Publications

SSRN

June 2023
Article

The Salary Taboo: Privacy Norms and the Diffusion of Information

By: Zoë Cullen and Ricardo Perez-Truglia

The limited diffusion of salary information has implications for labor markets, such as wage discrimination policies and collective bargaining. Access to salary information is believed to be limited and unequal, but there is little direct evidence on the sources of... View Details

Keywords: Search Costs; Privacy; Norms; Compensation; Financial Industry; Field Experiment; Knowledge Dissemination; Equality and Inequality; Gender; Compensation and Benefits; Societal Protocols

May 2014
Case

Health Care Accountability: Examples in Cancer Treatment

By: Regina E. Herzlinger and Natalie Kindred

This case is designed to support a discussion of the importance of outcomes evidence in empowering the public to make better health care decisions, the desired level of transparency and accountability for health care providers, and the issues with current measuring and... View Details

Keywords: Accountability; Health Care; Cancer; Cancer Treatment; Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center; Cancer Treatment Centers Of America; Vantage Oncology; Radiology; Risk Adjustment; Treatment Outcomes; Health Care Outcomes; Prostate Cancer; Transparency; Health Care and Treatment; Risk Management; Outcome or Result; Health Industry; United States

November 2024
Article

On the Representativeness of Voter Turnout

By: Louis Kaplow and Scott Duke Kominers

Prominent theory research on voting analyzes a variety of models in which expected pivotality drives voters' turnout decisions and hence determines voting outcomes. It is recognized, however, that such work is at odds with Downs's paradox: in practice, many... View Details

Keywords: Voting Behavior; Voting Turnout; Paradox Of Voting; Pivotality; Elections; Model; Theory; Governance Transparency; Government; Democracy; Turnout; Voting; Governance; Government and Politics; Public Sector; Political Elections

August 28, 2018
Article

How Intermittent Breaks in Interaction Improve Collective Intelligence

By: Ethan Bernstein, Jesse Shore and David Lazer

People influence each other when they interact to solve problems. Such social influence introduces both benefits (higher average solution quality due to exploitation of existing answers through social learning) and costs (lower maximum solution quality due to a... View Details

02 Aug 2021
Research & Ideas

What If Closing the Wage Gap Means Everyone Earns Less?

touting their pay transparency policies as a means of ensuring fairness. But, as it turns out, pay transparency doesn’t necessarily increase workers’ wages, writes Harvard Business School professor Zoe... View Details

Keywords: by Avery Forman

03 Sep 2020
Op-Ed

Why American Health Care Needs Its Own SEC

services of unknown quality. The lack of transparency protects providers and insurers from needing to compete on the price and quality of their services. Lack of competition, in turn, inflates the cost and... View Details

Keywords: by Regina E. Herzlinger; Health

25 Nov 2013
Research & Ideas

Hiding From Managers Can Increase Your Productivity

Companies all over the world have striven for transparency in the workplace, literally tearing down walls in an effort to let managers and employees observe each other. Take, for example, one of the 14 key principles of The Toyota Way,... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Manufacturing

08 Sep 2020
Sharpening Your Skills

Capitalism Works Better When I Can See What You're Doing

greater support for maintaining or expanding the scale of its programs. Lifting the Veil: The Benefits of Cost TransparencyA firm's costs are typically tightly guarded secrets. Researchers identify when and... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

Article

Corporate Social Responsibility and Access to Finance

By: Beiting Cheng, Ioannis Ioannou and George Serafeim

In this paper, we investigate whether superior performance on corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategies leads to better access to finance. We hypothesize that better access to finance can be attributed to a) reduced agency costs due to enhanced stakeholder... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Social Responsibility; Sustainability; Capital Constraints; ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) Performance; Stakeholder Engagement; Disclosure; Corporate Disclosure; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Environmental Sustainability; Capital

SSRN

Find at Harvard

June 2024
Case

Tremblant Capital: Launching an Active ETF

By: Robin Greenwood, Luis M. Viceira and Robert Ialenti

The case highlights deliberations led by Brett Barakett, CEO and chief investment officer of Tremblant Capital, just months prior to launching an actively managed ETF, Tremblant Global (TOGA). However, his team continued to have reservations around the launch. On the... View Details

Keywords: Asset Management; Investment Funds; Product Launch; Risk and Uncertainty; Financial Services Industry

November 2007 (Revised January 2010)
Case

ThedaCare: System Strategy

By: Michael E. Porter and Sachin H. Jain

Over the 1980s and 1990s, America's changing health care payer environment resulted in mergers of numerous community hospitals into hospital systems. Based in Appleton, Wisconsin, ThedaCare stood out among community hospital systems in its pursuit of service... View Details

Keywords: Value Creation; Health Care and Treatment; Problems and Challenges; Innovation and Invention; Health Industry; Wisconsin

2016
Working Paper

Private Networks of Managers and Financial Analysts and Their Externality on a Firm's Information Environment

By: Zengquan Li, T.J. Wong and Gwen Yu

When emerging market firms raise external capital, they face a tradeoff where greater transparency may lead to a lower cost of capital but at the cost of revealing proprietary information in their relational business practices. We find that firms overcome this... View Details

Keywords: Emerging Market; Financial Analysts; Information; Emerging Markets; Forecasting and Prediction; Corporate Governance

Forthcoming
Article

From Bupkis to Sechel in Health Care

By: Regina E. Herzlinger and Richard Boxer

Fifty years ago, famed economist Milton Friedman declared that “The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.” This free market manifesto was adopted by the healthcare industry as well. But transactional has evolved into transformational with the... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Accountability; Customer Focus and Relationships; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Health Industry

06 Dec 2011
Working Paper Summaries

What Impedes Oil and Gas Companies’ Transparency?

Keywords: by Paul Healy, Venkat Kuppuswamy & George Serafeim; Energy; Utilities

October 2023
Case

Lasell University in 2023: Securing the Future

By: John Jong-Hyun Kim and Mary C. Sauer

In a groundbreaking move on September 20, 2022, Lasell University's President, Michael B. Alexander, announced an extraordinary 33% reduction in tuition, room, board, and fees, signaling a pivotal shift in higher education. Situated in an affluent Boston suburb,... View Details

Keywords: Higher Education; Cost; Valuation; Competitive Advantage; Education Industry; United States; Massachusetts

Research Summary

Consumerism and the Distributed Delivery of Health Care

By: Robert S. Huckman

This stream of Professor Huckman's work examines the growing tendency for health care to be delivered in a more distributed manner. Examples of this phenomenon include health IT, teleradiology, medical travel, remote monitoring of chronic medical conditions, and retail... View Details

November 2009
Article

Is it Fair to Blame Fair Value Accounting for the Financial Crisis?

By: Robert C. Pozen

When the credit markets seized up in 2008, many heaped blame on "mark to market" accounting rules, which require banks to write down their troubled assets to the prices they'd fetch if sold on the open market - at the time, next to nothing. Recording those assets below... View Details

Keywords: Cost Accounting; Fair Value Accounting; Financial Crisis; Assets; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Crisis Management; Standards; Banking Industry

Find at Harvard

June 2012 (Revised March 2014)
Case

I Paid a Bribe (Dot) Com

By: Karthik Ramanna and Rachna Tahilyani

Anti-corruption web platform "ipaidabribe.com" leverages the transparency and anonymity of the Internet to encourage private citizens in India who have been the victims of corruption to self-report details of bribes paid, including the bribe amount, the name of the... View Details

Keywords: Crime and Corruption; Internet and the Web; Ethics; Service Industry; India