Publications

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21 May 2007
Research & Ideas

Fixing the Marketing-CEO Disconnect

investors' expectations is a ticking time bomb. Marketing is the way in which firms can close this gap because it encompasses all the activities View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

2021
Chapter

Business Continuity Insurance in the Next Disaster

By: Samuel Gregory Hanson, Adi Sunderam and Eric Zwick

This article draws lessons from the business support policies pursued in the COVID-19 pandemic to guide policy design for the next disaster. We contrast the performance of the Paycheck Protection Program to the Main Street Lending Program to illustrate how design... View Details

Keywords: COVID-19 Pandemic; Policy; Economic Slowdown and Stagnation; Financing and Loans; United States

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2018
Chapter

The Orphan Drug Act at 35: Observations and an Outlook for the Twenty-First Century

By: Nicholas Bagley, Benjamin Berger, Amitabh Chandra, Craig Garthwaite and Ariel Dora Stern

On the 35th anniversary of the adoption of the Orphan Drug Act (ODA), we describe the enormous changes in the markets for therapies for rare diseases that have emerged over recent decades. The most prominent example is the fact that the profit-maximizing price of new... View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Laws and Statutes; Research and Development; Investment; Markets; Monopoly

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2020
Book

The Ends Game: How Smart Companies Stop Selling Products and Start Delivering Value

By: Marco Bertini and Oded Koenigsberg

How some firms are rewriting the rules of commerce by pursuing “ends”—actual outcomes—rather than selling “means”—their products and services. View Details

Keywords: Commerce; Business Model; Design; Customer Relationship Management; Strategy

November 2015 (Revised October 2017)
Case

Dollar General Bids for Family Dollar

By: Jonas Heese, Paula A. Price, Suraj Srinivasan and David Lane

In spring 2015, Dollar General's CEO Rick Dreiling was looking ahead to retiring at year's end but worried about ensuring continued growth for the company he had built since 2008 into a market leader in the U.S. discount retail world. Dollar General operated over... View Details

Keywords: Dollar General; Family Dollar; Dollar Tree; Antitrust; Board Of Directors; Activist Investors; Federal Trade Commission; Acquisition; Valuation; Corporate Strategy; Retail Industry; United States

November 2003 (Revised September 2021)
Case

Ivar Kreuger and the Swedish Match Empire

By: Geoffrey Jones and Ingrid Vargas

Taught in Evolution of Global Business. Globalization and corporate fraud are the central themes of this case on the international growth of Swedish Match in the interwar years. Between 1913 and 1932, Ivar Kreuger, known as the "Swedish Match King," built a small,... View Details

Keywords: History; International Finance; Globalized Firms and Management; Crime and Corruption; Ethics; Monopoly; Business and Government Relations; Sweden

01 Oct 2000
News

After the Revolution: Putting the Internet in Perspective

hours a day, has a development team instead of a staff, and has no checkout lines. Bricks-and-mortar firms such as Walgreens, on the other hand, must build physical stores and... View Details

Keywords: Margie Kelley

March 2015
Case

MELF and Business Culture in the Twin Cities (A)

By: Clayton S. Rose and David Lane

Leaders of the many Fortune 500 firms headquartered in Minneapolis-St. Paul have a long history of engaging collectively, and with educational, political and social leaders, to deal with important community issues. Focusing on the participation of leading CEOs in the... View Details

Keywords: Education; Business and Community Relations; Management Teams; Minneapolis; Saint Paul

June 2008
Article

The Multiunit Enterprise

By: David A. Garvin and Lynne C. Levesque

A multiunit enterprise is a geographically dispersed organization built from standard units (stores, restaurants, or branches) that are aggregated into larger geographic groupings (districts, regions, and divisions). Although this organizational structure has become... View Details

Keywords: Globalized Firms and Management; Organizational Structure; Global Range; Research; Business Ventures; Problems and Challenges; Business or Company Management; Business Headquarters; Organizational Design; Talent and Talent Management; Goals and Objectives

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The report commends the broad-based governmental actions initially taken to support the economy, citizens, and the corporate sector during the Covid pandemic. However, structural changes in our economies due to the pandemic, and growing corporate... View Details

January 2025
Case

A Tiger in the Tank: Exxon Sues Investors

By: Clayton S. Rose, Sarah Sasso and James Weber

In June 2024, investors were trying to make sense of ExxonMobil’s (Exxon) lawsuit against two impact investors, Arjuna Capital (Arjuna) and Follow This, that had just been dismissed by the U.S. District Court of Northern Texas. Exxon’s suit challenged the rights of two... View Details

April 2025 (Revised May 2025)
Background Note

Customer Acquisition and the Cash Flow Trap

By: E. Ofek, Barak Libai and Eitan Muller

Startups as well as existing firms recognize the need to invest in order to acquire customers for their new ventures. And as each customer is expected at some point to have generated sufficient gross margins to cover their CAC, management expects that, soon enough, the... View Details

Keywords: Business Model; Customers; Forecasting and Prediction; Cash Flow; Business or Company Management

28 Feb 2020
News

The Capital That Ate Wellness Is Going to Eat Your Mushrooms

2017
Working Paper

Knowledge Flows within Multinationals—Estimating Relative Influence of Headquarters and Host Context Using a Gravity Model

By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Mike Horia Teodorescu and Tarun Khanna

From the perspective of a multinational subsidiary, we employ the classic gravity equation in economics to model and compare knowledge flows to the subsidiary from the MNC headquarters and from the host country context. We also generalize traditional economics gravity... View Details

Keywords: Multinationals; Knowledge Flows; Cosine Similarity; Gravity Model; Multinational Firms and Management; Knowledge Dissemination; Business Headquarters; Immigration

February 2007
Case

Update: The Music Industry in 2006

By: John R. Wells and Elizabeth Raabe

The global recorded music industry was undergoing a major transition in 2006. Sales had been declining for a decade, and consumers were buying music in new formats and through different distribution channels. CD sales still accounted for the majority of revenues, but... View Details

Keywords: History; Arts; Music Entertainment; Intellectual Property; Market Timing; Performance Evaluation; Trends; Music Industry