Publications
Publications
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(3,658)
- Faculty Publications (602)
- March 2015
- Article
Signaling to Partially Informed Investors in the Newsvendor Model
By: William Schmidt, Vishal Gaur, Richard Lai and Ananth Raman
We investigate a puzzling phenomenon in which firms make investment decisions that purposefully do not maximize expected profits. Using an extension to the newsvendor model, we focus on a relatively common scenario in which the firm's investor has imperfect information... View Details
- Article
Time-driven Activity-based Costing of Multivessel Coronary Artery Bypass Grafting across National Boundaries to Identify Improvement Opportunities: Study Protocol
By: F. Erhun, B. Mistry, T. Platcheck, A. Milstein, V.G. Narayanan and R. S. Kaplan
Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery is a common treatment for coronary artery disease—a disease that affects over 10% of US adults and is a major cause of morbidity and mortality. In 2005, the mean cost for a CABG procedure among Medicare beneficiaries in the... View Details
- December 2014 (Revised November 2023)
- Case
Codecademy: Monetizing a Movement?
By: Jeffrey J. Bussgang and Lisa C. Mazzanti
Codecademy, an open-platform, online community for learning computer programming, launched in 2011. By 2014, the company had raised a total of $12.5 million in funding and was, on many fronts, an overwhelming success. However, there were still no revenues. The founders... View Details
Keywords: Entrepreneurial Management; Startup Management; Technology; Computer Programming; Coding; Online Education; Monetization; Online Communities; Marketplaces; Internet and the Web; Education; Entrepreneurship; Business Startups; Growth and Development Strategy; Technology Industry; Education Industry
- December 2014 (Revised July 2016)
- Case
HEINEKEN—Brewing a Better World
By: Forest L. Reinhardt, José Alvarez, Tonia Junker and Daniela Beyersdorfer
The Dutch company HEINEKEN, one of the leading global brewers known for its brands like Heineken, Amstel, and Desperados and for its award-winning marketing campaigns, seeks to closely integrate its long-term sustainability "Brewing a Better World" approach into its... View Details
- December 2014
- Article
The Discipline of Business Experimentation
By: Stefan Thomke and Jim Manzi
The data you already have can't tell you how customers will react to innovations. To discover if a truly novel concept will succeed, you must subject it to a rigorous experiment. In most companies, tests do not adhere to scientific and statistical principles. As a... View Details
- Article
How Not to Cut Health Care Costs
By: Robert S. Kaplan and Derek A. Haas
Health care providers in much of the world are trying to respond to the tremendous pressure to reduce costs—but evidence suggests that many of their attempts are counterproductive, raising costs and sometimes decreasing the quality of care. Using evidence from field... View Details
- 2014
- Report
An Economy Doing Half Its Job: Findings of Harvard Business School's 2013–14 Survey on U.S. Competitiveness
By: Michael E. Porter and Jan Rivkin
In 2013–14, Harvard Business School (HBS) conducted its third alumni survey on U.S. competitiveness. Our report on the findings focuses on a troubling divergence in the American economy: large and midsize firms have rallied strongly from the Great Recession, and highly... View Details
- August 2014
- Technical Note
Conjoint Analysis: A Do it Yourself Guide
By: Elie Ofek and Olivier Toubia
Conjoint Analysis has become one of the most commonly used quantitative market research methods. It has been successfully employed across a wide variety of industries to quantify consumer preferences for products and services. This technical note is intended to provide... View Details
- August 2014
- Article
What Makes Annuitization More Appealing?
By: John Beshears, James J. Choi, David Laibson, Brigitte C. Madrian and Stephen P. Zeldes
We conduct and analyze two large surveys of hypothetical annuitization choices. We find that allowing individuals to annuitize a fraction of their wealth increases annuitization relative to a situation where annuitization is an "all or nothing" decision. Very few... View Details
- 2014
- Teaching Note
Fine Harvest Restaurant Group
By: Clara X. Chen, Kenneth A. Merchant, Tatiana Sandino and Wim Van der Stede
The Fine Harvest Restaurant Group cases A and B examine a company's design of a new system to evaluate the performance (and determine the bonuses) for its restaurant managers. Fine Harvest had traditionally evaluated restaurant managers based on store margins and had... View Details
- June 2014 (Revised March 2016)
- Case
Relating to Peapod
By: Susan Fournier and Jill Avery
Explores the relationships formed between consumers and the Peapod consumer-direct grocery delivery service, as revealed through an ethnographic study of Boston-area Peapod shoppers conducted between the Summer of 1997 and the Fall of 1999. Three representative case... View Details
- June 2014
- Teaching Note
Lit Motors
By: Thomas Eisenmann
In mid-2012 Lit Motors had created both engineering and design prototypes and conducted initial customer tests on less than $750,000 of investment. Lit Motors' founder, Daniel Kim, had started the company to design and manufacture an efficient electric 2-wheeled... View Details
- June 2014
- Case
Starbucks Coffee Company: Transformation and Renewal
By: Nancy F. Koehn, Kelly McNamara, Nora N. Khan and Elizabeth Legris
Starbucks Coffee Company: Transformation and Renewal analyzes the turnaround and reconstruction of Starbucks Coffee Company from 2008 to 2014 as led by CEO and co-founder Howard Schultz. The case offers executives and students an opportunity to examine in depth how... View Details
Keywords: Howard Schultz; Starbucks; Transformation; Turnaround; Change; Decision Making; Entrepreneurship; Growth and Development; Leadership; Organizations; Problems and Challenges; Risk and Uncertainty; Strategy; Value; Consumer Products Industry; Food and Beverage Industry; Retail Industry; North and Central America; Europe; Asia; South America; Middle East; Latin America
- May 2014
- Case
Health Care Accountability: Examples in Cancer Treatment
By: Regina E. Herzlinger and Natalie Kindred
This case is designed to support a discussion of the importance of outcomes evidence in empowering the public to make better health care decisions, the desired level of transparency and accountability for health care providers, and the issues with current measuring and... View Details
Keywords: Accountability; Health Care; Cancer; Cancer Treatment; Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center; Cancer Treatment Centers Of America; Vantage Oncology; Radiology; Risk Adjustment; Treatment Outcomes; Health Care Outcomes; Prostate Cancer; Transparency; Health Care and Treatment; Risk Management; Outcome or Result; Health Industry; United States
- April 2014 (Revised July 2015)
- Case
Sanofi Pasteur: The Dengue Vaccine Dilemma
By: V. Kasturi Rangan, David E. Bloom, Vincent Dessain and Emilie Billaud
In 2012, Sanofi Pasteur was racing to develop a vaccine against dengue, a mosquito-borne disease, and was evaluating this product in a Phase IIb trial conducted with school children in Thailand. But while the candidate vaccine met the high safety expectations and a... View Details
- April 2014
- Article
The Emergence of 'Us and Them' in 80 Lines of Code: Modeling Group Genesis in Homogeneous Populations
By: Kurt Gray, David G. Rand, Eyal Ert, Kevin Lewis, Steve Hershman and Michael I. Norton
Psychological explanations of group genesis often require population heterogeneity in identity or other characteristics, whether deep (e.g., religion) or superficial (e.g., eye color). We use game-theoretical agent-based models to explore group genesis in homogeneous... View Details
Keywords: Groups and Teams
- 2014
- Article
Notes from the Search for Deep Indicators in Services
By: James L. Heskett
Much of the research in the service sector over the last four decades has concerned itself with the search for deep indicators that explain service performance. This paper provides a brief retrospective of some of this research and illustrates the directions that this... View Details
- January 2014 (Revised March 2014)
- Case
Ford Asia Pacific & Africa: The E-coating Facility Decision in Gujarat, India (A)
By: Juan Alcacer and Nancy Hua Dai
In April 2013, Ford Asia Pacific & Africa (FAPA) was examining its options for e-coating service metal parts for the Ford Customer Service Division in Sanand, Gujarat, India. Randy Creel, Director of Parts Supply & Logistics, FAPA, worked with his colleagues in the US,... View Details
- January 2014 (Revised May 2014)
- Case
Tech Mahindra and the Acquisition of Satyam Computers (A)
By: Srikant M. Datar, Anjali Raina and Namrata Arora
Set in 2008, the case details Tech Mahindra, an information technology (IT) company within the Mahindra Group, an Indian multi-industry company with a diverse stable of businesses including automotives, farm equipment, and financial services, and its decision to... View Details
- January–February 2014
- Article
Building a Game-Changing Talent Strategy
By: Douglas A. Ready, Linda A. Hill and Robert J. Thomas
When most of the world's financial services giants were stumbling and retrenching in the aftermath of the 2008 recession, the asset management firm BlackRock was busy charting a course for growth. Its revenues, profits, and stock price all performed consistently... View Details