Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(3,259)
- Faculty Publications (810)
- Article
Moral Traps: When Self-serving Attributions Backfire in Prosocial Behavior
By: Stephanie C. Lin, Julian Zlatev and Dale T. Miller
Two assumptions guide the current research. First, people's desire to see themselves as moral disposes them to make attributions that enhance or protect their moral self-image: When approached with a prosocial request, people are inclined to attribute their own... View Details
Keywords: Morality; Attributions; Decision Making; Prosocial Behavior; Moral Sensibility; Behavior; Perception
- Article
The Error at the Heart of Corporate Leadership
By: Joseph L. Bower and Lynn S. Paine
Agency theory, a new model of governance promulgated by academic economists in the 1970s, is behind the idea that corporate managers should make shareholder value their primary concern and that boards should ensure they do. The theory regards shareholders as owners of... View Details
- April 2017 (Revised November 2017)
- Case
BlackRock (B): Acquire MLIM? (with video links)
In early 2006, BlackRock, Inc. is considering acquiring Merrill Lynch’s asset management business. The asset management industry was in a state of transition. In the prior year, more than 130 mergers and acquisitions had taken place. The proposed deal between BlackRock... View Details
- 2017
- Working Paper
Equality and Equity in Compensation
By: Jiayi Bao and Andy Wu
Equity compensation is widely used for incentivizing skilled employees, particularly in new technology businesses. Traditional theories explaining why firms offer equity suggest that workers with higher rank should receive compensation packages more heavily weighted in... View Details
- April 2017 (Revised May 2017)
- Case
GE Capital After the Crisis
By: John C. Coates, John D. Dionne and David S. Scharfstein
Keith Sherin, CEO of GE Capital, faced a decision on which hinged billions of dollars and the fate of one of America’s most storied companies. On his desk sat two secret analyses: Project Beacon, a proposal to spin off most of GE Capital to GE shareholders, and... View Details
- April 2017
- Article
Financing Risk and Innovation
By: Ramana Nanda and Matthew Rhodes-Kropf
We provide a model of investment into new ventures that demonstrates why some places, times, and industries should be associated with a greater degree of experimentation by investors. Investors respond to financing risk―a forecast of limited future funding―by modifying... View Details
- Article
The Effects of Product Line Breadth: Evidence from the Automotive Industry
By: Antonio Moreno and Christian Terwiesch
Using a detailed data set from the U.S. automotive industry, we enrich the existing literature on product line breadth with new results that highlight previously unexplored operational aspects of its benefits and costs. We find that expanding product line breadth has a... View Details
- March 2017
- Article
Why Do We Hate Hypocrites? Evidence for a Theory of False Signaling
By: Jillian J. Jordan, Roseanna Sommers, Paul Bloom and David G. Rand
Why do people judge hypocrites, who condemn immoral behaviors that they in fact engage in, so negatively? We propose that hypocrites are disliked because their condemnation sends a false signal about their personal conduct, deceptively suggesting that they behave... View Details
- Article
Repairing the Damage: The Effect of Price Knowledge and Gender on Auto-Repair Price Quotes
By: Meghan Busse, Ayelet Israeli and Florian Zettelmeyer
In this paper we investigate whether sellers treat consumers differently on the basis of how well informed consumers appear to be. We implement a large-scale field experiment in which callers request price quotes from automotive repair shops. We show that sellers alter... View Details
- January 2017
- Supplement
Hello Alfred: Come Home Happy — Operating the Business Model Exercise
By: Joseph B. Fuller and Christopher Payton
On a mission to "automate the on-demand economy," Harvard Business School classmates Marcela Sapone and Jessica Beck launched Hello Alfred in 2013 to provide subscribers with an "Alfred" to complete various chores for a monthly fee. In early 2016, the company has built... View Details
- January 2017
- Case
Bayer AG: Bidding to Win Merck's OTC Business
By: Benjamin C. Esty, Marc Baaij and Arjen Mulder
Shortly after submitting their best and final offer to acquire Merck's Consumer Care Division (a collection of "over-the-counter" (OTC) products with sales totaling $2 billion), the Bayer M&A team was given a chance to revise their bid because another potential... View Details
- Article
Deposit Competition and Financial Fragility: Evidence from the U.S. Banking Sector
By: Mark Egan, Ali Hortaçsu and Gregor Matvos
We develop a structural empirical model of the US banking sector. Insured depositors and run-prone uninsured depositors choose between differentiated banks. Banks compete for deposits and endogenously default. The estimated demand for uninsured deposits declines with... View Details
- December 2016
- Article
Social Network Utilization and the Impact of Academic Research in Marketing
By: Stav Rosenzweig, Amir Grinstein and Elie Ofek
The forces that drive the impact of academic research articles in the marketing discipline are of great interests to authors, editors, and the discipline’s policy makers. A key understudied driver is social network utilization by academic researchers. In this paper, we... View Details
- November 2016 (Revised November 2016)
- Case
Mark43
By: Thomas Eisenmann, Mitch Weiss and Halah AlQahtani
The founders of Mark43, an early-stage startup that provides software for law enforcement agencies, must decide whether to bid on a request for proposals (RFP) from the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). On the one hand, LAPD would be a second large and influential... View Details
- Article
Experience Theory, or How Desserts Are Like Losses
By: Jolie M. Martin, Martin Reimann and Michael I. Norton
While many experiments have explored risk preferences for money, few have systematically assessed risk preferences for everyday experiences. We propose a conceptual model and provide convergent evidence from seven experiments that, in contrast to a typical “zero”... View Details
- 2016
- Working Paper
Refugee Resettlement
By: David Delacretaz, Scott Duke Kominers and Alexander Teytelboym
Over 100,000 refugees are permanently resettled from refugee camps to hosting
countries every year. Nevertheless, refugee resettlement processes in most countries
are ad hoc, accounting for neither the priorities of hosting communities nor the preferences of refugees... View Details
- Article
Selfishly Benevolent or Benevolently Selfish? When Self-interest Undermines versus Promotes Prosocial Behavior
By: Julian Zlatev and Dale T. Miller
Existing research shows that appeals to self-interest sometimes increase and sometimes decrease prosocial behavior. We propose that this inconsistency is in part due to the framings of these appeals. Different framings generate different salient reference points,... View Details
- October 2016 (Revised March 2017)
- Case
Airbnb in Amsterdam (A)
By: Mitchell Weiss, Emer Moloney and Vincent Dessain
In February 2014, Amsterdam became the first city to issue new regulations specifically to allow home sharing. Airbnb's Molly Turner, global head of civic partnerships; her colleagues at the San Francisco–based home sharing platform; and her counterparts in Amsterdam's... View Details
Keywords: Public Entrepreneurship; Innovation; Sharing Economy; Amsterdam; Airbnb; Molly Turner; Regulation; Homesharing; Tourism; Business And Government; Public-private Partnership; Entrepreneurship; Business and Government Relations; Government Administration; Public Sector; City; Tourism Industry; Public Administration Industry; Travel Industry; Netherlands; Europe
- October 2016 (Revised November 2018)
- Case
Indigo Agriculture
By: Marco Iansiti, Michael W. Toffel and Christine Snively
Indigo Agriculture had successfully developed and launched its first commercial product, microbe-enhanced cotton seeds, on an accelerated product development timeline. In late 2016, as the company was about to launch its second product, winter wheat, the management... View Details
- October 2016
- Article
Looking Across and Looking Beyond the Knowledge Frontier: Intellectual Distance and Resource Allocation in Science
By: Kevin J. Boudreau, Eva Guinan, Karim R. Lakhani and Christoph Riedl
Selecting among alternative innovative projects is a core management task in all innovating organizations. In this paper, we focus on the evaluation of frontier scientific research projects. We argue that the "intellectual distance" between the knowledge embodied in... View Details