Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(708)
- Faculty Publications (104)
- July 2023 (Revised October 2024)
- Case
Revenue Recognition at Stride Funding: Making Sense of Revenues for a Fintech Startup
By: Paul M. Healy and Jung Koo Kang
The case explores the challenges of revenue recognition and financial reporting for Stride Funding (Stride), a fintech startup that has disrupted the student loan market. Stride leveraged proprietary machine learning and financial models to underwrite alternative... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Keep Your Enemies Closer: Strategic Platform Adjustments during U.S. and French Elections
By: Rafael Di Tella, Randy Kotti, Caroline Le Pennec and Vincent Pons
A key tenet of representative democracy is that politicians' discourse and policies should follow voters' preferences. In the median voter theorem, this outcome emerges as candidates strategically adjust their platform to get closer to their opponent. Despite its... View Details
- July 2023
- Article
So, Who Likes You? Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment
By: Ravi Bapna, Edward McFowland III, Probal Mojumder, Jui Ramaprasad and Akhmed Umyarov
With one-third of marriages in the United States beginning online, online dating platforms have become important curators of the modern social fabric. Prior work on online dating has elicited two critical frictions in the heterosexual dating market. Women, governed by... View Details
- June 2023
- Teaching Note
Agricultural Revolution without a Land Revolution: The Megafarms of CP Group
By: William C. Kirby and Noah B. Truwit
Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 316-150. The case introduces students to an innovative new agricultural venture on the outskirts of Beijing. It can be used as a platform to discuss broader issues of agricultural policy reform and regional disparities in social and... View Details
- June 2023
- Case
ByteDance: TikTok and the Trials of Going Viral in 2023
By: William C. Kirby, Noah B. Truwit and John P. McHugh
In March 2023, Chew, with an army of well-paid U.S. lobbyists and TikTok creators, descended on Washington. In his testimony, he planned to highlight the 150 million daily active American users on TikTok and how the platform had benefitted small business owners and... View Details
- February 2023
- Supplement
Astyanax Kanakakis at norbloc: A Founder's Experience with the DIFC Fintech Hive
By: Linda A. Hill and Lydia Begag
norbloc was founded in 2016 in Stockholm, Sweden, by Astyanax Kanakakis and his co-founders, Vitalii Demianets and Sam Saatchi. Kanakakis and Demianets got to work to address a key gap in the industry: Know Your Customer (KYC) data sharing. As the first distributed KYC... View Details
Keywords: Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Design; Organizational Culture; Organizational Structure; Organizations; Leadership; Leadership Development; Leadership Style; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Digital Transformation; Digital Strategy; Digital Platforms; Technology Adoption; Technological Innovation; Corporate Entrepreneurship; Business and Government Relations; Business Startups; Financial Services Industry; Technology Industry; Banking Industry; Information Technology Industry; Sweden; Europe; Singapore; London; United Arab Emirates; Dubai; Middle East; Athens; Greece
- December 2022 (Revised January 2023)
- Case
Cann: High Hopes for Cannabis Infused Beverages
By: Ayelet Israeli and Anne V. Wilson
Founded in 2018 by Jake Bullock and Luke Anderson, Cann sold “social tonics,” or cannabis-infused beverages. By 2022, the company had several notable celebrity investors and talent partners, had sold over 10 million beverages to consumers, was distributing in six... View Details
Keywords: Stigma; Product Innovation; Product Introduction; Product Differentiation; New Products; New Product Marketing; New Product Management; Brand Management; Branding; Packaging; Positioning; Growth Strategy And Execution; Growth; Cannabis Industry; Purpose; Purpose Brands; LGBTQ; Direct-to-consumer; DTC; Regulations; Channels Of Distribution; Product Development; Product Marketing; Product Positioning; Product; Innovation and Invention; Brands and Branding; Marketing; Marketing Communications; Marketing Channels; Advertising; Advertising Campaigns; Digital Marketing; Market Entry and Exit; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Consumer Products Industry; Food and Beverage Industry; United States; Canada; North America
- December 2022 (Revised June 2023)
- Case
Hacking the U.S. Election: Russia's Misinformation Campaign
By: Shikhar Ghosh
The case discusses the relatively low technology approach used by Russia to influence the U.S. Presidential Election in 2016. Although political parties manipulating the media was not a new phenomenon, the Russians ran a broad, well-financed, and sophisticated social... View Details
- December 2022
- Supplement
Freelancer, Ltd. Case Supplement
By: Christopher Stanton, Karim R. Lakhani, Jin Hyun Paik and Nina Cohodes
Over the course of the 2010s, the rapid advancement of mobile technologies and the rise of online freelancing platforms seemed to portend a radical transformation of labor markets into on-demand, flexible talent pools. Even though several Fortune 500 companies,... View Details
Keywords: Labor Markets; Freelancers; Change Management; Corporate Entrepreneurship; Globalized Firms and Management; Human Capital; Employment; Digital Platforms; Global Range; Adoption; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Growth and Development Strategy; Computer Industry; Electronics Industry; Employment Industry; Information Industry; Australia; United States; Philippines
- November 2022 (Revised December 2024)
- Case
Hugging Face (A): Serving AI on a Platform
By: Shane Greenstein, Daniel Yue, Sarah Gulick and Kerry Herman
It is fall 2022, and open-source AI model company Hugging Face is considering its three areas of priorities: platform development, supporting the open-source community, and pursuing cutting-edge scientific research. As it expands services for enterprise clients, which... View Details
- October 2022 (Revised October 2022)
- Case
Lyra Health: Transforming Mental Health
By: Rembrand Koning and Nicole Keller
In January 2022, Lyra Health was deciding between several different alternatives to grow the business. Founded in 2015, Lyra Health, was a digital mental health platform that combined technology with human therapists and coaches to deliver high quality mental health... View Details
- September 2022 (Revised August 2023)
- Case
Audrey Tang: Using Technology to Strengthen Democracy in Taiwan
By: Shikhar Ghosh and Shweta Bagai
Since the early days of the internet, Taiwan had a vibrant community of civic hackers and open-source programmers who engaged with social issues. Audrey Tang was one of them. She spearheaded the 2014 Sunflower Student Movement in Taiwan, where protestors peacefully... View Details
- August 2022
- Case
SuperRare: Turning an NFT Marketplace into a DAO
By: Jeffrey J. Bussgang, Scott Duke Kominers and Amy Klopfenstein
In June 2021, John Crain and Jonathan Perkins, the founders of SuperRare, a marketplace for non-fungible tokens (NFTs), contemplate whether to transform their company into a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). Crain and Perkins founded SuperRare in 2018 to... View Details
Keywords: NFTs; Crypto Economy; Alternative Assets; DAOs; Arts; Governance; Governance Controls; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Information Technology; Technology Adoption; Internet and the Web; Digital Platforms; Innovation and Invention; Technological Innovation; Disruptive Innovation; Finance; Currency; Investment; Markets; Auctions; Bids and Bidding; Demand and Consumers; Network Effects; Market Design; Market Transactions; Market Timing; Web Services Industry; North and Central America; United States
- July 2022
- Case
Metaverse Seoul
By: Mitchell Weiss and Samantha Markowitz
In May 2022, the Seoul Metropolitan Government (SMG) launched the pilot of Metaverse Seoul, a government-run metaverse. SMG had delivered a virtual version of Seoul’s mayor’s office. The team aimed to gain insights as they worked towards building a broad, immersive,... View Details
- July 28, 2022
- Article
DAO Governance Attacks, and How to Avoid Them
By: Pranav Garimidi, Scott Duke Kominers and Tim Roughgarden
Many web3 projects embrace permissionless voting using a fungible and tradable native token. Permissionless voting can offer many benefits, from lowering barriers to entry to increasing competition. Token holders can use their tokens to vote on a range of issues—from... View Details
- May 2022
- Case
TikTok and National Security: Investment in an Age of Data Sovereignty?
By: Jeremy Friedman, Sarah Bauerle Danzman and David Lane
This case covers TikTok’s purchase of Musical.ly and the reaction of the United States government, including the review of the purchase by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) and the reaction of the presidential administration of Donald... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
Small Campaign Donors
By: Laurent Bouton, Julia Cagé, Edgard Dewitte and Vincent Pons
In this paper, we study the characteristics and behavior of small donors, and compare them to those of large donors. We first build a novel dataset including all the 340 million individual contributions reported to the U.S. Federal Election Commission between 2005 and... View Details
- March 2022
- Article
From Proprietary to Collective Governance: How Do Platform Participation Strategies Evolve?
By: Siobhan O'Mahony and Rebecca Karp
When platform leaders change the rules guiding who can access and control a platform, the strategies of those who create value from the platform can be upended. Little research examines how platform participants adapt their strategies when a platform leader changes the... View Details
- February 2022 (Revised November 2022)
- Case
Fondeadora
By: Álvaro Rodríguez Arregui and Mitchell Weiss
Norman Müller and René Serrano, cofounders of Fondeadora, a Mexican “neobank,” had lined up a $12.5 million in Series A funding round in 2020 only to run into a major obstacle: The lead investor was Gradient Ventures, a venture firm launched by Alphabet, Inc., and... View Details
- January 2022 (Revised April 2025)
- Case
Steem Versus Hive: Testing Blockchain Governance
By: Shikhar Ghosh and Shweta Bagai
This case examines a pivotal governance conflict that occurred in 2020 when Justin Sun, founder of the TRON blockchain, acquired Steemit Inc., the company behind a popular social media platform operating on the Steem blockchain. Steem, launched in 2016 by Daniel... View Details