Publications

26 Mar 2012
Research & Ideas

What Neuroscience Tells Us About Consumer Desire

for behavior, and draws on concepts and techniques from neuroscience to inform her research in marketing. For corporations, on the other hand, the science is a means to an end goal of selling more stuff. But the tools, once restricted to... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Consumer Products

05 Sep 2023
Book

Failing Well: How Your ‘Intelligent Failure’ Unlocks Your Full Potential

Business School Professor Amy Edmondson argues in her new book Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well. Alimta is an example of an “intelligent failure,” Edmondson says, because the scientists developing it had no way to advance... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

February 2001
Case

PlanetFeedback: The Voice of One ... The Power of Many (A)

By: James L. Heskett

The management of PlanetFeedback in proposes a merger with Intelliseek. Their goal is to create a comprehensive C2B and B2B business focused on the generation and analysis for business clients of consumer feedback data via the Internet, Planet Feedback's board of... View Details

Keywords: Mergers and Acquisitions; Decisions; Information Management; Analytics and Data Science; Business Strategy; Internet and the Web; Information Technology Industry

Educators

September 2007 (Revised September 2008)
Case

Buildings and Energy

By: Forest L. Reinhardt and Nazli Uludere

Presents data on opportunities to conserve energy in buildings, which account for about a third of all energy use. Encourages readers to think about the impediments to energy efficiency in the buildings sector and the ways in which entrepreneurs can profitably surmount... View Details

Keywords: Buildings and Facilities; Energy Conservation; Construction; Entrepreneurship; Investment; Innovation and Invention; Performance Efficiency; Environmental Sustainability; Construction Industry

Educators

12 Mar 2024
Research & Ideas

Publish or Perish: What the Research Says About Productivity in Academia

candidate; Rachel Mural, a doctoral candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School; Jerry Thursby and Marie Thursby, visiting scholars at the Digital Data Design Institute at Harvard’s Laboratory for Innovation Science; HBS View Details

Keywords: by Ben Rand; Education

March 1980 (Revised February 1987)
Case

Sweco, Inc. (A)

By: Michael E. Porter and George S. Yip

Describes Sweco's decision about whether to enter the mud-processing equipment industry (used in oil well drilling). This is an internal entry decision, and the case describes Sweco's existing businesses as well as the mud-processing industry and competitors. The case... View Details

Keywords: Cost vs Benefits; Decisions; Forecasting and Prediction; Cost; Analytics and Data Science; Market Entry and Exit; Competition

Educators

October–December 2023
Article

A Practical Guide to Conversation Research: How to Study What People Say to Each Other

By: Michael Yeomans, Katelynn Boland, Hanne K. Collins, Nicole Abi-Esber and Alison Wood Brooks

Conversation—a verbal interaction between two or more people—is a complex, pervasive, and consequential human behavior. Conversations have been studied across many academic disciplines. However, advances in recording and analysis techniques over the last decade have... View Details

Keywords: Interpersonal Communication; Analytics and Data Science; Research

winter 2003
Article

Massively Categorical Variables: Revealing the Information in Zip Codes

We introduce the idea of a massively categorical variable, a variable such as zip code that takes on too many values to be treated in the standard manner, and show how to use it directly as explanatory variables in an econometric model. In an application of this... View Details

Keywords: Strategy; Analytics and Data Science; Behavior; Marketing; Standards; Finance

March–April 2023
Article

Market Segmentation Trees

By: Ali Aouad, Adam Elmachtoub, Kris J. Ferreira and Ryan McNellis

Problem definition: We seek to provide an interpretable framework for segmenting users in a population for personalized decision making. Methodology/results: We propose a general methodology, market segmentation trees (MSTs), for learning market... View Details

Keywords: Decision Trees; Computational Advertising; Market Segmentation; Analytics and Data Science; E-commerce; Consumer Behavior; Marketplace Matching; Marketing Channels; Digital Marketing

May 23, 2011
Article

Leading and Lagging Countries in Contributing to a Sustainable Society

By: Robert G. Eccles and George Serafeim

To determine the extent to which corporate and investor behavior is changing to contribute to a more sustainable society, researchers Robert Eccles and George Serafeim analyzed data involving over 2,000 companies in 23 countries. One result: a ranking of countries... View Details

Keywords: Change; Society; Corporate Disclosure; Natural Environment; Rank and Position; Social Issues; Financial Statements; Behavior

2023
Article

Experimental Evaluation of Individualized Treatment Rules

By: Kosuke Imai and Michael Lingzhi Li

The increasing availability of individual-level data has led to numerous applications of individualized (or personalized) treatment rules (ITRs). Policy makers often wish to empirically evaluate ITRs and compare their relative performance before implementing them in a... View Details

Keywords: Causal Inference; Heterogeneous Treatment Effects; Precision Medicine; Uplift Modeling; Analytics and Data Science; AI and Machine Learning

17 Jun 2014
First Look

First Look: June 17

lasting changes in the lives of people and their societies. Rather, some organizations would be better off measuring shorter-term outputs or individual outcomes. Funders such as foundations and impact investors are better positioned to measure systemic impacts. August... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

07 Dec 1999
Research & Ideas

Henry Heinz and Brand Creation in the Late Nineteenth Century

science of nutrition began to develop in the 1890s; the presence of vitamins in food and the relationship between diet and disease are twentieth-century discoveries. But as he and his partner expanded their business in the early 1870s,... View Details

Keywords: by Nancy F. Koehn

2023
Working Paper

Design-Based Inference for Multi-arm Bandits

By: Dae Woong Ham, Iavor I. Bojinov, Michael Lindon and Martin Tingley

Multi-arm bandits are gaining popularity as they enable real-world sequential decision-making across application areas, including clinical trials, recommender systems, and online decision-making. Consequently, there is an increased desire to use the available... View Details

Keywords: Analytics and Data Science; Mathematical Methods

1991
Book

Multinational and International Banking

By: G. Jones

The essays in this volume explore the historical evolution of multinational and international banking. Contemporary studies, and most writers on the theory of multinational banking, focus on US data, yet historically European financial institutions were the leaders in... View Details

Keywords: Banks and Banking; Multinational Firms and Management; Analytics and Data Science; Opportunities; Theory; Banking Industry; Europe; United States

2025
Working Paper

Dynamic Personalization with Multiple Customer Signals: Multi-Response State Representation in Reinforcement Learning

By: Liangzong Ma, Ta-Wei Huang, Eva Ascarza and Ayelet Israeli

Reinforcement learning (RL) offers potential for optimizing sequences of customer interactions by modeling the relationships between customer states, company actions, and long-term value. However, its practical implementation often faces significant challenges.... View Details

Keywords: Dynamic Policy; Deep Reinforcement Learning; Representation Learning; Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment; Latent Variable Models; Customer Relationship Management; Customer Value and Value Chain; Foreign Direct Investment; Analytics and Data Science

SSRN

June 2018
Article

Personal and Social Usage: The Origins of Active Customers and Ways to Keep Them Engaged

By: Clarence Lee, Elie Ofek and Thomas Steenburgh

We study how digital service firms can develop an active customer base, focusing on two questions. First, how does the way that customers use the service postadoption to meet their own needs (personal usage) and to interact with one another (social usage) vary across... View Details

Keywords: Customer Engagement; Adoption Routes; Word-of-Mouth; Digital Marketing; Bayesian Estimation; Customers; Communication; Consumer Behavior; Marketing; Internet and the Web; Analytics and Data Science

08 Nov 2010
Research & Ideas

How to Fix a Broken Marketplace

tackled the market for new medical residents, economists, and lawyers. (Forbes magazine named him one of the world's "seven most powerful new economists.") "Market design is the engineering part of game theory," Roth explains. "It's the... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Health

Other Article

How to Make Remote Monitoring Tech Part of Everyday Health Care

By: Samantha F. Sanders, Ariel Dora Stern and William J. Gordon

Remote patient monitoring is a subset of telehealth that involves the collection, transmission, evaluation, and communication of patient health data from electronic devices. These devices include wearable sensors, implanted equipment, and handheld instruments. During... View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Information Technology; Analytics and Data Science; Technology Adoption