Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(5,240)
- Faculty Publications (767)
- April 2025
- Article
Crisis Interventions in Corporate Insolvency
By: Samuel Antill and Christopher Clayton
We model the optimal resolution of insolvent firms in general equilibrium. Collateral-constrained banks lend to (i) solvent firms to finance investments and (ii) distressed firms to avoid liquidation. Liquidations create negative fire-sale externalities. Liquidations... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Extractive Taxation and the French Revolution
By: Tommaso Giommoni, Gabriel Loumeau and Marco Tabellini
We study the fiscal determinants of the French Revolution, exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in the salt tax—a large source of royal revenues and one of the most extractive forms of taxation of the Ancien Régime. Implementing a Regression Discontinuity... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
The Cybernetic Teammate: A Field Experiment on Generative AI Reshaping Teamwork and Expertise
By: Fabrizio Dell'Acqua, Charles Ayoubi, Hila Lifshitz, Raffaella Sadun, Ethan Mollick, Lilach Mollick, Yi Han, Jeff Goldman, Hari Nair, Stew Taub and Karim R. Lakhani
We examine how artificial intelligence transforms the core pillars of collaboration—
performance, expertise sharing, and social engagement—through a pre-registered field
experiment with 776 professionals at Procter & Gamble, a global consumer packaged goods
company.... View Details
- March 2025 (Revised April 2025)
- Case
Perplexity: Redefining Search
By: Suraj Srinivasan, Michelle Hu, Sriraghav Srinivasan and Radhika Kak
By early 2025, Perplexity had rapidly evolved from a modest startup into a popular "answer engine" valued at $9 billion. The company had boldly positioned itself as the disruptor to Google aiming to redefine search for the AI age. Through novel AI... View Details
- March 2025 (Revised May 2025)
- Case
Xfund and Sam Altman: Finding Harvard's Best Generative AI Founders
By: Suraj Srinivasan
On May 1, 2024, Xfund Managing Partners Patrick Chung and Brandon Farwell, hosted a high-stakes venture pitch session designed to select one startup for a minimum $100,000 investment. This “Xperiment Stake” competition, dedicated to startups in the Generative AI... View Details
- March 2025
- Case
YouTube: Bidding for NFL Sunday Ticket
By: Anita Elberse and Crystal Yao
In December 2022, Erin Teague, a senior director and the global head of sports, movies and shows at YouTube, technology giant Alphabet Inc.’s video- sharing platform, received the news that Sundar Pichai, the chief executive officer of Alphabet and its subsidiary... View Details
- March 2025
- Case
Metaphysic AI: Rethinking the Value of Human Expertise
By: Zoë B. Cullen, Shikhar Ghosh and Shweta Bagai
In early 2025, Thomas Graham, CEO of Metaphysic, a leading AI generative video company confronted fundamental questions about who should control digital identity in a world where AI could perfectly recreate human likeness. Founded in 2021, Metaphysic first rose to fame... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Incentive-Compatible Recovery from Manipulated Signals, with Applications to Decentralized Physical Infrastructure
By: Jason Milionis, Jens Ernstberger, Joseph Bonneau, Scott Duke Kominers and Tim Roughgarden
We introduce the first formal model capturing the elicitation of unverifiable information from a party (the "source") with implicit signals derived by other players (the "observers"). Our model is motivated in part by applications in decentralized physical... View Details
- March 2025
- Article
Novice Risk Work: How Juniors Coaching Seniors on Emerging Technologies Such as Generative AI Can Lead to Learning Failures
By: Katherine C. Kellogg, Hila Lifshitz-Assaf, Steven Randazzo, Ethan Mollick, Fabrizio Dell'Acqua, Edward McFowland III, François Candelon and Karim R. Lakhani
The literature on communities of practice demonstrates that a proven way for senior professionals to upskill
themselves in the use of new technologies that undermine existing expertise is to learn from junior
professionals. It notes that juniors may be better able... View Details
- February 2025
- Case
Blue Owl Financing of Ping Identity
By: Victoria Ivashina and Srimayi Mylavarapu
In the fall of 2022, Blue Owl Capital's investment committee evaluated a potential investment in the technology sector. The proposed transaction centered on Ping Identity Corporation (“Ping”), a fast-growing identity access management (IAM) software company that was... View Details
- February 2025
- Article
Disclosure, Humanizing, and Contextual Vulnerability of Generative AI Chatbots
By: Julian De Freitas and I. Glenn Cohen
In the wake of recent advancements in generative AI, regulatory bodies are trying to keep pace. One key decision is whether to require app makers to disclose the use of generative AI-powered chatbots in their products. We suggest that some generative AI-based chatbots... View Details
- January 2025
- Case
Summer Health: Raising an AI-First Company?
By: Jeffrey J. Bussgang, Sarah Mehta and Maxim Pike Harrell
In October 2023, Summer Health CEO Ellen DaSilva arrived at a defining juncture for her pediatric telehealth startup. Founded in 2021, Summer Health offered parents rapid access to licensed pediatricians via text message. DaSilva, an experienced telehealth executive,... View Details
- January 2025
- Case
Moderna: Democratizing Artificial Intelligence
By: Iavor I. Bojinov, Karim R. Lakhani, Annika Hildebrandt and James Weber
The case study examines Moderna's journey in democratizing artificial intelligence (AI), particularly generative AI, across its workforce. It details the company's "digital-first, AI-focused" approach, including the rollout of OpenAI's ChatGPT Enterprise to all... View Details
- Working Paper
AI in Disguise—How AI-generated Ads' Visual Cues Shape Consumer Perception and Performance
By: Yannick Exner, Jochen Hartmann, Oded Netzer and Shunyuan Zhang
Generative AI’s recent advancements in creating content have offered vast potential to transform the advertising industry. This research investigates the impact of generative AI-enabled visual ad creation on real-world advertising effectiveness. For this purpose, we... View Details
- January 2025
- Case
Ontra: Embracing GenAI in the Legal Technology Industry
By: Christopher Stanton and George Gonzalez
Ontra built a network of legal professionals to enable financial institutions to outsource contract negotiations. The rise of generative AI inspired the company to build software solutions to streamline its processes through automation. Now company leadership must... View Details
- January 2025
- Case
GE Appliances 2025: Energizing Change
By: Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Jacob A. Small
At the turn of 2025, Kevin Nolan, CEO of GE Appliances following its acquisition by Chinese appliance giant Haier in 2016, is reviewing progress toward his net zero carbon vision for homes, which would otherwise exacerbate the global warming climate crisis. An... View Details
- 2025
- Article
Humor as a Window into Generative AI Bias
By: Roger Samure, Julian De Freitas and Stefano Puntoni
A preregistered audit of 600 images by generative AI across 150 different prompts explores the link between humor and discrimination in consumer-facing AI solutions. When ChatGPT updates images to make them “funnier”, the prevalence of stereotyped groups changes. While... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Combining Complements: Theory and Evidence from Cancer Treatment Innovation
By: Rebekah Dix and Todd A. Lensman
Innovations often combine several components to achieve outcomes greater than the
“sum of the parts.” We argue that such combination innovations can introduce an understudied
inefficiency—a positive market expansion externality that benefits the owners of
the... View Details
- January 2025
- Article
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) System Implementations and Corporate Misconduct
By: Jonas Heese and Joseph Pacelli
This study examines whether enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementations are associated with reductions in corporate misconduct. Specifically, we study the relation between staggered facility-level rollouts of ERP systems and facility-level regulatory violations... View Details
- 2025
- Article
Statistical Inference for Heterogeneous Treatment Effects Discovered by Generic Machine Learning in Randomized Experiments
By: Kosuke Imai and Michael Lingzhi Li
Researchers are increasingly turning to machine learning (ML) algorithms to investigate causal heterogeneity in randomized experiments. Despite their promise, ML algorithms may fail to accurately ascertain heterogeneous treatment effects under practical settings with... View Details