Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(2,535)
- Faculty Publications (197)
- May 2023
- Article
Incentive Effects of Subjective Allocations of Rewards and Penalties
By: Wei Cai, Susanna Gallani and Jee-Eun Shin
We examine the incentive effects of subjectivity in allocating tournament-based rewards and punishments. We use data from a company where reward and punishment decisions are based on a combination of objective metrics and subjective performance assessments. Rankings... View Details
- 2023
- Article
Estimating Causal Peer Influence in Homophilous Social Networks by Inferring Latent Locations.
By: Edward McFowland III and Cosma Rohilla Shalizi
Social influence cannot be identified from purely observational data on social networks, because such influence is generically confounded with latent homophily, that is, with a node’s network partners being informative about the node’s attributes and therefore its... View Details
- December 2022 (Revised February 2023)
- Case
Akooda: Charging Toward Operational Intelligence
By: Christopher T. Stanton and Mel Martin
The Akooda case describes the challenges confronting founder and CEO Yuval Gonczarowski (MBA ‘17) in 2022 as he attempts to boost sales. Launched in November 2020, Akooda was an AI company that mined 20 different sources of digital data, from tools like Slack, Google... View Details
- November–December 2022
- Article
The Value of Descriptive Analytics: Evidence from Online Retailers
By: Ron Berman and Ayelet Israeli
Does the adoption of descriptive analytics impact online retailer performance, and if so, how? We use the synthetic difference-in-differences method to analyze the staggered adoption of a retail analytics dashboard by more than 1,500 e-commerce websites, and we find an... View Details
- October 2022
- Case
An Heir with No Spare: The Deitch Family Office
By: Lauren Cohen and Grace Headinger
Joe and Matt Deitch, father and son, knew it was time to start their own family office. Matthew had recently joined his father at the family’s three enterprises, and they both realized that their family’s needs had grown increasingly complex over the years. In search... View Details
Keywords: Family Office; Philanthropy; Charitable Giving; Family; Family Business; Talent and Talent Management; Entrepreneurship; Governance; Values and Beliefs; Job Search; Organizational Design; Organizational Structure; Family Ownership; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; Family and Family Relationships; Financial Services Industry; Real Estate Industry; Technology Industry; United States; Massachusetts; Boston; Florida; Miami
- 2022
- Working Paper
Communicating Corporate Culture in Labor Markets: Evidence from Job Postings
We examine how firms craft their job postings to convey information about their culture and
whether doing so helps attract employees. We utilize state-of-the-art machine learning methods to
develop a comprehensive dictionary of key corporate values across the near... View Details
- October 2022
- Case
Star Magnolia Capital: Becoming Experts at Finding Experts
By: Lauren Cohen, Hao Gao, River Ewing and Grace Headinger
Shinya Deguchi, Founder and Managing Partner of Star Magnolia Capital, a Shanghai-based multi-family office (MFO), considered how to convince a new prospective family that the MFO’s endowment model approach would best suit their needs. In recent decades, there has been... View Details
- September 10, 2022
- Article
NFT Sales: Clearing the Market, Avoiding Gas Wars
By: Scott Duke Kominers and Tim Roughgarden
Instead of letting the market decide the price for their primary sale offerings, many NFT projects choose to initially sell their NFTs at prices below the market-clearing level. But what happens when market designers trade off efficiency for equity; or when demand far... View Details
- September 2022
- Article
Human Versus Machine: A Comparison of Robo-Analyst and Traditional Research Analyst Investment Recommendations
By: Braiden Coleman, Kenneth J. Merkley and Joseph Pacelli
We provide the first comprehensive analysis of the properties of investment recommendations generated by “Robo-Analysts,” which are human analyst-assisted computer programs conducting automated research analysis. Our results indicate that Robo-Analyst recommendations... View Details
- March 2022 (Revised September 2022)
- Case
Can Papaya Global Keep Scaling Fast?
By: Daniel Isenberg and William R. Kerr
Companies that employ people all around the world also need to pay those people. That can be an exceedingly complex task, though - defining terms of employment, complying with global regulations, and working with huge quantities of data, among other obstacles,... View Details
- March 2022
- Case
In Data We Trust: Be Mobile Africa and Furthering Financial Inclusion Across the African Continent
By: Lauren Cohen, Grace Headinger and Pierre Marchesseault
To Cédric Jeannot, leveraging technology to promote financial inclusion was personal. After no established financial institution would accept his technology platform to lower transaction costs for free, Jeannot launched FinTech company Be Mobile Africa in May 2020.... View Details
Keywords: Finance; Fintech; Emerging Market; Fundraising; Financial Inclusion; Strategy; Expansion; Management; Entrepreneurship; Personal Finance; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Growth and Development Strategy; Financial Services Industry; Banking Industry; Africa; Togo; Nigeria; Ghana
- March 2022 (Revised December 2022)
- Case
Perch
By: Jeffrey F. Rayport, Stacy Straaberg and Julia Kelley
In May 2021, Perch CEO Chris Bell needed to decide whether his e-commerce aggregator company, which bought and scaled Amazon Marketplace brands, should acquire up to three acquisition targets. The prospective acquisitions, Web Deals Direct, HomeCo, and Future Brands,... View Details
Keywords: Business Ventures; Acquisition; Business Growth and Maturation; Decision Making; Cost vs Benefits; Decision Choices and Conditions; Decisions; Management; Growth and Development Strategy; Strategy; Business Strategy; Integration; E-commerce; Consumer Products Industry; Retail Industry; Technology Industry; North America; United States; Massachusetts; Boston; California; Asia; Philippines
- Article
When Seeking Help, Women and Racial/Ethnic Minorities Benefit from Explicitly Stating Their Identity
By: Erika L. Kirgios, Aneesh Rai, Edward H. Chang and Katherine L. Milkman
Receiving help can make or break a career, but women and racial/ethnic minorities do not always receive the support they seek. Across two audit experiments—one with politicians and another with students—as well as an online experiment (total n = 5,145), we test whether... View Details
- January 2022
- Case
Fueling a Cleaner Future: ACWA Power and Green Hydrogen
By: Dennis Yao and Alpana Thapar
In January 2020, Paddy Padmanathan, president and CEO of ACWA Power, was reflecting on the company’s sixteen-year record of success and thinking about its future growth plans. Founded in 2004, ACWA Power was a Saudi Arabian developer, owner, and operator of power and... View Details
- November 2021
- Case
Tommy Hilfiger Adaptive: Fashion for All
By: Elizabeth A. Keenan, Sandra J. Sucher and Shalene Gupta
In Fall 2017, Tommy Hilfiger launched Tommy Hilfiger Adaptive, a line of adaptive and inclusive fashion apparel intended to make dressing easier. Now, Tommy Hilfiger is planning to launch Tommy Hilfiger Adaptive internationally in early 2020. The prospect of making... View Details
Keywords: Marketing And Society; Brands; Fashion; Inclusion; Consumer; Corporate Social Responsibility; Retail; Apparel; Disability; Accessibility; Marketing; Brands and Branding; Marketing Communications; Product Marketing; Social Marketing; Product Launch; Product Positioning; Marketing Strategy; Social Enterprise; Society; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Social Issues; Consumer Behavior; Fashion Industry; Consumer Products Industry; Apparel and Accessories Industry; Retail Industry; United States; North America
- September 2021
- Case
Posse Foundation: Developing Strong Leaders from Diverse Backgrounds
By: John J-H Kim, Robin Mendelson and Julia Kelley
Founded in 1989, Posse Foundation was a nonprofit organization with a mission of developing future leaders who reflected the U.S.’s rich diversity. The organization ran a selective, localized admissions process in 10 U.S. cities to identify outstanding students with... View Details
Keywords: COVID-19 Pandemic; Education; Higher Education; Decision Making; Demographics; Diversity; Ethnicity; Income; Race; Values and Beliefs; Geography; Geographic Scope; Growth and Development; Leadership; Leading Change; Goals and Objectives; Growth and Development Strategy; Mission and Purpose; Partners and Partnerships; Social Enterprise; Nonprofit Organizations; Identity; Social Issues; Wealth and Poverty; Expansion; Education Industry; North and Central America; United States
- 2021
- White Paper
Hidden Workers: Untapped Talent
By: Joseph B. Fuller, Manjari Raman, Eva Sage-Gavin and Kristen Hines
Companies are increasingly desperate for workers. As they continue to struggle to find people with the skills they need, their competitiveness and growth prospects are put at risk.
At the same time, an enormous and growing group of people are unemployed or... View Details
- Article
What Evolution Can Teach Us About Innovation
By: Noubar Afeyan and Gary P. Pisano
Many people believe that the process for achieving breakthrough innovations is chaotic, random, and unmanageable. But that view is flawed, the authors argue. Breakthroughs can be systematically generated using a process modeled on the principles that drive evolution in... View Details
- August 2021
- Case
Livongo: Scaling a Purpose-Driven Organization in Healthcare
By: Ranjay Gulati, Aseem Shukla and Reva Nohria
When seasoned entrepreneur Glen Tullman founded the chronic health care startup Livongo in 2014, it was personal. His son lived with diabetes, and Tullman knew firsthand how taxing it could be to manage such an unrelenting disease. Livongo set out to empower people... View Details
- May 2021
- Article
Choice Architecture in Physician–patient Communication: A Mixed-methods Assessment of Physicians' Competency
By: J. Hart, K. Yadav, S. Szymanski, A. Summer, A. Tannenbaum, J. Zlatev, D. Daniels and S.D. Halpern
Background: Clinicians’ use of choice architecture, or how they present options, systematically influences the choices made by patients and their surrogate decision makers. However, clinicians may incompletely understand this influence.... View Details