Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(862)
- Faculty Publications (63)
- Article
The Error at the Heart of Corporate Leadership
By: Joseph L. Bower and Lynn S. Paine
Agency theory, a new model of governance promulgated by academic economists in the 1970s, is behind the idea that corporate managers should make shareholder value their primary concern and that boards should ensure they do. The theory regards shareholders as owners of... View Details
- April 2017
- Case
The Future of Patent Examination at the USPTO
By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Tarun Khanna and Sarah Mehta
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is the federal government agency responsible for evaluating and granting patents and trademarks. In 2015, the USPTO employed approximately 8,000 patent examiners who granted nearly 300,000 patents to inventors. As of April... View Details
Keywords: Machine Learning; Telework; Collaborating With Unions; Human Resources; Recruitment; Retention; Intellectual Property; Copyright; Patents; Trademarks; Knowledge Sharing; Technology Adoption; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Performance Productivity; Performance Improvement; District of Columbia
- March 2017
- Article
Institutional Ownership and Corporate Tax Avoidance: New Evidence
By: Mozaffar N. Khan, Suraj Srinivasan and Liang Tan
We provide new evidence on the agency theory of corporate tax avoidance (Slemrod, 2004; Crocker and Slemrod, 2005; Chen and Chu, 2005) by showing that increases in institutional ownership are associated with increases in tax avoidance. Using the Russell index... View Details
- December 2016 (Revised October 2018)
- Case
U.S. Digital Service
By: Mitchell Weiss, Nick Sinai and Michael Norris
Mikey Dickerson and Haley Van Dyck found themselves far from home and far from certain about where to take the U.S. Digital Service (USDS) next. In the summer of 2015, they had landed in London to meet with Mike Bracken, director of the United Kingdom’s Government... View Details
Keywords: Public Entrepreneurship; Haley Van Dyck; Mikey Dickerson; United States Digital Service; Digital Services; Innovation Teams; Scaling Innovation; 18F; Presidential Innovation Fellows; Government Digital Service; Mike Bracken; Innovation Fellowships; Entrepreneurship; Government Administration; Innovation and Management; United States; United Kingdom
- October 2016 (Revised April 2018)
- Case
DataXu: Selling Ad Tech
By: Frank V. Cespedes, John Deighton, Lisa Cox and Olivia Hull
DataXu served marketers by buying digital advertising for brands using its demand-side platform. It sought a way to build a more predictable revenue stream in the very transactional media marketplace, and hoped that two new marketing analytics products would give it a... View Details
- June 2016
- Case
Big Spaceship: The Evolving Agency
By: Boris Groysberg and Matthew G. Preble
This case discusses the evolution of Big Spaceship, an advertising and marketing agency, from a product-focused business to a relationship-oriented one as clients seek deeper and more meaningful long-term partnerships. The 15-year-old company had already evolved... View Details
- June 2016
- Case
Publicis Groupe 2016: Maurice and the Millennials
By: Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Jonathan Cohen
Having built Publicis Groupe through acquisitions maintained as separate brands, CEO Maurice Lévy wanted to transform the advertising and marketing firm to an integrated digital-ready enterprise to address industry changes. In early 2016, following a reorganization, he... View Details
Keywords: Managing Change; Transformations; Digital; Millennials; Change; Innovation; Acquisitions; Merger; Culture; Advertising Agency; Reorganization; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Information Technology; Change Management; Restructuring; Management Succession; Marketing; Mergers and Acquisitions; Transformation; Innovation and Invention; Digital Marketing; Advertising Industry
- Article
Formal Measures in Informal Management: Can a Balanced Scorecard Change a Culture?
By: Robert Gibbons and Robert S. Kaplan
Agency theorists, historically, have analyzed what kinds of performance measures should be used in formal incentive contracts. For example, after Kaplan-Norton proposed a balanced scorecard of both financial and non-financial measures, some envisioned its role only in... View Details
- September 2014
- Case
Havas: Change Faster
By: Karim R. Lakhani and Michael L. Tushman
As of 2013, Havas was the 6th largest global advertising, digital, and communications group in the world. Headquartered in Paris, France, the group was highly decentralized, with semi-independent agencies in more than 100 countries offering a variety of services. The... View Details
- 2014
- Working Paper
Entrepreneurship as Experimentation
By: William R. Kerr, Ramana Nanda and Matthew Rhodes-Kropf
Entrepreneurship research is on the rise but many questions about its fundamental nature still exist. We argue that entrepreneurship is about experimentation: the probabilities of success are low, extremely skewed and unknowable until an investment is made. At a macro... View Details
- 2014
- Chapter
Bringing Agency Back Into Network Research: Constrained Agency and Network Action
By: Ranjay Gulati and Sameer Srivastava
We propose a framework of constrained agency grounded in the actors' resources and motivations within their structurally constrained context. Structural positions influence the resources available to actors and color the motivations that shape their actions. Resources... View Details
- January 2014
- Case
Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor: India's Road to Prosperity?
By: John Macomber and Vidhya Muthuram
The Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC) was an ambitious $90 billion infrastructure project covering the 1483-km distance between Delhi and Mumbai. The project would create new industrial townships, high speed freight lines, six-lane expressways, airports, ports... View Details
- September–October 2013
- Article
The Role of Organizational Scope and Governance in Strengthening Private Monitoring
By: Lamar Pierce and Michael W. Toffel
Governments and other organizations often outsource activities to achieve cost savings from market competition. Yet such benefits are often accompanied by poor quality resulting from moral hazard, which can be particularly onerous when outsourcing the monitoring and... View Details
Keywords: Crime and Corruption; Decision Choices and Conditions; Corporate Accountability; Governance Compliance; Policy; Management Practices and Processes; Demand and Consumers; Market Design; Market Entry and Exit; Market Transactions; Service Delivery; Service Operations; Business Processes; Organizational Structure; Performance Effectiveness; Performance Expectations; Practice; Transportation; Transportation Industry; Service Industry; United States; New York (state, US)
- August 2013 (Revised October 2013)
- Case
Modern Family Planning: The Business of Circle Surrogacy
By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Blake Landro
The business of surrogacy, a boutique practice with client costs upwards of $100,000, allowed couples and individuals from a variety of backgrounds, ages, and sexual orientations to build families. This case examines Circle Surrogacy (CS), one of the premier surrogacy... View Details
- July 2012
- Case
Droga5: Launching Jay-Z's Decoded
By: Anita Elberse and Kwame Owusu-Kesse
In 2010, David Droga and Andrew Essex, co-founders of advertising agency Droga5, hope to convince both John Meneilly, manager of hip-hop star Shawn Carter—better known as Jay-Z—and a partner in Carter's company Roc Nation and Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of... View Details
- Article
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: Financial Regulation for the Twenty-First Century
By: Leonard J. Kennedy, Patricia A. McCoy and Ethan S. Bernstein
After existing regulatory systems failed to prevent the recent financial crisis, Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, a sweeping reform designed to alleviate the crisis and prevent its recurrence. Out of this Act, the Consumer... View Details
Keywords: Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; Dodd-Frank; CFPB; Financial Crisis; Reform; New Agency; Market-based Approach; Evidence-based Analysis; Innovative Technologies And Transparency Policies; BEST Practices; Government and Politics; Government Administration; Finance; Financial History; Law; Markets; Organizations; Organizational Design; Business and Government Relations; Balance and Stability; Strategy; Financial Services Industry; Banking Industry; United States
- 2012
- Article
Wider dem sauren Mund. Beiersdorfs U.S.-Geschaeft mit der Zahnpastamarke Pebeco
By: G. Jones and Christina Lubinski
This article examines the growth and ultimate demise of the toothpaste brand Pebeco, which was created by the German personal care company Beiersdorf in 1903. The brand was an enormous international success, becoming for a time the largest toothpaste brand in the... View Details
- 9 May 2011 - 11 May 2011
- Conference Presentation
How Firms Respond to Mandatory Information Disclosure
By: Anil Doshi, Michael Toffel and Glen W. S. Dowell
When new institutional pressures arise, which organizations are particularly likely to resist or
acquiesce? When subjected to new information disclosure mandates, an increasingly popular form
of market-based government regulation, which types of organizations are... View Details
- February 2011 (Revised May 2011)
- Case
Utilis: Designing, Producing, and Selling Rapid Deployment Shelters for a Troubled World
By: Herman B. Leonard, Daniela Beyersdorfer and Simon Harrow
How can a company that supplies disaster response and humanitarian agencies best handle the intrinsically unpredictable and highly volatile demand for its products? Utilis is a French supplier of rapid-deploy high-end tent solutions for civilian and military uses (such... View Details
- 2011
- Working Paper
How Foundations Think: The Ford Foundation as a Dominating Institution in the Field of American Business Schools
By: Rakesh Khurana, Kenneth Kimura and Marion Fourcade
The question of institutional change has become central to organizational research (Powell, 2008). Recent scholarship has demonstrated, often through carefully researched cases, that institutions can and sometimes do change. According to this research, there are two... View Details