Publications

March 2005 (Revised June 2006)
Case

Sun Microsystems, Inc.: Web Services Strategy

By: Thomas R. Eisenmann and Fernando Suarez

Microsoft and IBM have excluded Sun Microsystems from the board of the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I), an industry consortium that will shape the evolution of Web services standards. Sun managers must decide whether to join WS-I as a contributing... View Details

Keywords: Information Technology; Standards; Corporate Governance; Power and Influence; Information Technology Industry; Information Technology Industry

01 Dec 2023
News

Turning Point: Where Credit Is Due

Nagi Otgonshar (MBA 2015) (Illustration by Gisela Goppel) Nagi Otgonshar (MBA 2015) (Illustration by Gisela Goppel) Earning a full scholarship has always been the only realistic ticket to a superior education for me. It was this golden opportunity that allowed me to... View Details

Keywords: Executive, Legislative, and Other General Government Support; Government

2024
Working Paper

Using LLMs for Market Research

By: James Brand, Ayelet Israeli and Donald Ngwe

Large language models (LLMs) have rapidly gained popularity as labor-augmenting tools for programming, writing, and many other processes that benefit from quick text generation. In this paper we explore the uses and benefits of LLMs for researchers and practitioners... View Details

Keywords: Large Language Model; Research; AI and Machine Learning; Analysis; Customers; Consumer Behavior; Information Technology Industry; Information Technology Industry

SSRN

August 2015 (Revised June 2021)
Case

Amazon.com, 2021

By: John R. Wells, Benjamin Weinstock, Gabriel Ellsworth and Galen Danskin

In February 2021, Amazon announced 2020 operating profits of $22,899 million, up from $2,233 million in 2015, on sales of $386 billion, up from $107 billion five years earlier (see Exhibit 1). The shareholders expressed their satisfaction (see Exhibit 2), but not all... View Details

22 Mar 2024
Research & Ideas

Open Source Software: The $9 Trillion Resource Companies Take for Granted

What does it take to put a price tag on open source software (OSS), a resource so critical to the global economy that some 96 percent of commercial programs include some code created, tinkered with, or distributed for free by public-facing tech forums? A new paper... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne; Information Technology; Information Technology; Information Technology

Web

A New Vision – The Human Relations Movement – Baker Library | Bloomberg Center, Historical Collections

examining the everyday realities of organizational life, Fritz Roethlisberger and his colleagues found that the “person” and the “organization” could not be compartmentalized. Beneath the formalities of the organization chart was not chaos but a robust, View Details

09 Dec 2002
Research & Ideas

Unilever—A Case Study

like knowledge and information can often be transferred more efficiently and effectively within a firm than between independent firms. There are several reasons for this, including the fact that much knowledge is tacit. Indeed, it is well... View Details

Keywords: by Geoffrey Jones; Consumer Products; Entertainment & Recreation; Food & Beverage; Manufacturing; Retail

February 2020 (Revised June 2020)
Background Note

China Commerce 2020

By: William R. Kerr, Daniel O'Connor and Nathaniel Schwalb

China's digital commerce platforms engage billions of consumers daily across a number of routine tasks from banking, retail purchases, travel, gaming, payments, and more. These platforms are the most sophisticated/informed and highest performing/capable in the world.... View Details

Keywords: Platforms; Strategy; Leadership; E-commerce; Digital Platforms; Retail Industry; Technology Industry; Consumer Products Industry; China

16 Jun 2015
Working Paper Summaries

Paying Up for Fair Pay: Consumers Prefer Firms with Lower CEO-to-Worker Pay Ratios

Keywords: by Bhavya Mohan, Michael I. Norton & Rohit Deshpandé

Research Summary

Self-Disclosure and the Struggle to Negotiate Identities

Identity negotiation, the set of processes through which group members come to establish their identities within a group, has important implications for group interactions and productivity, particularly for diverse groups. When groups cannot make informed assumptions... View Details

October 2023 (Revised January 2024)
Case

Ball: EVA Driving the World's Leading Can Manufacturer (A)

By: Jonas Heese and Susan Pinckney

The case describes Ball’s multi decade history of using Economic Value Added to drive decision making and workforce compensation. In 2016, the company acquired Rexam PLC and became the world’s leading metal beverage container company. Consumer demand for varied... View Details

2023
Working Paper

Targeting, Personalization, and Engagement in an Agricultural Advisory Service

By: Susan Athey, Shawn Cole, Shanjukta Nath and Jessica Zhu

ICT is increasingly used to deliver customized information in developing countries. We examine whether individually targeting the timing of automated voice calls meaningfully increases engagement in an agricultural advisory service. We define, estimate, and... View Details

Keywords: Developing Countries and Economies; Knowledge Dissemination; Customization and Personalization; Performance Effectiveness

March 2021
Article

International Trade and Social Connectedness

By: Michael Bailey, Abhinav Gupta, Sebastian Hillenbrand, Theresa Kuchler, Robert J. Richmond and Johannes Stroebel

We use de-identified data from Facebook to construct a new and publicly available measure of the pairwise social connectedness between 170 countries and 332 European regions. We find that two countries trade more when they are more socially connected, especially for... View Details

Keywords: Social Connections; International Trade; Trade; Social Media

SSRN

January 17, 2022
Article

Reducing Racial Disparities in Cancer Outcomes

By: Kathy Giusti and Richard G. Hamermesh

A disproportionate number of Black patients die from cancer in the United States. A key to addressing this problem is enrolling more Black patients in clinical trials. A strategy consisting of these three parts can help accomplish this goal: 1) centralize information... View Details

Keywords: Cancer Trials; Racial Disparity; Health Testing and Trials; Race; Strategy

August 2022
Article

The Gender Gap in Self-Promotion

By: Christine L. Exley and Judd B. Kessler

In applications, interviews, performance reviews, and many other environments, individuals are explicitly asked or implicitly invited to assess their own performance. In a series of experiments, we find that women rate their performance less favorably than equally... View Details

Keywords: Self-promotion; Gender Gap; Experiments; Performance Evaluation; Gender

Article

Internal Deadlines, Drug Approvals, and Safety Problems

By: Lauren Cohen, Umit Gurun and Danielle Li

Absent explicit quotas, incentives, reporting, or fiscal year-end motives, drug approvals around the world surge in December, at month-ends, and before respective major national holidays. Drugs approved before these informal deadlines are associated with significantly... View Details

Keywords: Health; Economics; Government and Politics; Innovation and Invention; Research; Science; Biotechnology Industry; Health Industry; Pharmaceutical Industry

SSRN

October 2019
Article

Limited Investment Capital and Credit Spreads

By: Emil N. Siriwardane

Using proprietary credit default swap (CDS) data, I investigate how capital shocks at protection sellers impact pricing in the CDS market. Seller capital shocks—measured as CDS portfolio margin payments—account for 12% of the time-series variation in weekly spread... View Details

Keywords: Credit Risk; Derivatives; Credit Derivatives and Swaps; Capital Markets; Credit; Financial Institutions