Publications

31 Oct 2011
Research & Ideas

The Most Powerful Workplace Motivator

the sale right away and improve the chance of attaining club membership. In the paper, Larkin uses actual choices of hundreds of salespeople facing this decision to statistically estimate the average salesperson's "willingness to pay" for... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

15 Feb 2024
Blog Post

How I Spent My 2+2 Deferral: Carol Wright

The HBS 2+2 program is a deferred admission process for current students in their final year of study, either in college or a full-time master’s degree program. If you are admitted through 2+2, you work for two to four years in a field of your View Details

Zoe B. Cullen

Zoe Cullen graduated with a PhD from Stanford in Economics in 2016. She worked from 2016-2018 as the Chief Economist for an Asian bank on the roll out of a digital transaction platform. In 2018 she joined HBS as an Assistant Professor in the Entrepreneurial... View Details

2009
Other Unpublished Work

Choice-based Measures of Conflict in Preferences

By: Katherine Baldiga and Jerry R. Green

We propose a family of measures of difference between ordinal preference relations. The difference between two preferences is the probability that they would disagree about the optimal choice from a random available set. It is in this sense that these measures are... View Details

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Measurement and Metrics; Mathematical Methods; Conflict of Interests; Welfare

November 2009
Article

Fast or Fair? A Study of Response Times

This paper uses a modified dictator game to investigate the relationship between response times and social preferences. We find that faster subjects more often chose the option with the highest payoff for themselves. Moreover, our within-analysis reveals that, for a... View Details

Keywords: Relationships; Time Management; Social Issues; Decision Choices and Conditions; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques; Profit

2014
Working Paper

Don't Take 'No' for an Answer: An Experiment with Actual Organ Donor Registrations

By: Judd B. Kessler and Alvin E. Roth

Over 10,000 people in the U.S. die each year while waiting for an organ. Attempts to increase organ transplantation have focused on changing the registration question from an opt-in frame to an active choice frame. We analyze this change in California and show it... View Details

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Health Care and Treatment; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; Health Industry

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August 1993
Background Note

Executing Change: Seven Key Considerations

By: Nitin Nohria and Rakesh Khurana

Provides a 7S framework to complement the McKinsey 7S framework. Focuses on some of the critical choices that must be made in implementing change--Strategic Intent, Substance, Scale, Scope, Speed, Sequence, and Style. Overall, the note argues that these choices must be... View Details

Keywords: Change; Framework; Goals and Objectives; Management Style; Time Management; Strategy

July 2004
Article

Determinants of Control System Design in Divisionalized Firms

By: Margaret A. Abernethy, Jan Bouwens and Laurence van Lent

We investigate two determinants of two choices in the control system of divisionalized firms, namely decentralization and use of performance measures. The two determinants are those identified in the literature as important to control system design: (1) information... View Details

Keywords: Design; Organizational Design; Business Divisions; Management Systems; Performance Evaluation

August 2013 (Revised September 2015)
Case

Coursera

By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Hyunjin Kim

By providing free and open-access online courses at a large scale, Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) platforms seek to innovate the business models of the traditional higher education industry. In a little over a year, Coursera had grown at a rapid rate to emerge as a... View Details

Keywords: Business Models; Strategy; Competition; Business Model; Internet and the Web; Higher Education; Competitive Advantage; Education Industry

October 2017
Case

The Transformation of Microsoft

By: C. Fritz Foley, E. Scott Mayfield and F. Katelynn Boland

In early 2015, Amy Hood, CFO of Microsoft, and the rest of the senior leadership team faced a set of fundamental choices. The firm had opportunities to serve customers in ways that would be associated with higher growth but lower margin. Some of these opportunities... View Details

Keywords: Growth; Corporate Finance; Valuation; Growth Management; Communication Strategy; Transformation; Information Technology Industry; Computer Industry; United States

September 1991 (Revised January 1997)
Case

Manzana Insurance: Fruitvale Branch (Abridged)

By: Steven C. Wheelwright

Deals with performance assessment and improvement of a service operation in the insurance industry, a market that is highly sensitive to response time. Two branch offices in direct competition are described, and the impact of response time on performance is suggested.... View Details

Keywords: Business Offices; Decision Choices and Conditions; Time Management; Service Operations; Performance Evaluation; Competition; Insurance Industry

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

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June 2000
Case

Risk Management and Leasing at Nissan Motor Corporation, USA

Market pressures, accounting, and managerial incentives can result in managerial choices that have a long-term detrimental effect on the firm. View Details

Keywords: Risk Management; Value; Decision Choices and Conditions; Accounting; Auto Industry