Publications

14 Dec 2020
Blog Post

Our Top 5 Blog Posts of 2020

In 2020, some of our most popular articles reflect the challenges faced throughout the business world and beyond, both before and during COVID-19. This year has tested our abilities to change and adapt, and to rally together to enact... View Details

Keywords: All Industries

January 2018
Article

The Effect of Cost Sharing on an Employee Weight Loss Program: A Randomized Trial

By: Leslie K. John, Andrea Troxel, William Yancy, Joelle Y. Friedman, Jingsan Zhu, Lin Yang, Robert Galvin, Karen Miller-Kovach, Scott Halpern, George Loewenstein and Kevin Volpp

Purpose: We tested the effects of employer subsidies on employee enrollment, attendance, and weight loss in a nationally-available weight management program.
Design: A randomized trial tested the impact of employer subsidy: 100%; 80% 50% and a hybrid 50% subsidy... View Details

Keywords: Affordable Care Act (ACA); Subsidies; Weight Loss; Obesity; Incentives; Behavioral Economics; Motivation and Incentives; Behavior; Health Disorders; Health Care and Treatment; Compensation and Benefits; United States

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18 Aug 2011
Lessons from the Classroom

Business Plan Contest: 15 Years of Building Better Entrepreneurs

An online shipping platform that uses social networks and smartphones. Low-cost medical care and monitoring that helps seniors to live at home. The "Skype" of broadband, offering free Internet service. On an April morning known as "Super Saturday," 63 student teams... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Hanna; Education

2007
Chapter

Legal Origin vs. the Politics of Creditor Rights: Bond Markets in Brazil, 1850-2002

By: Aldo Musacchio

This paper explores the question: Do institutions persist over time and determine current economic outcomes? Specifically, does the adoption or inheritance of a legal tradition in the past determine the subsequent course of institutional and financial development? This... View Details

Keywords: History; Rights; Common Law; Code Law; Financial Markets; Credit; Economy; Government and Politics; Financial Services Industry

July 2014 (Revised August 2014)
Case

AmazonFresh: Rekindling the Online Grocery Market

By: Rory McDonald, Clayton Christensen, Robin Yang and Ty Hollingsworth

More than a decade after the high-profile failures of several early online grocers, grocery remains the largest single U.S. retail category and one of the few that has not yet migrated online. Amazon began testing its grocery-delivery service, AmazonFresh, in Seattle,... View Details

Keywords: Innovation; New Markets; Grocery; Operations Strategy; Innovation and Invention; Strategy; Emerging Markets; Learning; Service Operations; Internet and the Web; Business Model; Food and Beverage Industry; United States

2021
Working Paper

Equilibrium Effects of Pay Transparency

By: Zoë B. Cullen and Bobak Pakzad-Hurson

The public discourse around pay transparency has focused on the direct effect: how workers seek to rectify newly-disclosed pay inequities through renegotiations. The question of how wage-setting and hiring practices of the firm respond in equilibrium has received... View Details

Keywords: Pay Transparency; Online Labor Market; Privacy; Wage Gap; Negotiation; Corporate Disclosure; Compensation and Benefits; Gender

31 Oct 2013
Working Paper Summaries

Do Measures of Financial Constraints Measure Financial Constraints?

Keywords: by Joan Farre-Mensa & Alexander Ljungqvist

29 Jun 2009
Sharpening Your Skills

Sharpening Your Skills: Leading Change

Sharpening Your Skills dives into the HBS Working Knowledge archives to bring together articles on ways to improve your business skills. Questions To Be Answered: How do I build my business in this environment? What should leaders communicate? My organization doesn't... View Details

Keywords: by Staff

23 Mar 2020
Working Paper Summaries

The Effects of Hierarchy on Learning and Performance in Business Experimentation

Keywords: by Sourobh Ghosh, Stefan H. Thomke, and Hazjier Pourkhalkhali

12 Oct 2019
News

Starbucks Stores That Only Accept Mobile Orders Sure Beat the Line

Article

The Role of Interactivity in Local Differential Privacy

By: Matthew Joseph, Jieming Mao, Seth Neel and Aaron Leon Roth

We study the power of interactivity in local differential privacy. First, we focus on the difference between fully interactive and sequentially interactive protocols. Sequentially interactive protocols may query users adaptively in sequence, but they cannot return to... View Details

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02 Jan 2024
Blog Post

The No. 1 Character Trait You Will Need to Succeed in Business

If you choose to pursue a career in business, I can guarantee that you will experience moments that will test you as never before. At times like those, what quality will you need more than any other? I believe that quality is courage.... View Details

14 Feb 2014
News

Playing Cupid makes us happy

Research Summary

Incentives and Education

(with Bob Slonim and Eric Bettinger)
No Child Left Behind has created an incentive system for schools to increase test scores as well as attendance figures.... View Details

January 2022
Article

Rational Habit Formation: Experimental Evidence from Handwashing in India

By: Reshmaan Hussam, Atonu Rabbani, Giovanni Reggiani and Natalia Rigol

We test the predictions of the rational addiction model, reconceptualized as rational habit formation, in the context of handwashing in rural India. To track handwashing, we design soap dispensers with timed sensors. We test for rational habit formation by informing... View Details

Keywords: Handwashing; Habit; Monitoring; Behavior; Health; Motivation and Incentives

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We test the effectiveness of self-help peer groups as a commitment device for precautionary savings, through two randomized field experiments among 2,687 microentrepreneurs in Chile. The first experiment finds that self-help peer groups are a powerful tool to... View Details

05 May 2022
HBS Seminar

Caleb Kwon, Harvard Business School

December 2009
Case

TruEarth Healthy Foods: Market Research for a New Product Introduction

By: V. Kasturi Rangan and Sunru Yong

Topics covered include: consumer marketing, market research, new product introduction, and quantitative analysis. TruEarth Healthy Foods, a maker of gourmet pastas, sauces, and meals, wants to build on its successful introduction of fresh whole grain pasta by... View Details

Keywords: Market Research; Consumer Marketing; Brands; Food; Marketing Strategy; Consumer Behavior; Forecasting and Prediction; Product Launch; Brands and Branding; Retail Industry; Food and Beverage Industry

January 2020
Case

Celata Bioinnovations

By: John R. Wells and Benjamin Weinstock

In December 2019, Jon Hu (HBS ‘19) and Dr. Samantha Dale Strasser, co-founders of Celata Bioinnovations, were raising $1 million to launch their company. They had founded Celata less than six months earlier with the aim of redefining the drug discovery process.... View Details