Publications

Educators

Innovating in Healthcare: Creating Breakthrough Services, Products, and Business Models

Innovating in Healthcare offers effective approaches for designing, reworking, and implementing innovative healthcare services, products, and business models. It will help anyone working in healthcare service or product development, from hospitals to... View Details

Network Competition and Exclusive Contracts: Evidence from News Agencies

This paper studies exclusive vertical contracts in network industries and asks whether exclusive arrangements intended to be anti-competitive in one market segment can be pro-competitive in another. The setting is news agencies in the early 20th-century United States,... View Details

How Do Drug Copayment Coupons Affect Branded Drug Prices and Quantities Purchased?

Drug copayment coupons to reduce patient cost-sharing have become nearly ubiquitous for high-priced brand-name prescription drugs. Medicare bans such coupons on the grounds that they are kickbacks that induce utilization, but they are commonly used by... View Details

Research Summary

The Supply Chain Economy: A New Industry Categorization for Understanding Innovation in Services

An active debate has centered on the importance of manufacturing for driving innovation in the U.S. economy. This paper offers an alternative framework that focuses on the role of suppliers of goods and services (the “supply chain economy”) in national performance. We... View Details

Article

Integrating: A Managerial Practice that Enables Implementation in Fragmented Health Care Environments

By: Michaela J. Kerrissey, Patricia Satterstrom, Nicholas Leydon, Gordon Schiff and Sara J. Singer

How some organizations improve while others remain stagnant is a key question in health care research. This inductive qualitative study examines primary care clinics implementing improvement efforts in order to identify mechanisms that enable implementation despite... View Details

Keywords: Organization And Management Theory; Quality Improvement; Health Care and Treatment; Performance Improvement; Integration; Cooperation

Find at Harvard

2013
Case

The COFCO Group

By: F. Warren McFarlan, Zheng Xiaoming and Ziqian Zhao

COFCO was China's sole legitimate window for agricultural foreign trade before 1987. The reform of China's foreign trade system beginning in 1987 cost COFCO its monopoly position. Subsequently, the SOE giant capitalized on its foreign trade expertise to strategically... View Details

Keywords: China; Food; China

The New Rules for Bringing Innovations to Market, Harvard Business Review, March 2004

It's tough to get consumers to adopt innovations--and it's getting tougher all the time. That's because more and more markets are taking on the characteristics of networks. The interconnections among today's companies are so plentiful that often a... View Details

2025
Working Paper

Tax Elasticities of Top Donors: Evidence from Family Foundations

By: Simon Essig Aberg

High net-worth donors who give through a family foundation or donor-advised fund constitute the fastest growing segment of charitable giving in the United States. Using a novel database of foundation tax filings, I document facts about top donors, estimate how they... View Details

Keywords: Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; Taxation; Motivation and Incentives

SSRN

2023
Working Paper

The Market for Sharing Interest Rate Risk: Quantities and Asset Prices

By: Ishita Sen, Umang Khetan, Jane Li and Ioana Neamtu

We study the extent of interest rate risk sharing across the financial system using granular positions and transactions data in interest rate swaps. We show that pension and insurance (PF&I) sector emerges as a natural counterparty to banks and corporations: overall,... View Details

Keywords: Interest Rates; Investment Funds; Banks and Banking; Insurance; Investment Banking; Risk and Uncertainty

SSRN

June 2020
Teaching Note

Armarium: Luxury Fashion Brands for Rent

By: Jill Avery and David Fubini

Armarium, a two-sided digital platform that offered consumers the opportunity to rent the most coveted, current season high fashion clothing and accessories from the top global luxury brands, had emerged from its first sales season with two distinct customer segments:... View Details

Keywords: Luxury Brand; Fashion; Sharing Economy; Two-sided Marketplace; Target Market; Customer Selection; Marketing; Brands and Branding; Luxury; Two-Sided Platforms; Business Model; Growth and Development Strategy; Customer Value and Value Chain; Fashion Industry; Consumer Products Industry; United States; North America

June 2016
Teaching Note

HubSpot: Lower Churn through Greater CHI

By: Jill Avery, Asis Martinez Jerez and Thomas Steenburgh

HubSpot, a web marketing startup selling inbound marketing software to small- and medium-sized businesses, is under pressure from its venture capital partners to rapidly acquire new customers and to maintain a low level of customer churn. The B2B SaaS company is in the... View Details

Keywords: CRM; Customer Acquisition; Customer Retention; Churn Management; SaaS Business Models; Customer Lifetime Value; Venture Capital; Startup; Software; Monitoring And Control; Marketing; Customer Relationship Management; Marketing Strategy; Accounting; Technology Industry; United States

05 Sep 2017
News

Narrow Networks On The Health Insurance Marketplaces: Prevalence, Pricing, And The Cost Of Network Breadth

April 2009
Article

How to Market in a Downturn

By: John A. Quelch and Katherine Jocz

This article includes a one-page preview that quickly summarizes the key ideas and provides an overview of how the concepts work in practice along with suggestions for further reading. Because no two recessions are exactly alike, marketers find themselves in poorly... View Details

Keywords: Customers; Economic Slowdown and Stagnation; Spending; Marketing Strategy; Consumer Behavior; Segmentation

31 Mar 2009
First Look

First Look: March 31, 2009

Working PapersCorporate Social Entrepreneurship Authors:James Austin and Ezequiel Reficco Abstract Corporate Social Entrepreneurship (CSE) is a process aimed at enabling business to develop more advanced and powerful forms of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR).... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

2024
Working Paper

Incrementality Representation Learning: Synergizing Past Experiments for Intervention Personalization

By: Ta-Wei Huang, Eva Ascarza and Ayelet Israeli

This paper introduces Incrementality Representation Learning (IRL), a novel multitask representation learning framework that predicts heterogeneous causal effects of marketing interventions. By leveraging past experiments, IRL efficiently designs and targets... View Details

Keywords: Heterogeneous Treatment Effect; Multi-task Learning; Representation Learning; Personalization; Promotion; Deep Learning; Field Experiments; Customer Focus and Relationships; Customization and Personalization

SSRN

December 2022
Article

When and How Should Firms Differentiate? Quality and Advertising Decisions in a Duopoly

By: Dominique Olié Lauga, Elie Ofek and Zsolt Katona

A prominent hallmark of competitive interaction is the desire to differentiate from rivals. In this article, the authors examine under what conditions firms will differentiate through product quality versus advertising intensity. Firms select quality in a first stage,... View Details

Keywords: Competition; Advertising; Product Positioning

Find at Harvard

24 Jul 2023
Research & Ideas

Part-Time Employees Want More Hours. Can Companies Tap This ‘Hidden’ Talent Pool?

jobs that balance with personal circumstances. 29 percent said that they work part-time due to caregiving responsibilities. Spotlight on women and caregivers Caregivers are the largest segment of these untapped workers, comprising a third... View Details

Keywords: by Kara Baskin

March 2025 (Revised April 2025)
Case

Perplexity: Redefining Search

By: Suraj Srinivasan, Michelle Hu, Sriraghav Srinivasan and Radhika Kak

By early 2025, Perplexity had rapidly evolved from a modest startup into a popular "answer engine" valued at $9 billion. The company had boldly positioned itself as the disruptor to Google aiming to redefine search for the AI age. Through novel AI... View Details

Keywords: AI and Machine Learning; Venture Capital; Innovation Leadership; Technological Innovation; Internet and the Web; Business Startups; Competitive Strategy; Business Model; Technology Industry; United States

Educators