Publications
Publications
Show Results For
- All HBS Web
(432)
- Faculty Publications (126)
- April 27, 2020
- Article
A Crisis Playbook for Family Businesses
By: Josh Baron and Ben Francois
In a business crisis, the power of family business owners is magnified. Unlike public companies, which typically focus on maximizing shareholder value, family owners value objectives that usually go well beyond financial returns (e.g., family legacy, reputation). This... View Details
- April 2023
- Article
A Field Experiment on Subgoal Framing to Boost Volunteering: The Trade-off Between Goal Granularity and Flexibility
By: Aneesh Rai, Marissa A. Sharif, Edward H. Chang, Katherine L. Milkman and Angela L. Duckworth
Research suggests that breaking overarching goals into more granular subgoals is beneficial for goal progress. However, making goals more granular often involves reducing the flexibility provided to complete them, and recent work shows that flexibility can also be... View Details
- 2023
- Chapter
Organizational Development
By: Min Basadur, Tim Basadur and Goran Calic
Our review of the field of Organizational Development (OD) reveals an extensive range of tools which attempt to help organizations improve performance. We believe that OD should be studied differently: As a continuous process of change-making or innovation. How this... View Details
- August 2022
- Article
Availability of New Medicines in the U.S. and Germany From 2004 to 2018
By: Katharina Blankart, Huseyin Naci and Amitabh Chandra
Importance: Germany's unique approach to coverage determination and pricing has ensured that effective medicines remain on the market, often at prices reduced through negotiation. However, less is known about trade-offs of this approach with regard to initial... View Details
- 2022
- Chapter
Of Learning and Forgetting: Centrism, Populism, and the Legitimacy Crisis of Globalization
By: Rawi Abdelal
Every order is a bargain with disappointments and trade-offs. Thus is every order an unstable equilibrium. The first era of globalization, circa 1870–1914, created both international prosperity and domestic instability. That instability was fully realized during the... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
THEMIS: A Framework for Cost-Benefit Analysis of COVID-19 Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions
By: Dimitris Bertsimas, Michael Lingzhi Li and Saksham Soni
Since December 2019, the world has been ravaged by the COVID-19 pandemic, with over 150 million confirmed cases and 3 million confirmed deaths worldwide. To combat the spread of COVID-19, governments have issued unprecedented non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs),... View Details
Keywords: COVID-19; Health Pandemics; Policy; Framework; Cost vs Benefits; Outcome or Result; United States; Germany; Brazil; Singapore; Spain
- January 2022
- Technical Note
Ethical Analysis: Well-Being and Rights
By: Nien-hê Hsieh and Christopher Diak
This note introduces students to two central concepts for ethical analysis: well-being and rights. It illustrates ways in which they figure in managerial decisions and challenges that arise, including how to frame trade-offs across individual well-being and... View Details
- September 2021
- Article
Trials and Terminations: Learning from Competitors' R&D Failures
I analyze project continuation decisions where firms may resolve uncertainty through news about competitors' research and development (R&D) failures, as well as through their own results. I examine the trade-offs and interactions between product-market competition and... View Details
- August 2021
- Article
Voter Mobilization and Trust in Electoral Institutions: Evidence from Kenya
By: Benjamin Marx, Vincent Pons and Tavneet Suri
Voter mobilization campaigns face trade-offs in young democracies. In a large-scale experiment implemented in 2013 with the Kenyan Electoral Commission (IEBC), text messages intended to mobilize voters boosted participation but also decreased trust in electoral... View Details
- July 2021
- Article
Creating Exercise Habits Using Incentives: The Trade-off Between Flexibility and Routinization
By: John Beshears, Hae Nim Lee, Katherine L. Milkman, Robert Mislavsky and Jessica Wisdom
Habits involve regular, cue-triggered routines. In a field experiment, we tested whether incentivizing exercise routines—paying participants each time they visit the gym within a planned, daily two-hour window—leads to more persistent exercise than offering flexible... View Details
- July 2021
- Article
Redistribution through Markets
By: Piotr Dworczak, Scott Duke Kominers and Mohammad Akbarpour
Policymakers frequently use price regulations as a response to inequality in the markets they control. In this paper, we examine the optimal structure of such policies from the perspective of mechanism design. We study a buyer-seller market in which agents have private... View Details
- Article
The Economic Consequences of Bankruptcy Reform
By: Tal Gross, Raymond Kluender, Feng Liu, Matthew J. Notowidigdo and Jialan Wang
A more generous consumer bankruptcy system provides greater insurance against financial risks but may also raise the cost of credit. We study this trade-off using the 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (BAPCPA), which increased the costs of... View Details
- Article
Does Observability Amplify Sensitivity to Moral Frames? Evaluating a Reputation-Based Account of Moral Preferences
By: Valerio Capraro, Jillian J. Jordan and Ben Tappin
A growing body of work suggests that people are sensitive to moral framing in economic games involving prosociality, suggesting that people hold moral preferences for doing the “right thing”. What gives rise to these preferences? Here, we evaluate the explanatory power... View Details
- 2021
- Article
Fair Influence Maximization: A Welfare Optimization Approach
By: Aida Rahmattalabi, Shahin Jabbari, Himabindu Lakkaraju, Phebe Vayanos, Max Izenberg, Ryan Brown, Eric Rice and Milind Tambe
Several behavioral, social, and public health interventions, such as suicide/HIV prevention or community preparedness against natural disasters, leverage social network information to maximize outreach. Algorithmic influence maximization techniques have been proposed... View Details
- March 2021 (Revised August 2024)
- Case
Hotwire.com: Navigating Through Turbulence
By: Jeffrey F. Rayport, Manny de Zarraga and Eric Levine
On September 10, 2001, after speaking at an industry conference at New York’s World Trade Center, Hotwire co-founder Spencer Rascoff boarded a flight from Newark to San Francisco. After returning home, Rascoff awoke the next morning to a phone call informing him that... View Details
Keywords: September 11; Corporate Entrepreneurship; Business Growth and Maturation; Disruption; Decisions; Job Cuts and Outsourcing; Growth Management; Digital Platforms; Problems and Challenges; Risk and Uncertainty; Expansion; Internet and the Web; Leading Change; Leadership Style; Air Transportation Industry; Tourism Industry; San Francisco
- 2021
- Working Paper
Population Interference in Panel Experiments
By: Iavor I Bojinov, Kevin Wu Han and Guillaume Basse
The phenomenon of population interference, where a treatment assigned to one experimental unit affects another experimental unit's outcome, has received considerable attention in standard randomized experiments. The complications produced by population interference in... View Details
- 2021
- Working Paper
Does Observability Amplify Sensitivity to Moral Frames? Evaluating a Reputation-Based Account of Moral Preferences
By: Valerio Capraro, Jillian J. Jordan and Ben Tappin
A growing body of work suggests that people are sensitive to moral framing in economic games involving prosociality, suggesting that people hold moral preferences for doing the “right thing”. What gives rise to these preferences? Here, we evaluate the explanatory power... View Details
- December 2020 (Revised March 2022)
- Teaching Note
Forecasting ClimaCell
By: Joshua Lev Krieger, Christopher Stanton and James Barnett
A weather technology startup, ClimaCell considers the R&D trade-offs and financing implications of pursuing a proposed contract with a major automobile maker, rather than continuing its focus on building a scalable, all-purpose weather prediction engine. View Details
- 2020
- Conference Presentation
An Empirical Study of the Trade-Offs Between Interpretability and Fairness
By: Shahin Jabbari, Han-Ching Ou, Himabindu Lakkaraju and Milind Tambe
- 2020
- Working Paper
Dog Eat Dog: Balancing Network Effects and Differentiation in a Digital Platform Merger
By: Chiara Farronato, Jessica Fong and Andrey Fradkin
Digital platforms are increasingly the subject of regulatory scrutiny. In comparison to multiple competitors, a single platform may increase consumer welfare if network effects are large or may decrease welfare due to higher prices or reduction in platform variety. We... View Details