Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(562)
- Faculty Publications (69)
- Article
The Effects of Media Slant on Firm Behavior
By: Vishal P. Baloria and Jonas Heese
The media can impose reputational costs on firms because of its important role as an information intermediary and its ability to negatively slant coverage. We exploit a quasi-natural experiment that holds constant the information event across firms, but varies the... View Details
- March 2018
- Teaching Note
ISRO: Explore Space or Exploit CubeSats?
ISRO, India’s space agency, established to address domestic challenges with space technology, is one of the six largest space agencies in the world. Through its 59 missions, ISRO has launched numerous satellites for communication, disaster management, navigation,... View Details
- Article
Games of Threats
By: Elon Kohlberg and Abraham Neyman
A game of threats on a finite set of players, N, is a function d that assigns a real number to any coalition, S ⊆ N, such that d(S) = -d(N\S). A game of threats is not necessarily a coalitional game as it may fail to satisfy the condition d(Ø) = 0. We show that analogs... View Details
- October 2017
- Article
Elevating Repositioning Costs: Strategy Dynamics and Competitive Interactions
By: Anoop R. Menon and Dennis Yao
This paper proposes an approach for modeling competitive interactions that incorporates the costs to firms of changing strategy. The costs associated with strategy modifications, which we term “repositioning costs,” are particularly relevant to competitive interactions... View Details
- October 2017
- Article
Toward a Prescriptive Theory of Dynamic Capabilities: Connecting Strategic Choice, Learning, and Competition
By: Gary P. Pisano
The field of strategy has mounted an enormous effort to understand, define, predict, and measure how organizational capabilities shape competitive advantage. While the notion that capabilities influence strategy dates back to the work of Andrews (1971, The Concept... View Details
- 2017
- Working Paper
The Effects of Media Slant on Firm Behavior
By: Vishal P. Baloria and Jonas Heese
The media can impose reputational costs on firms because of its important role as an information intermediary and its ability to negatively slant coverage. We exploit a quasi-natural experiment that holds constant the information event across firms, but varies the... View Details
- August 2017
- Article
A Formal Theory of Strategy
What makes a decision strategic? When is strategy most important? This paper formally studies these questions, starting from a (functional) definition of strategy as “the smallest set of choices to optimally guide (or force) other choices.” The paper shows that this... View Details
- 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
- 2017
- Working Paper
Cooperative Strategic Games
By: Elon Kohlberg and Abraham Neyman
We examine a solution concept, called the “value," for n-person strategic games. In applications, the value provides an a-priori assessment of the monetary worth of a player's position in a strategic game, comprising not only the player's contribution to the total... View Details
Keywords: Game Theory
- September–October 2016
- Article
Growing New Corporate Businesses: From Initiation to Graduation
By: Sebastian Raisch and Michael Tushman
Large companies initiate many new businesses, but few of them reach scale. The ambidexterity literature describes how companies create exploratory businesses, but says little about how they subsequently scale these businesses. The strategy literature uses real option... View Details
- June 2016 (Revised November 2021)
- Case
chotuKool: 'Little Cool,' Big Opportunity
By: Rory McDonald, Derek van Bever and Efosa Ojomo
In 2013, a team led by Gopalan Sunderraman, vice president of corporate development at Godrej & Boyce Mfg. Co. Ltd.—one of the companies owned by Godrej Group, a large Indian conglomerate—was preparing to launch an innovative low-cost refrigerator. Developed expressly... View Details
- 2016
- Working Paper
Towards a Prescriptive Theory of Dynamic Capabilities: Connecting Strategic Choice, Learning, and Competition
By: Gary P. Pisano
The field of strategy has mounted an enormous effort to understand, define, predict, and measure how organizational capabilities shape competitive advantage. While the notion that capabilities influence strategy dates back to the work of Andrews (1971), attempts to... View Details
Keywords: Competitive Advantage
- 2016
- Article
Recursive Mentalizing and Common Knowledge in the Bystander Effect
By: Kyle A. Thomas, Julian De Freitas, Peter DiScioli and Steven Pinker
The more potential helpers there are, the less likely any individual is to help. A traditional explanation
for this bystander effect is that responsibility diffuses across the multiple bystanders, diluting the responsibility of each. We investigate an... View Details
- March–April 2016
- Article
Scrutiny, Norms, and Selective Disclosure: A Global Study of Greenwashing
By: Christopher Marquis, Michael W. Toffel and Yanhua Zhou
Under increased pressure to report environmental impacts, some firms selectively disclose relatively benign impacts, creating an impression of transparency while masking their true performance. We identify key company- and country-level factors that limit firms' use of... View Details
- Article
The Lives and Deaths of Jobs: Technical Interdependence and Survival in a Job Structure
By: Sharique Hasan, John-Paul Ferguson and Rembrand Koning
Prior work has considered the properties of individual jobs that make them more or less likely to survive in organizations. Yet little research examines how a job’s position within a larger job structure affects its life chances and thus the evolution of the... View Details
- 2015
- Working Paper
A Normative Theory of Dynamic Capabilities: Connecting Strategy, Know-How, and Competition
By: Gary P. Pisano
The field of strategy has mounted an enormous effort to understand, define, predict, and measure how organizational capabilities shape competitive advantage. While the notion that capabilities influence strategy dates back to the work of Andrews (1971), attempts to... View Details
- 2015
- Chapter
Innovating without Information Constraints: Organization, Communities, and Innovation when Information Costs Approach Zero
By: Elizabeth J. Altman, Frank Nagle and Michael Tushman
Innovation has traditionally taken place within an organization's boundaries and/or with selected partners. This Chandlerian approach to innovation has been rooted in transaction costs, organizational boundaries, and information processing challenges associated with... View Details
- 2015
- Working Paper
The Cooperative Solution of Stochastic Games
By: Elon Kohlberg and Abraham Neyman
Building on the work of Nash, Harsanyi, and Shapley, we define a cooperative solution for strategic games that takes account of both the competitive and the cooperative aspects of such games. We prove existence in the general (NTU) case and uniqueness in the TU... View Details
- February 2015
- Article
Location Choices under Strategic Interactions
By: Juan Alcacer, Cristian Dezso and Minyuan Zhao
The literature on location choices has mostly emphasized the impact of location and firm characteristics. However, most industries with a significant presence of multi-location firms are oligopolistic in nature, which suggests that strategic interaction among firms... View Details
- 2015
- Conference Presentation
The Strategic Bystander: Recursive Theory of Mind and Common Knowledge in Decisions to Help
By: J. De Freitas, K. A. Thomas, P. DeScioli and S. Pinker