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- August 2009 (Revised August 2010)
- Case
Slanket: Responding to Snuggie's Market Entry
By: John A. Deighton and Leora Kornfeld
How does a pioneer in a new product category deal with the runaway success of a follower? Can search engine marketing and social media help? In 2008 Slanket CEO, Gary Clegg, found that his product, a blanket with sleeves, had been eclipsed by The Snuggie, another... View Details
- August 2009
- Case
Meeting the Diversity Challenge at PepsiCo: The Steve Reinemund Era
By: David A. Thomas and Stephanie Creary
This case profiles PepsiCo's diversity journey under the leadership of former chairman and CEO Steve Reinemund who instituted diversity as one of the company's strategic imperatives. It demonstrates the ways in which Reinemund partnered with his leadership team and... View Details
- February 2009
- Article
Optimal Reserve Management and Sovereign Debt
By: Laura Alfaro and Fabio Kanczuk
Most models currently used to determine optimal foreign reserve holdings take the level of international debt as given. However, given the sovereign's willingness-to-pay incentive problems, reserve accumulation may reduce sustainable debt levels. In addition, assuming... View Details
- 2009
- Chapter
On the General Relativity of Fiscal Language
By: Jerry R. Green and Lawrence Kotlikoff
A century ago, everyone thought time and distance were well defined physical concepts. But neither proved absolute. Instead, measures/reports of time and distance were found to depend on one's reference point, specifically one's direction and speed of travel, making... View Details
- Article
When Dreaming Is Believing: The (Motivated) Interpretation of Dreams
By: Carey K. Morewedge and Michael I. Norton
This research investigated laypeople's interpretation of their dreams. Participants from both Eastern and Western cultures believed that dreams contain hidden truths (Study 1) and considered dreams to provide more meaningful information about the world than similar... View Details
- November 2008 (Revised February 2009)
- Case
Omron: Sensing Society
By: Rosabeth M. Kanter and Ethan S Bernstein
"Leading profitable growth is only part of the goal. We cannot live without breathing, but we do not live in order to take a breath,” said Omron's President and CEO, Hisao Sakuta, in 2008. Omron, a $7B global supplier of sensors, control system components, advanced... View Details
- October 2008
- Article
It's Time to Make Management a True Profession
By: Nitin Nohria and Rakesh Khurana
In the face of the recent institutional breakdown of trust in business, managers are losing legitimacy. To regain public trust, management needs to become a true profession in much the way medicine and law have, argue Khurana and Nohria of Harvard Business School. True... View Details
- October 2008 (Revised January 2011)
- Case
Lawrence Trinh: Venturing to Vietnam
By: Joshua D. Margolis and Rachel Gordon
Should Lawrence Trinh pursue his aspiration of working in Vietnam—and if so, what set of principles and practices should he adopt if he encounters corruption? These are questions that reverberate for many students who wish to work in emerging markets and other contexts... View Details
- July 2008
- Article
Crime and Punishment in the 'American Dream'
By: Rafael Di Tella and Juan Dubra
We observe that countries where belief in the "American dream" (i.e., effort pays) prevails also set harsher punishment for criminals. We know that beliefs are also correlated with several features of the economic system (taxation, social insurance, etc). Our objective... View Details
- July 2008
- Article
Fairness in Extended Dictator-Game Experiments
By: Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Reiner Eichenberger
We test the robustness of behavior in dictator games by offering allocators the choice to play an unattractive lottery. With this lottery option, mean transfers from allocators to recipients substantially decline, partly because many allocators now keep the entire... View Details
- 2008
- Chapter
I Read Playboy for the Articles: Justifying and Rationalizing Questionable Preferences
By: Zoe Chance and Michael I. Norton
When people behave in ways that might appear selfish, prejudiced or perverted, they engage in a host of strategies designed to justify questionable behavior with rational excuses: “I hired my son because he's more qualified”; “I promoted Ashley because she does a... View Details
- July – August 2008
- Article
Should You Invest in the Long Tail?
By: Anita Elberse
The blockbuster strategy is a time-honored approach, particularly in media and entertainment. When space is limited on store shelves and in traditional distribution channels, producers tend to focus on a few likely best sellers, hoping that one or two big hits will... View Details
- April 2008 (Revised July 2011)
- Background Note
Strategic Decline
By: David J. Collis and Jan W. Rivkin
This note first documents the facts around the sustainability of competitive advantage. It then observes that the demise of a previously successful strategy, in the first instance, often comes from some change in the external environment. It, therefore, characterizes... View Details
- February 2008 (Revised July 2008)
- Case
Wanxiang Group: A Chinese Company's Global Strategy
By: Regina M. Abrami, William C. Kirby, F. Warren McFarlan, Keith Chi-ho Wong and Tracy Manty
With an almost forty-year history as a business in China, the Wanxiang Group has navigated through the significantly different political and economic changes in China to succeed as a global leader in the auto parts industry and to develop into a broad business... View Details
- February 2008 (Revised May 2008)
- Case
Tad O'Malley: The Investment Conundrum
By: Felda Hardymon, Josh Lerner and Ann Leamon
Tad O'Malley has just started as an associate with Empire Investment Group. He must evaluate three investment opportunities facing the big leveraged buyout firm. All are global, but each pertains to different offices and each deal has different strengths and... View Details
- December 2007
- Article
Fair (and Not So Fair) Division
By: John W. Pratt
Drawbacks of existing procedures are illustrated and a method of efficient fair division is proposed that avoids them. Given additive participants' utilities, each item is priced at the geometric mean (or some other function) of its two highest valuations. The... View Details
- November 2007
- Background Note
Bayesian Estimation & Black-Litterman
By: Joshua D. Coval and Erik Stafford
Describes a practical method for asset allocation that is more robust to estimation errors than the traditional implementation of mean-variance optimization with sample means and covariances. The Bayesian inspired Black-Litterman model is described after introducing... View Details
- 2007
- Book
An Experiment in Fair Value Accounting? The State of the Art in Research and Thought Leadership on Accounting for Life Assurance in the UK and Continental Europe
By: Joanne G Horton, Richard H. Macve and George Serafeim
"Fair value" is currently the central topic of debate in the development of accounting standards. While it has now been defined to mean an exit price in US GAAP, the IASB is still considering its own definition, and some commentators are arguing for versions of entry... View Details
- October 2007
- Article
The Art of Designing Markets
By: Alvin E. Roth
Traditionally, markets have been viewed as simply the confluence of supply and demand. But to function properly, they must be able to attract a sufficient number of buyers and sellers, induce participants to make their preferences clear, and overcome congestion by... View Details