Publications

05 Nov 2013
First Look

First Look: November 5

tension between the two sets of activities. Download working paper: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2294928 Cases & Course Materials Harvard Business School Case 714-412 Coursera By providing free and open-access online courses at a large... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

March 2021 (Revised February 2025)
Teaching Note

Afterpay U.S.: The Omnichannel Dilemma

By: Antonio Moreno and Anibha Singh

Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 519-086. In 2018, Nick Molnar, the founder of the Australia-based online payment service Afterpay began its expansion to the U.S. market. The service had gained a loyal following in Australia by enabling customers to pay for online... View Details

19 Feb 2013
First Look

First Look: Feb. 19

the last decade, a variety of novel patent intermediaries have emerged. We discuss how several online platforms have started services for buying and selling patents but have failed to gain meaningful... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

21 Jan 2014
First Look

First Look: January 21

Benjamin G., and Michael Luca Abstract—Online marketplaces often contain information not only about products, but also about the people selling the products. In an effort to facilitate trust, many platforms encourage sellers to provide... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

28 Feb 2017
First Look

First Look at New Research, February 28

success factors for managing business experiments at the “incubation moment,” which appear to improve the prospects of success. Publisher's link: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=52307 forthcoming Strategy Science Repositioning and Cost-cutting: The... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

16 Nov 2016
Research & Ideas

Turning One Thousand Customers into One Million

of experimentation. Taking all these factors into account, a startup can create dozens of ads within just a few days, and learn quickly and cheaply what is most effective to attract suppliers. Uber, for instance, made extensive use of View Details

Keywords: by Thales S. Teixeira and Michael Blanding; Retail; Transportation; Accommodations

23 Aug 2012
Working Paper Summaries

Field Evidence on Individual Behavior & Performance in Rank-Order Tournaments

Keywords: by Kevin J. Boudreau, Constance E. Helfat, Karim R. Lakhani & Michael Menietti

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

Keywords: Campaign Finance; Campaign Contributions; Small Donations; ActBlue; WinRed; TV Advertising; Political Elections; Finance; Demographics; Advertising; Analysis; Analytics and Data Science

Read Now

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

Keywords: Metaverse; Entrepreneurship; Innovation and Invention; Digital Platforms; Internet and the Web; Government Administration; Public Administration Industry; South Korea; Asia

January 2017 (Revised August 2019)
Supplement

X Fire Paintball & Airsoft: Is Amazon a Friend or Foe? (B)

By: Feng Zhu and Angela Acocella

Three years after launching his brick-and-mortar store, X Fire Paintball and Airsoft, Steve Herbert Sr. and his sons began selling products on Amazon.com’s third-party Marketplace and online sales expanded rapidly. Over time, X Fire noticed that products of which it... View Details

Keywords: Ethics; Competition; Digital Platforms; Internet and the Web; Small Business; Retail Industry; Canada

Nick Devlin faced a difficult strategic decision in October 2022. As the CEO of a UK-based subscription business connecting wine drinkers in the US, UK, and Australia with winemakers from around the world (which one journalist called the “Netflix of Wine”), he had... View Details

02 Oct 2014
Working Paper Summaries

Bitcoin

Keywords: by Rainer Böhme, Nicolas Christin, Benjamin Edelman & Tyler Moore; Banking

08 Sep 2015
First Look

September 8, 2015

Business Review Case Study: Can You Win Back Online Shoppers? By: Teixeira, Thales S., and Sunil Gupta Abstract—This case study discusses the options that brick-and-mortar retailers can use to combat the negative consequences of... View Details

Keywords: Carmen Nobel

16 Sep 2008
First Look

First Look: September 16, 2008

disaggregated "clusters" or "ecosystems" of firms has been widely recognized. But platforms and the systems in which they are embedded are very diverse. In particular, platforms may exist... View Details

January 2017 (Revised August 2019)
Case

X Fire Paintball & Airsoft: Is Amazon a Friend or Foe? (A)

By: Feng Zhu and Angela Acocella

Three years after launching his brick-and-mortar store, X Fire Paintball and Airsoft, Steve Herbert Sr. and his sons began selling products on Amazon.com’s third-party Marketplace, and online sales expanded rapidly. Over time, X Fire noticed that products of which it... View Details

Keywords: Ethics; Competition; Digital Platforms; Internet and the Web; Small Business; Retail Industry; Canada

21 Jun 2022
HBS Case

Free Isn’t Always Better: How Slack Holds Its Own Against Microsoft Teams

Salesforce, which acquired the firm in 2021. Microsoft, meanwhile, was finally able to draw users to Teams, the free business communication platform it introduced in 2017 as part of Office 365. "Can these collaborative software View Details

Keywords: by Lane Lambert; Information Technology; Technology

March 2018 (Revised July 2018)
Case

Cadre

By: Thomas R. Eisenmann, Scott Duke Kominers and David Lane

Late in 2017, CEO Ryan Williams and his team debated whether Cadre should become not only a technology-enabled investment manager, but also an online trading exchange providing high levels of liquidity for investors in commercial real estate (CRE) equity. Cadre was a... View Details

Keywords: ＂Cadre,＂; Entrepreneurship; Market Design; Digital Platforms; Strategy; Internet and the Web; Private Equity; Financial Services Industry; Real Estate Industry; United States