Publications

December 2000 (Revised April 2006)
Case

Promise (A): Building a Consumer Finance Company in Japan

Describes Promise, the third-largest consumer finance company in Japan. Promise was created in 1963 by an entrepreneur and has grown rapidly, especially in the 1990s when commercial banks struggled. Promise's core business consists of providing unsecured loans of up to... View Details

Keywords: Capital Structure; Entrepreneurship; Financial Institutions; Financial Services Industry; Japan

Jul 11 2023
Interview

Consumer Brands Today: Q&A with Jill Avery

Fast Answer

Producer Price Index / Consumer Price Index

Where can I find the Producer Price Index or Consumer Price Index for the U.S. and other countries? Producer Price Index (PPI) U.S.: Producer Price Indexes from the Department of Labor Bureau of... View Details

02 Sep 2010
News

Disputing wrongful dismissal; consumers like underdogs, too

29 Nov 2011
News

What We Really Know About Consumer Behavior

September 2018
Article

Aggregation of Consumer Ratings: An Application to Yelp.com

By: Weijia Dai, Ginger Jin, Jungmin Lee and Michael Luca

Because consumer reviews leverage the wisdom of the crowd, the way in which they are aggregated is a central decision faced by platforms. We explore this "rating aggregation problem" and offer a structural approach to solving it, allowing for (1) reviewers to vary in... View Details

Keywords: User Generated Content; Crowdsourcing; Yelp; Social and Collaborative Networks; Information; Internet and the Web; Learning; Mathematical Methods; E-commerce

11 Feb 2022
News

Consumers Want to Use Their Purchasing Power to Address Ecological and Social Challenges, Says Geoffrey G. Jones

Forthcoming
Article

Differentiating on Diversity: How Disclosing Workforce Diversity Influences Consumer Choice

By: Maya Balakrishnan, Jimin Nam and Ryan W. Buell

Companies are facing increased pressure to “walk the talk” on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in their operations. One specific call-to-action from stakeholders is the public disclosure of EEO-1s. Companies with 100+ employees are federally mandated to annually... View Details

Keywords: Consumer Behavior; Corporate Disclosure; Diversity; Employees; Perception

Purchase

October 1999 (Revised March 2000)
Case

HP Consumer Products Business Organization: Distributing Printers via the Internet

By: Rajiv Lal, Kirthi Kalyanam, Shelby Mc Intyre and Edie Prescott

In spring 1998, Pradeep Jotwani, vice president and general manager of the Consumer Products Business Organization of the Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP), was contemplating the increasing success of e-commerce and its implications for his division. The consumer products group... View Details

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Marketing Channels; Business Processes; Problems and Challenges; Partners and Partnerships; Sales; Business Strategy; Information Technology; Consumer Products Industry

Educators

Purchase

February 2024
Teaching Note

Accelerating with Caution: Forecasting and Managing birddogs' Growth (A) and (B)

By: Mark Egan

Teaching Note for HBS Case Nos. 224-023 and 224-024. As 2017 was drawing to a close, birddogs’ founder and CEO, Peter Baldwin, was working with his CFO Jack Sullivan to prepare for 2018. A nascent direct-to-consumer apparel brand, birddogs had carved its niche in men’s... View Details

Keywords: Inventory Management; Forecasting Demand; Financial Constraints; Apparel; Startups; Corporate Finance; Forecasting and Prediction; Working Capital; Financing and Loans; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Demand and Consumers; Apparel and Accessories Industry; United States

Purchase

October 14, 2023
Article

Will Consumers Buy Selfish Self-Driving Cars?

By: Julian De Freitas

Keywords: AI and Machine Learning; Ethics; Technological Innovation; Safety; Auto Industry

Register to Read

06 Mar 2008
News

Marketing Can Serve Citizens as Well as Consumers

May 2014
Article

Dynamics of Demand for Index Insurance: Evidence from a Long-Run Field Experiment

By: Shawn A. Cole, Daniel Stein and Jeremy Tobacman

This paper estimates how experimentally-manipulated experiences with a novel financial product, rainfall index insurance, affect subsequent insurance demand. Using a seven-year panel, we develop three main findings. First, recent experience matters for demand,... View Details

July 2024 (Revised September 2024)
Case

Shell’s Balancing Act: Resource Allocation and the Green Transition (Abridged)

By: David Collis and Haisley Wert

In mid-2023, amid pressure from climate change activists, shareholder activists, and confronting enormous uncertainty about the future demand for and price of fossil fuels, new Shell CEO Wael Sawan (Harvard MBA 2003) announced a change in strategy for the U.K. oil... View Details

Keywords: Oil ＆ Gas; Renewables; Forecasting Demand; Strategy; Energy; Climate Change; Resource Allocation; Corporate Strategy; Investment Activism; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Culture; Energy Industry

Educators

April–May 2024
Article

Gone with the Big Data: Institutional Lender Demand for Private Information

By: Jung Koo Kang

I explore whether big-data sources can crowd out the value of private information acquired through lending relationships. Institutional lenders have been shown to exploit their access to borrowers’ private information by trading on it in financial markets. As a shock... View Details

Keywords: Analytics and Data Science; Borrowing and Debt; Financial Markets; Value; Knowledge Dissemination; Financing and Loans

SSRN

2016
Chapter

Secondary Markets, Demand Revival, and Firm Performance: Exploratory Analyses in the Vintage Timepiece Auctions Market

By: Kim Claes and Ryan Raffaelli