Publications

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04 Oct 2011
First Look

First Look: October 4

knowing "who we are" might depend in part on repeatedly remembering to forget "who we were not." The Enabling Role of Social Position in Diverging from the Institutional Status Quo: Evidence from the U.K. National Health View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

30 Sep 2002
Research & Ideas

Use the Psychology of Pricing To Keep Customers Returning

big bucks in the minds of most consumers. We see similar efforts by magazines that advertise their low per-issue prices or insurance companies that break the cost of their premiums down to a low, per-day cost. All these efforts are... View Details

Keywords: by Manda Mahoney

January 2001 (Revised June 2001)
Case

COFIDIS

An offspring of French catalog marketer 3 Suisses, and a popular sponsor of Tour de France, Cofidis sells consumer credit over the phone, defying conventional banking with a product policy and a communication strategy that perfectly fits the company's comparative... View Details

Keywords: Marketing Strategy; Internet and the Web; Marketing Communications; Competitive Advantage; Product; Credit; Financial Services Industry; France

November 2011
Article

Ownership Structure and Financial Constraints: Evidence from a Structural Estimation

By: Chen Lin, Yue Ma and Yuhai Xuan

This article examines the impact of the divergence between corporate insiders' control rights and cash-flow rights on firms' external finance constraints via generalized method of moments estimation of an investment Euler equation. Using a large sample of U.S.... View Details

Keywords: Ownership; Social Enterprise; Reputation; Cash Flow; Annuities; Investment; Investment Funds; Financial Reporting; Accounting Audits; Financial Services Industry; United States

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11 Dec 2012
First Look

First Look: Dec. 11

Johannesburg Stock Exchange. Purchase this case:http://hbr.org/search/413038-PDF-ENG Droga5: Launching Jay-Z's Decoded Elberse, Anita, and Kwame Owusu-KesseHarvard Business School Case 513-032 In 2010, David Droga and Andrew Essex, co-founders of View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

April 2015 (Revised December 2015)
Case

Resuscitating Monitter

By: Benjamin Edelman and Wei Sun

After a Twitter API change and policy change block his fledgling startup, solo entrepreneur Alex Holt evaluates his options. Should he double-down with a major investment in new servers, rewriting his app from scratch, and charging users for a service that he had... View Details

Keywords: Platform Strategy; Envelopment; Dependence; Social Media; Business Strategy; Vertical Integration; Information Technology; Digital Platforms; Advertising Industry; Advertising Industry; Australia

November 2022
Background Note

The Future of E-Commerce: Lessons from the Livestream Wars in China

By: Ayelet Israeli, Jeremy Yang and Billy Chan

This note explores the emerging multi-billion dollar commerce trend of livestream commerce. Livestream commerce is the sale of goods or services directly to consumers via live shows on digital platforms (such as social media or e-commerce platforms). It is a form of... View Details

November 2017
Teaching Note

Tencent

By: John R. Wells and Gabriel Ellsworth

Teaching Note for HBS No. 718-426. Tencent had undergone many transformations since it was founded in 1998 as a simple messaging service. In 2017, it was the largest online games provider in China with a wide range of game types, China’s largest social networking... View Details

Teaching Interest

Digital Marketing Strategy

By: John A. Deighton

When the tools of marketing change, strategies change too. The focus of this course is on firms trying to navigate the transition from offline to online market-making and strategy development. Our concern is primarily with corporations that have products and... View Details

December 2009 (Revised March 2025)
Case

Phreesia: The Patient Intake Company

By: Regina E. Herzlinger, Sunaina Yarlagadda and Brian L. Walker

How should the co-founders of an organization that provides patient sign-in and billing services scale their company after five years of successfully targeting small private physician practices? Phreesia had deployed a direct mail and sales force strategy that resulted... View Details

Keywords: Advertising; Social Entrepreneurship; Revenue; Health Care and Treatment; Health Industry

06 Feb 2018
First Look

First Look at New Research and Ideas: February 6, 2018

Quasi-Experiment By: Israeli, Ayelet Abstract—This paper investigates a manufacturer’s ability to influence compliance rates among its authorized online retailers by exploiting changes in the Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) policy and in... View Details

September–October 2013
Article

The Role of Organizational Scope and Governance in Strengthening Private Monitoring

By: Lamar Pierce and Michael W. Toffel

Governments and other organizations often outsource activities to achieve cost savings from market competition. Yet such benefits are often accompanied by poor quality resulting from moral hazard, which can be particularly onerous when outsourcing the monitoring and... View Details

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January 2019 (Revised March 2021)
Case

SoundCloud: Subscription Streaming?

By: Ashish Nanda, Eric Van den Steen, Andy Wu, Jeffrey Boyar and Bonnie Bennett Slater

Established in 2007, SoundCloud already boasted the second largest number of active music listeners among all streaming services and was recognized as the go-to platform for new artists by early 2014. Yet, its founders were questioning the robustness of the firm’s... View Details