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- February 2021 (Revised May 2021)
- Case
SafeGraph: Selling Data as a Service
By: Ramana Nanda, Abhishek Nagaraj and Allison Ciechanover
Set in January 2021, the CEO of SafeGraph, a four-year-old startup that sold Data as a Service, looked to the future. His aim was to become the most trusted source for data about a physical place. The company provided points of interest (POI) and foot traffic data on... View Details
- February 2021
- Case
A Cultural Transformation at Southeastern Grocers
By: Suraj Srinivasan, Jonah S. Goldberg and Joseph A. Paul
When Anthony Hucker, the CEO of Southeastern Grocers (SEG), took over in that role in July 2017, the company was in dire financial and operational condition and was headed towards bankruptcy. SEG, the fifth largest grocery chain in the U.S. in early 2021, operated... View Details
- 2021
- Chapter
International Business History and the Strategy of Multinational Enterprises: How History Matters
By: Geoffrey Jones and Teresa da Silva Lopes
This chapter provides an overview of the evolution of international business over the long-run as well as the strategies of MNEs. It highlights how strategies became more complex over time with MNEs moving from being coordinators of resources and managers of... View Details
- January 2021
- Article
The Effects of Menu Costs on Retail Performance: Evidence from Adoption of the Electronic Shelf Label Technology
By: Ioannis Stamatopoulos, Achal Bassamboo and Antonio Moreno
We use the adoption of electronic shelf labels (ESLs) by an international grocery retailer in 2015 to identify the effects of physical menu costs (i.e., labor and material costs of price adjustment) on retail performance. We find that the installation of ESLs increased... View Details
- October 2020
- Article
Task Selection and Workload: A Focus on Completing Easy Tasks Hurts Long-Term Performance
By: Diwas S. KC, Bradley R. Staats, Maryam Kouchaki and Francesca Gino
How individuals manage, organize, and complete their tasks is central to operations management. Recent research in operations focuses on how under conditions of increasing workload individuals can decrease their service time, up to a point, in order to complete work... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Design Rules, Volume 2: How Technology Shapes Organizations: Chapter 6 The Value Structure of Technologies, Part 1: Mapping Functional Relationships
Organizations are formed in a free economy because an individual or group perceives value in carrying out a technical recipe that is beyond the capacity of a single person. Technology specifies what must be done, what resources must be assembled, what actions taken in... View Details
- July 28, 2020
- Article
Economic Vulnerability of Households with Essential Workers
By: Grace McCormack, Christopher Avery, Ariella Kahn-Lang Spitzer and Amitabh Chandra
The label of “essential worker” reflects society’s needs but does not mean that society has compensated those workers for additional risks incurred on the job during the current pandemic. When an essential worker contracts severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus... View Details
- July 2020
- Article
Tell It Like It Is: When Politically Incorrect Language Promotes Authenticity
By: J. Schroeder, M. Rosenblum and F. Gino
When a person’s language appears political—such as being politically correct or incorrect—it can influence fundamental impressions of him or her. Political correctness is “using language or behavior to seem sensitive to others’ feelings, especially those others who... View Details
- February 2020
- Teaching Note
Essential Explorations at MUJI
By: Tomomichi Amano and Das Narayandas
Launched as a private brand in 1980 to counter the increasingly brand-conscious consumer in Japan, MUJI offered beautifully designed, fairly priced, no-frills quality goods. The once modest private label brand with 40 products had expanded significantly by 2019 to more... View Details
- January 2020 (Revised April 2020)
- Teaching Note
Brandless: Disrupting Consumer Packaged Goods
By: Jill Avery
Brandless, an online direct-to-consumer seller of upscale private-label consumer packaged goods (CPG), offered consumers a limited assortment of values-conscious products delivered directly to their homes with the simplicity of one fixed $3.00 price point that promised... View Details
- Article
Detecting Adversarial Attacks via Subset Scanning of Autoencoder Activations and Reconstruction Error
By: Celia Cintas, Skyler Speakman, Victor Akinwande, William Ogallo, Komminist Weldemariam, Srihari Sridharan and Edward McFowland III
Reliably detecting attacks in a given set of inputs is of high practical relevance because of the vulnerability of neural networks to adversarial examples. These altered inputs create a security risk in applications with real-world consequences, such as self-driving... View Details
- 2019
- Working Paper
Design Rules, Volume 2: How Technology Shapes Organizations: Chapter 8 Rationalizing Flow Processes
The purpose of this chapter is to examine the value structure of flow production processes and to explain why it is necessary to rationalize flow processes using the tools of systematic management. I first explain the problems facing managers of multi-step flow... View Details
- 2019
- White Paper
Impact-Weighted Financial Accounts: The Missing Piece for an Impact Economy
By: George Serafeim, T. Robert Zochowski and Jennifer Downing
Reimagining capitalism is an imperative. We need to create a more inclusive and sustainable form of capitalism that works for every person and the planet. Massive environmental damage, growing income and wealth disparity, stress, and depression within developed... View Details
- August 2019 (Revised January 2020)
- Case
Essential Explorations at MUJI
By: Tomomichi Amano, Das Narayandas, Naoko Jinjo and Akiko Kanno
Launched as a private brand in 1980 to counter the increasingly brand-conscious consumer in Japan, MUJI offered beautifully designed, fairly priced, no-frills quality goods. The once modest private label brand with 40 products had expanded significantly by 2019 to more... View Details
- April 2019 (Revised April 2021)
- Case
Wayfair
By: Jeffrey F. Rayport, Susie L. Ma and Matthew G. Preble
In 2016 Niraj Shah and Steve Conine, founders of online home goods retailer Wayfair, are faced with a decision about how to improve user experience on their e-commerce sites. A key driver of consumer interest and conversion to purchase in the home category is visual... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
The Revised-Is-Quality Heuristic: Why Consumers Prefer Products Labeled as Revised
By: Ximena Garcia-Rada, Leslie K. John, Ed O’Brien and Michael I. Norton
From downloading never-ending updates to tracking ever-newer releases, consumers
today are surrounded by revised products that purport to have improved upon their predecessors.
Seven experiments examine when and why consumers rely on a “revised-is-quality”... View Details
- 2018
- Working Paper
Design Rules, Volume 2: How Technology Shapes Organizations: Chapter 6 The Value Structure of Technologies, Part 1: Mapping Functional Relationships
Organizations are formed in a free economy because a person or group perceives value in carrying out a technical recipe that is beyond the capacity of a single person. Technology specifies what must be done, what resources must be assembled, what actions taken, and... View Details
- 2018
- Working Paper
Detecting Anomalies: The Relevance and Power of Standard Asset Pricing Tests
By: Malcolm Baker, Patrick Luo and Ryan Taliaferro
The two standard approaches for identifying capital market anomalies are cross-sectional coefficient tests, in the spirit of Fama and MacBeth (1973), and time-series intercept tests, in the spirit of Jensen (1968). A new signal can pass the first test, which we label a... View Details
- August 2018
- Article
The Effect of Graphic Warnings on Sugary-Drink Purchasing
By: Grant Donnelly, Laura Y. Zatz, Daniel Svirsky and Leslie John
Governments have proposed text warning labels to decrease consumption of sugary drinks – a contributor to chronic diseases like diabetes. However, they may be less effective than more evocative, graphic warning labels. We field-tested the effectiveness of graphic... View Details
- July–August 2018
- Article
From Niche to Mainstream (HBR Case Study)
By: Elie Ofek
A large Japanese snack maker faces challenges in marketing products in the US. Several options for jumpstarting sales are presented. View Details