Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(1,862)
- Faculty Publications (431)
- May 2011
- Article
Think Customers Hate Waiting? Not So Fast...
By: Ryan W. Buell and Michael I. Norton
Managers typically look for ways to reduce wait time to increase customer satisfaction. New research suggests there's a better approach: showing customers a representation of the effort, whether literal or not, being expended on their behalf while they wait. (The... View Details
- April 2011
- Article
Institutional Tax Clienteles and Payout Policy
By: Mihir Desai and Li Jin
This paper employs heterogeneity in institutional shareholder tax characteristics to identify the relation between firm payout policy and tax incentives. Analysis of a panel of firms matched with the tax characteristics of the clients of their institutional... View Details
- March 2011
- Article
Zoom In, Zoom Out
Zoom buttons on digital devices let us examine images from many viewpoints. They also provide an apt metaphor for modes of strategic thinking. Some people prefer to see things up close, others from afar. Both perspectives have virtues. But they should not be fixed... View Details
- 2016
- Working Paper
Delay as Agenda Setting
By: James J. Anton and Dennis A. Yao
We examine a dynamic decision-making process involving unrelated issues in which a decision may be endogenously delayed by the allocation of influence resources. Delay is strategically interesting when decision makers with asymmetric preferences face multiple issues... View Details
- February 2011
- Article
Dividend Taxes and International Portfolio Choice
By: Mihir Desai and Dhammika Dharmapala
This paper investigates how dividend taxes influence portfolio choices, using the response to the distinctive treatment of a subset of foreign dividends in the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act (JGTRRA) of 2003. An open-economy after-tax capital asset... View Details
- 2011
- Article
A Choice Prediction Competition for Social Preferences in Simple Extensive Form Games: An Introduction
By: Eyal Ert, Ido Erev and Alvin E. Roth
Two independent, but related, choice prediction competitions are organized that focus on behavior in simple two-person extensive form games: one focuses on predicting the choices of the first mover and the other on predicting the choices of the second mover. The... View Details
- 2011
- Article
The Consumer Psychology of Mail-in Rebates
By: John T. Gourville and Dilip Soman
Consumers who buy a product intending to use an accompanying mail-in rebate often do not redeem the rebate. To explain this behavior, we argue that consumers use an anchoring and adjustment approach to predicting the likelihood of redeeming a rebate. In keeping with... View Details
- Article
The Social Utility of Feature Creep
By: Debora V. Thompson and Michael I. Norton
Previous research shows that consumers frequently choose products with too many features that they later find difficult to use. Our research shows that this seemingly suboptimal behavior may in fact confer benefits when factoring in the social context of consumption.... View Details
- October 2010
- Article
Preferring Balanced vs. Advantageous Peace Agreements: A Study of Israeli Attitudes Towards a Two-State Solution
By: Deepak Malhotra and Jeremy Ginges
The paper extends research on fixed-pie perceptions by suggesting that disputants may prefer proposals that are perceived to be equally attractive to both parties (i.e., balanced) rather than one-sided, because balanced agreements are seen as more likely to be... View Details
- September 2010
- Article
Strategies to Fight Ad-sponsored Rivals
By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Feng Zhu
We analyze the optimal strategy of a high-quality incumbent that faces a low-quality ad-sponsored competitor. In addition to competing through adjustments of tactical variables such as price or the number of ads a product carries, we allow the incumbent to consider... View Details
Keywords: Strategy; Business Models; Tactics; Pricing; Business Model; Advertising; Competition; Quality; Price; Product Marketing
- 2010
- Working Paper
Employee Selection as a Control System
By: Dennis Campbell
Theories from the economics, management control, and organizational behavior literatures predict that when it is difficult to align incentives by contracting on output, aligning preferences via employee selection may provide a useful alternative. This study... View Details
- 2011
- Working Paper
Business Model Innovation and Competitive Imitation: The Case of Sponsor-Based Business Models
By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Feng Zhu
We study sponsor-based business model innovations where a firm monetizes its product through sponsors rather than setting prices to its customer base. We analyze strategic interactions between an innovative entrant and an incumbent where the incumbent may imitate the... View Details
- Article
Peer-to-Peer File Sharing and the Market for Digital Information Goods
By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Andres Hervas-Drane
We study competitive interaction between two alternative models of digital content distribution over the Internet: peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing and centralized client-server distribution. We present microfoundations for a stylized model of p2p file sharing where all... View Details
- 2010
- Working Paper
Trade Policy and Firm Boundaries
By: Laura Alfaro, Paola Conconi, Harald Fadinger and Andrew F. Newman
We study how trade policy affects firms' ownership structures. We embed an incomplete contracts model of vertical integration choices into a standard perfectly-competitive international trade framework. Integration decisions are driven by a trade-off between the... View Details
- 2010
- Chapter
The Financing of R&D and Innovation
By: Bronwyn H. Hall and Josh Lerner
Evidence on the “funding gap” for investment innovation is surveyed. The focus is on financial market reasons for underinvestment that exist even when externality-induced underinvestment is absent. We conclude that while small and new innovative firms experience high... View Details
- 2010
- Working Paper
Competing Complements
By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell, Barry Nalebuff and David B. Yoffie
In Cournot's model of complements, the producers of A and B are both monopolists. This paper extends Cournot's model to allow for competition between complements on one side of the market. Consider two complements, A and B, where the A + B bundle is valuable only when... View Details
- 2001
- Working Paper
Strategies to Fight Ad-sponsored Rivals
By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Feng Zhu
We analyze the optimal strategy of a high-quality incumbent that faces a low-quality ad-sponsored competitor. In addition to competing through adjustments of tactical variables such as price or the number of ads a product carries, we allow the incumbent to consider... View Details
- March 2010
- Article
Matching with Preferences over Colleagues Solves Classical Matching
In this note, we demonstrate that the problem of "many-to-one matching with (strict) preferences over colleagues" is actually more difficult than the classical many-to-one matching problem, "matching without preferences over colleagues." We give an explicit reduction... View Details
- 2010
- Book
Wealth and Justice: The Morality of Democratic Capitalism
By: Peter Wehner and Arthur C. Brooks
Popular opinion would have us believe that America's free market system is driven by greed and materialism, resulting in gross inequalities of wealth, destruction of the environment, and other social ills. Even proponents of capitalism often refer to the free market as... View Details
- Article
The Counterfeit Self: The Deceptive Costs of Faking It
By: Francesca Gino, Michael I. Norton and Dan Ariely
Although people buy counterfeit products to signal positive traits, we show that wearing counterfeit products makes individuals feel less authentic and increases their likelihood of both behaving dishonestly and judging others as unethical. In four experiments,... View Details