Dale T. Miller
The motivation to feel moral powerfully guides people’s prosocial behavior. We propose that people’s efforts to preserve their moral self-regard conform to a moral threshold model. This model predicts that people are primarily concerned with whether their... View Details
- February 2020
- Article
Effects of a Tournament Incentive Plan Incorporating Managerial Discretion in a Geographically Dispersed Organization
By: Carolyn Deller and Tatiana Sandino
Using retail chain data, we study the effects of a tournament incentive plan based primarily on objective performance, but incorporating managerial discretion in the selection of winners. In principle, such plans could motivate employees to perform both at a high... View Details
- January 2020 (Revised December 2024)
- Case
Governing PG&E
By: Lynn S. Paine and Will Hurwitz
The five commissioners of the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) listened intently at a public forum in April 2019 as PG&E Corporation’s out-going chairman Richard Kelly described the company’s proposed new board. PG&E, which provided electricity and natural... View Details
Keywords: Bankruptcy; Board Of Directors; Board Dynamics; Business Ethics; Business Model Innovation; Corporate Boards; Energy Efficiency; Environmental And Social Sustainability; Government And Business; Hedge Funds; Institutional Investors; Legal Aspects Of Business; Regulated Monopolies; Regulation; Shareholders; Stakeholder Management; Strategy And Execution; Utilities; Insolvency and Bankruptcy; Governing and Advisory Boards; Ethics; Capital Structure; Climate Change; Corporate Accountability; Corporate Governance; Environmental Sustainability; Executive Compensation; Leadership; Management; Safety; Business and Government Relations; Energy Industry; Utilities Industry; California; United States
- January 2020 (Revised April 2020)
- Case
Fossil Fuel Divestment
By: Michael W. Toffel and Sarah Gulick
The president of Harvard University is facing growing pressure from students, alumni, and other climate change activists that are urging the university to divest its multi-billion dollar endowment from fossil fuel companies. The case summarizes the arguments for and... View Details