Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(1,718)
- Faculty Publications (482)
- September 2008 (Revised June 2011)
- Case
Examining the Adoption of Drug-Eluting Stents
By: Elie Ofek
Marketers are often tasked with exploring the factors that impact the long-run adoption of a new product or technology. The new product under consideration here is the drug-eluting stent: a device which props open a clogged artery to the heart and then releases... View Details
- 2008
- Book
Marketing Metaphoria: What Deep Metaphors Reveal About the Minds of Consumers
By: Gerald Zaltman and Lindsay Zaltman
Why do advertising campaigns and new products often fail? Why do consumers feel that companies don't understand their needs? Because marketers themselves don't think deeply about consumers' innermost thoughts and feelings. Marketing Metaphoria is a... View Details
- April 2008 (Revised March 2014)
- Case
Flying J (A)
By: Rohit Deshpande and Lauren Barley
The largest retailer of diesel fuel in the U.S., Flying J, is rethinking its growth strategy as the economy goes into a recession. Its major customer base, owner-operated truck drivers, are facing increasing costs of doing business. Yet Flying J is considering whether... View Details
- April 2008
- Case
TerraCog Global Positioning Systems: Conflict and Communication on Project Aerial
By: Michael Beer and Sunru Yong
TerraCog, a successful privately held high-tech firm that develops GPS (global positioning system) and similar products for consumer markets, has recently been caught off-guard by a competitor's new product that makes novel use of satellite imagery. When TerraCog... View Details
Keywords: Organizational Behavior; Meetings; Decision Making; Group Dynamics; Human Resource Management; Conflict; Information Technology; Leadership; Conflict Management; Competition; Groups and Teams; Organizational Culture; Human Resources; Communication; Decision Choices and Conditions; Crisis Management; Technology Industry
- 2008
- Working Paper
Where Does It Go? Spending by the Financially Constrained
By: Shawn A. Cole, John Thompson and Peter Tufano
In this paper, we analyze the spending decisions of over 1.5 million Americans who vary in their degree of revealed credit constraints. Specifically, we analyze how these Americans spend their income tax refunds, using transaction-level data from a stored-value card... View Details
- 2008
- Working Paper
Consumer Demand for Prize-Linked Savings: A Preliminary Analysis
By: P. Tufano, Nick Maynard and Jan-Emmanuel De Neve
This paper reports on a small-scale survey of the potential American demand for prize-linked savings accounts, an account that awards prizes as part of the saving product's return. In October 2006, Centra Credit Union launched a prize-linked savings pilot. As part of... View Details
- June 2008
- Article
How Are Preferences Revealed?
By: John Beshears, James J. Choi, David Laibson and Brigitte C. Madrian
Revealed preferences are tastes that rationalize an economic agent's observed actions. Normative preferences represent the agent's actual interests. It sometimes makes sense to assume that revealed preferences are identical to normative preferences. But there are many... View Details
- 2008
- Simulation
Pricing Simulation: Universal Car Rental
This web-based simulation presents an engaging context in which students develop their knowledge of pricing by managing a rental car operation (Universal) in Florida and improve regional performance by developing a pricing strategy. The simulation involves three... View Details
Keywords: Competition; Consumer Behavior; Price; Profit; Renting or Rental; Auto Industry; Service Industry; Miami; Orlando; Tampa
- November 2007
- Article
A Model of Consumer Learning for Service Quality and Usage
By: Raghuram Iyengar, Asim Ansari and Sunil Gupta
In many services, e.g., the wireless service industry, consumers choose a service plan based on their expected consumption. In such situations, consumers experience two forms of uncertainty. First, consumers may be uncertain about the quality of their service provider... View Details
- 2007
- Working Paper
The 'Fees → Savings' Link, or Purchasing Fifty Pounds of Pasta
By: Michael I. Norton and Leonard Lee
Many consumers have had the experience of entering discount membership clubs to make a few purchases, only to leave with enough pasta to outlast a nuclear winter. We suggest that the presence of membership fees can lead consumers to infer a "fees → savings" link,... View Details
- 2007
- Working Paper
Digital Interactivity: Unanticipated Consequences for Markets, Marketing, and Consumers
By: John A. Deighton and Leora Kornfeld
The digital interactive transformation in marketing is not unfolding, as many thought it would, on the model of direct marketing. That model anticipated that digital media using rich profiling data would intrude marketing messaging more deeply and more precisely into... View Details
- 2007
- Working Paper
Mental Accounting and Small Windfalls: Evidence from an Online Grocer
By: Katherine L. Milkman, John Beshears, Todd Rogers and Max H. Bazerman
We study the effect of small windfalls on consumer spending decisions by examining the purchasing behavior of a sample of online grocery shoppers over the course of a year. We compare the purchases customers make when redeeming a $10-off coupon they received from their... View Details
- August 2007 (Revised March 2008)
- Case
Fiyta - The Case of a Chinese Watch Company
By: Regina M. Abrami, William C. Kirby, F. Warren McFarlan, Luc R. Wathieu, Gao Wang, Fei Li and Tracy Manty
Fiyta had long been on of China's foremost watch brands. However, as China's economy began to improve and the livelihood of many Chinese rose with it, their tastes began to change. Exposed to more luxurious foreign brands, many Chinese strived to purchase a Swiss or... View Details
- 2007
- Working Paper
A Taste For Obscurity: An Individual-Level Examination of 'Long Tail' Consumption
By: Anita Elberse
Because online retailers are often able to provide products in a more cost-efficient manner than bricks-and-mortar stores, online channels are characterized by a vast assortment of products. Proponents of the "long tail" principle recently argued that the demand for... View Details
- June 2007 (Revised April 2010)
- Case
Comcast Corporation
By: Anita Elberse and Jason Schreiber
In October 2006, Comcast executives had entered negotiations with broadcast networks to broaden the selection of free network content distributed via its video-on-demand (VOD) service. The major broadcast networks, however, were unsure of the effect it would have on... View Details
- November 2006
- Case
Organics: Coming Center Stage?
By: James E. Austin and Reed Martin
The organics movement has certainly come a long way. From hippie farming communes and a scattering of natural food stores in the 1960s, organics outgrew its origins as a counterculture curiosity of the 1970s to become the fastest growing segment of the food industry in... View Details
- October 2006 (Revised August 2007)
- Case
RKS Guitars
By: Elie Ofek, Thomas J. Steenburgh, Michael I. Norton and Kerry Herman
RKS has designed a revolutionary electric guitar and needs to decide how to best market their innovation. The iconic status of existing electric guitars, and the lack of any recent radical innovations in the category, pose challenges in securing consumer adoption. If... View Details
- September 2006 (Revised October 2007)
- Module Note
Platform-Mediated Networks: Definitions and Core Concepts
Defines platform-mediated networks and introduces concepts central to their study. First, it defines networks and network effects; explains how network effects influence users' willingness-to-pay for network access; describes factors that determine the strength of... View Details
- April 2006
- Background Note
Designing Sustainable Service Models
By: Frances X. Frei
Taught as the second module in a Harvard Business School course on Managing Service Operations. Addresses the challenge of designing service models that effectively incorporate a customer operating role, as well as how to align operations to deliver value to both the... View Details
- March 2006
- Course Overview Note
Consumer Marketing: Rethinking the Core
By: Youngme E. Moon
Outlines the structure and content of an advanced MBA course entitled Consumer Marketing: Rethinking the Core. The course, which is part of the second-year curriculum at the Harvard Business School, focuses on a reexamination of several fundamental marketing paradigms... View Details