Publications
Publications
Show Results For
- All HBS Web
(2,213)
- Faculty Publications (588)
- July 2024 (Revised December 2024)
- Background Note
District Heating: An Overview
By: Willy Shih and Michael W. Toffel
This note provides an overview of district heating: systems in which central plants generate heat that is conveyed by steam or water through a set of insulated pipes to send heat to residential and/or commercial buildings. It describes key elements of the system (heat... View Details
- July–August 2024
- Article
Doing More with Less: Overcoming Ineffective Long-Term Targeting Using Short-Term Signals
By: Ta-Wei Huang and Eva Ascarza
Firms are increasingly interested in developing targeted interventions for customers with the best response,
which requires identifying differences in customer sensitivity, typically through the conditional average treatment
effect (CATE) estimation. In theory, to... View Details
- June 2024 (Revised August 2024)
- Case
Cementos Argos in the U.S.: Go Big or Go Home?
By: Jorge Tamayo, Ruth Costas, Pedro Levindo and Karina Souza
In April 2011, Colombian group Cementos Argos had to decide on whether to double down its business in the U.S., amidst the U.S. cement industry’s lowest performance in 30 years. Argos— Colombia’s leading cement producer and one of the “jewels” of Grupo GEA, the... View Details
Keywords: Mergers and Acquisitions; Business Organization; Business Subsidiaries; Talent and Talent Management; Cost vs Benefits; Financial Crisis; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues; Global Strategy; Business Strategy; Construction Industry; Construction Industry; Latin America; South America; North and Central America; United States; Colombia
- June 2024
- Case
Vinalhaven: The Downtown Project
By: Richard S. Ruback, Matthew Preble, Ruth Page and Dave Habeeb
Vinalhaven is an island community located approximately 12 miles off the coast of Maine. The island has a year-round population of about 1,300 people as of 2022, with an additional 3,000 people who reside on the island in the summer months. The two largest industries... View Details
- June 2024
- Case
Building Innovation at VINCI
By: Dennis Campbell, Aluna Wang and Carlota Moniz
This case study explores how the VINCI Group, a French multinational operating in concessions, energy, and construction, bolstered awareness and adoption rates of new technologies within the organization. Through its separate innovation hub, Leonard, VINCI aimed to... View Details
Keywords: Business Model; Business Organization; Decisions; Business Earnings; Business Strategy; Competition; Energy; Corporate Entrepreneurship; Values and Beliefs; Global Range; Global Strategy; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues; Multinational Firms and Management; Globalized Markets and Industries; Corporate Accountability; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Disruptive Innovation; Innovation and Management; Innovation Strategy; Technological Innovation; Knowledge Sharing; Organizational Culture; Technology Adoption; Innovation Leadership; Organizational Structure; Construction Industry; Construction Industry; Construction Industry; France; Europe
- June 2024
- Article
Defining Who You Are by Whom You Serve? Strategies for Prosocial–Professional Identity Integration with Clients
By: Lakshmi Ramarajan and Julie Yen
Many professionals want to both achieve professional success and contribute to society. Yet, in some professional contexts, these aims are in tension because serving elite clients is considered the pinnacle of professional success, but professionals themselves may view... View Details
- May 2024
- Article
Relational Attributions for One’s Own Resilience Predict Compassion for Others
By: Rachel Ruttan, Ting Zhang, Sivahn Barli and Katherine DeCelles
Existing work on attribution theory distinguishes between external and internal attributions (i.e., “I overcame adversity due to luck” vs. “my own effort”). We introduce the construct of relational resilience attributions (i.e., “due to help from other people”) as a... View Details
- Spring 2024
- Article
The Evolution of Banking in the 21st Century: Evidence and Regulatory Implications
By: Samuel Gregory Hanson, Victoria Ivashina, Laura Nicolae, Jeremy C. Stein, Adi Sunderam and Daniel K. Tarullo
As revealed by the failures of three regional banks in the spring of 2023, bank runs are not a thing of the past. To inform the ongoing discussion of the appropriate regulatory response, we examine trends in the banking industry over the last twenty-five years. On the... View Details
- March 2024 (Revised July 2024)
- Case
H2 Green Steel: A Clean-Tech Triple Play?
By: Debora L. Spar, Gunnar Trumbull, Henry Tao and Julia Comeau
At the end of 2023, the Swedish startup H2 Green Steel was mid-way through construction on an integrated steel plant in Northern Sweden that would use abundant local hydro power to create Europe’s first commercial-scale green steel. Their goal was to help European... View Details
- March 2024 (Revised April 2024)
- Supplement
From 'BIG' Ideas to Sustainable Impact at ICL Group (B)
By: Linda A. Hill and Lydia Begag
In August 2023, Raviv Zoller, CEO of ICL Group, discussed his upcoming business trip to St. Louis with Eduard Croitoru, VP of ICL Corporate Initiatives, to commemorate the construction of ICL's new $400 million advanced manufacturing facility. In preparation for the... View Details
Keywords: Change Management; Agribusiness; Accounting; Communication; Renewable Energy; Chemicals; Machinery and Machining; Metals and Minerals; Mining; Social Entrepreneurship; Corporate Entrepreneurship; Values and Beliefs; Environmental Sustainability; Natural Resources; Globalization; Information Technology; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Leadership; Organizational Culture; Personal Development and Career; Partners and Partnerships; Manufacturing Industry; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Chemical Industry; Battery Industry; Israel; United States; China
- 2023
- Working Paper
Design-Based Inference for Multi-arm Bandits
By: Dae Woong Ham, Iavor I. Bojinov, Michael Lindon and Martin Tingley
Multi-arm bandits are gaining popularity as they enable real-world sequential decision-making across application areas, including clinical trials, recommender systems, and online decision-making. Consequently, there is an increased desire to use the available... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Corporate Debt, Boom-Bust Cycles, and Financial Crises
By: Victoria Ivashina, Sebnem Kalemli-Özcan, Luc Laeven and Karsten Müller
Using a new dataset on sectoral credit exposures covering financial and non-financial sectors in 115 economies over the period 1940–2014, we document the following evidence that corporate debt plays a key role in explaining boom-bust cycles, financial crises, and slow... View Details
- February 2024 (Revised February 2024)
- Teaching Note
Travelogo: Understanding Customer Journeys
By: Eva Ascarza and Ta-Wei Huang
Teaching Note for HBS Exercise 524-044. The exercise aims to teach students about 1) Customer Segmentation; and 2) constructing buying personas, 3) Get actionable insights from clickstream data. View Details
- February 2024
- Article
An Economic Framework for Vaccine Prioritization
By: Mohammad Akbarpour, Eric Budish, Piotr Dworczak and Scott Duke Kominers
We propose an economic framework for determining the optimal allocation of a scarce supply of vaccines that become gradually available during a public health crisis, such as the Covid-19 pandemic. Agents differ in observable and unobservable characteristics, and the... View Details
- February 2024
- Article
Come Together: Firm Boundaries and Delegation
By: Laura Alfaro, Nick Bloom, Paola Conconi, Harald Fadinger, Patrick Legros, Andrew F. Newman, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen
We develop an incomplete-contracts model to jointly study firm boundaries and the allocation of decision rights within them. Integration has an option value: it gives firm owners authority to delegate or centralize decision rights, depending on who can best solve... View Details
- December 2023 (Revised February 2024)
- Case
Transforming Healthcare Delivery at Karolinska University Hospital
By: Susanna Gallani, Mary Witkowski, Elena Corsi and Nikolina Jonsson
The case study examines the journey toward value-based healthcare at Karolinska University Hospital. The hospital's ambitious shift to a patient-centered care delivery model, accompanied by the construction of a new facility, encountered challenges such as high costs,... View Details
- December 2023
- Article
Intermediary Balance Sheets and the Treasury Yield Curve
By: Wenxin Du, Benjamin Hebert and Wenhao Li
We document a regime change in the Treasury market post-Global Financial Crisis (GFC): dealers switched from net short to net long Treasury bonds. We construct “net-long” and “net-short” curves that account for balance sheet and financing costs, and show that actual... View Details
- 2023
- Article
Post Hoc Explanations of Language Models Can Improve Language Models
By: Satyapriya Krishna, Jiaqi Ma, Dylan Slack, Asma Ghandeharioun, Sameer Singh and Himabindu Lakkaraju
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in performing complex tasks. Moreover, recent research has shown that incorporating human-annotated rationales (e.g., Chain-of-Thought prompting) during in-context learning can significantly enhance... View Details
- December 2023
- Article
What Can Stockouts Tell Us About Inflation? Evidence from Online Micro Data
By: Alberto Cavallo and Oleksiy Kryvtsov
We use a detailed micro dataset on product availability and stockouts to construct a direct high-frequency measure of consumer product shortages during the 2020-2022 pandemic. We document a widespread multi-fold rise in stockouts in nearly all sectors early in the... View Details
- November 2023 (Revised January 2024)
- Case
Bridgit: Persevere or Pivot?
By: Reza Satchu and Patrick Sanguineti
In late 2012, Mallorie Brodie and Lauren Lake, two young women in their final year of college, founded Bridgit, a technology startup that developed solutions to simplify vital but laborious processes within the construction industry. In the Fall of 2013, after months... View Details