Consumer Power - Publications - Faculty & Research

08 Sep 2008
HBS Case

The Value of Environmental Activists

There are many methods, most financial, to measure the success of companies in meeting goals. But the question becomes a lot harder at Harvard Business School when MBAs are challenged to measure the efforts of environmental organizations like Greenpeace and the World... View Details

Keywords: by Sarah Jane Gilbert; Energy; Utilities

23 Jan 2013
Research & Ideas

Three-Dimensional Strategy: Winning the Multisided Platform

third party. By contrast, a grocery store also creates a space for consumers and multiple brands to meet—but the store controls the transaction, serving as a reseller. Done right, the MSP model has proven extremely lucrative, throwing off... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Hanna

06 May 2021
HBS Case

How Four Women Made Miami More Equitable for Startups

numbers. That also helps people be seen as individuals, rather than representing a category." Like all people who are seen as the “only” of their kind, the women entrepreneurs were overloaded with speaking invitations and board memberships that View Details

Keywords: by Carolyn DiPaolo

16 Apr 2013
First Look

First Look: April 16

technologies that allow books to be published, distributed, and sold to consumers electronically. New competitors like Amazon and Apple attacked the traditional industry structure, creating many uncertainties over the long-term viability... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

16 Jan 2006
Research & Ideas

Adam Smith, Behavioral Economist?

discuss her research and the enduring power of Adam Smith's ideas. Ann Cullen: How did you and your coauthors come to be interested in this lesser known publication of Adam Smith? Nava Ashraf: Several years ago while taking a graduate... View Details

Keywords: by Ann Cullen

28 May 2020
Research & Ideas

Coronavirus Could Create a 'Bankruptcy Pandemic'

With a pandemic temporarily closing many businesses and stifling consumer demand, whole industries, especially those that recently leveraged their balance sheets to take advantage of near-zero interest rates, are seeing their profits... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman; Financial Services; Banking

15 Jun 2007
Research & Ideas

Remembering Alfred Chandler

great-grandfather, the business editor and analyst Henry Varnum Poor, to 2 recent volumes, published while he was in his 80s: Inventing the Electronic Century: The Epic Story of the Consumer Electronics and Computer Industries and Shaping... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

08 Nov 2011
First Look

First Look: Nov. 8

structural estimation methods. Our results confirm the belief expressed by industry experts that in the fast-food drive-thru industry, customers trade off price and waiting time. More interestingly, our estimates indicate that consumers... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

03 Jan 2017
First Look

January 3, 2017

powerful machine learning technique known as Thompson sampling to address the challenge of balancing the exploration-exploitation tradeoff under the presence of inventory constraints. Our algorithms prove to have both strong theoretical... View Details

Keywords: Carmen Nobel

19 Sep 2016
Research & Ideas

Why Isn't Business Research More Relevant to Business Practitioners?

challenging, is achievable. Take HBS colleague Benjamin G. Edelman, an expert in online markets whose research focuses on consumer protection related to online businesses. “My research is made better by choosing questions that are... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Education

01 May 2019
What Do You Think?

What Should the Leadership of YouTube Do?

barred People already consume tabloid newspapers, racist propaganda, biased news broadcasts, and pornography willingly. Let them at least know how the general public categorizes such materials Everyone benefits from such a system. Viewers... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett; Entertainment & Recreation; Media & Broadcasting

04 Dec 2000
What Do You Think?

Have We Overdone Deregulation and Privatization?

consumers were that deregulation: (1) unleashes the power of a self-correcting free market (Jeff Struck), giving customers services at prices they are willing to pay and quality levels that they are willing... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

22 Jul 2015
Research & Ideas

Name Your Price. Really.

relationships between people, and don't necessarily need to be balanced evenly. It's the kind of interaction we have when taking a friend out to dinner. "If you give me a dollar, I may not feel the need to give you back the dollar immediately," says Santana.... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Consumer Products

17 Sep 2001
Research & Ideas

Is There Help for the Big Ticket Buyer?

they have alternatives. Once this love affair begins, the homebuyer has often effectively thrown away their chief source of power in the negotiation, their BATNA. Research that examined why consumers so... View Details

Keywords: by Max H. Bazerman

09 Jun 2015
Sharpening Your Skills

Sharpening Your Skills: Social Media

Using social media to advance your marketing is a potentially powerful and low-cost tool. But the risk is potentially powerful, too—allowing consumers to co-create your brand is enough to induce night sweats... View Details

Keywords: Re: Multiple Faculty; Advertising

13 Jun 2018
Sharpening Your Skills

That Costs HOW Much?

Pricing the Right Price for You? Not every industry or company can benefit from performance-based pricing. But where there is a fit, PBP can be a powerful tool that merges the interests of buyers and sellers. How Our Brain Determines if... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Retail

28 Jul 2016
Op-Ed

Where is TripAdvisor for Doctors?

persuade them to reciprocate by adding reviews themselves. In addition, you need a business model that monetizes the site traffic without diminishing the site’s credibility. Once these issues are resolved, health care consumers will... View Details

Keywords: by John A. Quelch; Health

29 Jan 2013
Research & Ideas

Creating the Perfect Super Bowl Ad

question whether ads, including the over-the-top Super Bowl spots, have become too entertaining, says Thales S. Teixeira, an assistant professor in the Marketing unit at Harvard Business School. In upcoming research, Why, When and How Much to Entertain View Details

Keywords: by Kim Girard; Advertising; Media & Broadcasting

20 Feb 2006
HBS Case

Oprah: A Case Study Comes Alive

The idea seemed feasible because Mends had once met Winfrey through a personal connection at college. "I thought it was a fabulous possibility for several reasons," Koehn explained. "One, based on intuition, was that there's something very View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Consumer Products; Consumer Products; Consumer Products

25 Sep 2000
Research & Ideas

Cyber-Marketing: Scouting the Digital Communications Frontier

done. Much of its future will lie in the background of consumer life, where, like plumbing, it will be indispensable but seldom conspicuous. Deighton and Barwise see digital communications as the most recent in a series of advances that... View Details

Keywords: by Peter K. Jacobs

Publications