Publications

2010
Other Paper

Clear and Present Danger: Planning and New Venture Survival Amid Political and Civil Violence

By: Shon R. Hiatt and Wesley Sine

Prior strategy research is divided on the utility of new-venture planning. Some scholars argue that planning enhances new-firm performance and others make the opposite argument. This paper attempts to reconcile these contradictory views by exploring the extent of... View Details

Keywords: Business Startups; Entrepreneurship; Government and Politics; Success; Performance Effectiveness; Strategic Planning; Business and Government Relations; Colombia

03 Apr 2018
News

Practice Makes Perfect: Why Chinese Manufacturers Have A Production Advantage

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Faculty & Research

facilitated by their productivity and semantic breadth, which are psychologically analogous to the dual pathways of persistence and flexibility in human ideation. Further, we distinguish between the utility of LLMs as key ideators versus... View Details

2022
Article

Towards Robust Off-Policy Evaluation via Human Inputs

By: Harvineet Singh, Shalmali Joshi, Finale Doshi-Velez and Himabindu Lakkaraju

Off-policy Evaluation (OPE) methods are crucial tools for evaluating policies in high-stakes domains such as healthcare, where direct deployment is often infeasible, unethical, or expensive. When deployment environments are expected to undergo changes (that is, dataset... View Details

Keywords: Analytics and Data Science; Research

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29 Apr 2025
HBS Seminar

Magie Cheng & David Huang

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MS/MBA Biotechnology: Life Sciences | MBA

new drug discoveries and therapeutics. The program is completed over two academic years, utilizing January terms and time in August at the start of the program. The curriculum emphasizes developing effective business models in the... View Details

December 2017 (Revised December 2018)
Case

OCP Group

By: Kristin Fabbe, Forest Reinhardt, Natalie Kindred and Alpana Thapar

This case explores the strategy of OCP Group, the 95% state-owned Moroccan firm charged with managing the North African country’s vast reserves of phosphate. Phosphate was one of the most vital macronutrients for plant health, along with nitrogen and potassium, and... View Details

Keywords: OCP; OCP Group; Casablanca; Chemicals; Operations; Transformation; Competitive Strategy; Competitive Advantage; Chemical Industry; Morocco

February 2019 (Revised July 2019)
Case

Sales Force Management at Nobel Ilac

By: Doug J. Chung and Gamze Yucaoglu

Nobel Ilac was a Turkish generic pharmaceutical company marketing more than 100 drugs in 20 countries and, as of 2017, had over 2,500 employees worldwide. Nobel had implemented a transformation strategy—more specifically, a customer segmentation plan—whereby the sales... View Details

Keywords: Sales Strategy; Compensation; Employee Retention; Recruiting; Pharmaceuticals; Salesforce Management; Strategy; Organizational Design; Human Resources; Compensation and Benefits; Employees; Retention; Recruitment; Pharmaceutical Industry; Turkey

June 2023
Teaching Note

Connecting Students in Chattanooga (A) and (B)

By: Jan W. Rivkin

Teaching Note for HBS Case Nos. 722-449 and 722-451. As this case opens, it is the spring of 2020 in Chattanooga. COVID-19 has hit, public schools have closed their buildings, remote learning has begun, and more than 28,000 schoolkids lack the high-quality Internet... View Details

Keywords: K-12 Education; Pandemic; COVID-19; Accessibility; Education; Urban Development; Wealth and Poverty; Internet and the Web; Information Infrastructure; Education Industry; Tennessee

02 Apr 2018
News

Practice Makes Perfect: Why Chinese Manufacturers Have A Production Advantage

Web

Overview | MBA

Regenerative Biology, a Harvard Medical School/Faculty of Arts and Sciences joint department. The program is completed over two academic years, utilizing January terms and time in August at the start of the program. Harvard Business... View Details

2006
Working Paper

Worse but Equal: The Influence of Social Categories on Resource Allocations

By: Stephen M. Garcia, Max H. Bazerman, Shirli Kopelman and Dale T. Miller

This paper explores the influence of social categories on the perceived trade-off between relatively bad but equal distribution of resources between two parties and profit maximizing, yet asymmetric payoffs. Study 1 and 2 showed that people prefer to maximize profits... View Details

Keywords: Demographics; Fairness; Resource Allocation; Decision Choices and Conditions; Profit

2024
Working Paper

How Real Is Hypothetical?: A High-Stakes Test of the Allais Paradox

By: Uri Gneezy, Yoram Halevy, Brian Hall, Theo Offerman and Jeroen van de Ven

Researchers in behavioral and experimental economics often argue that only incentive-compatible mechanisms can elicit effort and truthful responses from participants. Others argue that participants make less-biased decisions when the stakes are sufficiently high.... View Details

Keywords: Research; Behavioral Finance; Economics; Behavior; Prejudice and Bias

June 2017
Article

The Political Economy of Financial Innovation: Evidence from Local Governments

By: Christophe Pérignon and Boris Vallée

We examine the toxic loans sold by investment banks to local governments. Using proprietary data, we show that politicians strategically use these products to increase chances of being re-elected. Consistent with greater incentives to hide the cost of debt, toxic loans... View Details

Keywords: Financial Innovation; Political Elections; Financing and Loans; Innovation and Invention

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2016
Working Paper

The Structure of Board Committees

By: Kevin D. Chen and Andy Wu

We document and analyze board committee structures utilizing a novel dataset containing full board committee membership for over 6,000 firms. Board committees provide benefits (specialization, efficiency, and accountability benefits) and costs (information... View Details

Keywords: Board Of Directors; Board Committees; Specialization; Accountability; Information Segregation; Overloaded Directors; Multi-commitee Directors; Sarbanes-Oxley Act; Corporate Accountability; Governing and Advisory Boards; Accounting; Corporate Governance

Bill Vrattos is a Senior Lecturer at the Harvard Business School, where he teaches Investment Strategies, a course on public market investing in the elective curriculum. He also co-teaches Private Equity Projects and Ecosystems, where he mentors student groups on... View Details

June 2022 (Revised January 2023)
Case

South Africa – a 'Just Energy Transition'

By: Richard Vietor

South Africa, like most other countries, is in the process of reducing its carbon emissions to comply with COP26 and, hopefully, reach net zero emissions by 2050. However, because South Africa relies almost wholly on coal (93%) for electricity, and on coal for... View Details

Keywords: Energy; Economic Development; Climate Change; Coal Mining; Emission Reduction; Environmental Regulation; Environmental Sustainability; Environmental Law; Labor and Management Relations; Labor Unions; Natural Resources; Energy Policy; Energy Sources; South Africa

April 2001 (Revised February 2002)
Case

Level (3) Communications in 2001: The 'Pivotal Year'

Level (3) is one of the most distinctive of the new "fiber backbone" start-ups in the year 2001. Unlike its competitors, Level (3) has built its fiber network--and organization--in such a way that it should be able to utilize future generations of technologically... View Details

Keywords: Communication Technology; Risk Management; Industry Growth; Competitive Advantage; Telecommunications Industry; United States

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April 2010
Case

School of One: Reimagining How Students Learn

By: Stacey M. Childress, James Weber and Matthew Adams Haldeman

School of One was a start-up with a new approach to learning. Instead of one teacher delivering the entire math curriculum to a class of 20-25 students, School of One utilized a technology platform that allowed several teachers to collectively oversee the learning of a... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Learning; Innovation and Invention