Publications

June 2024
Case

Growing Foodology into Latin America's Largest Platform for Virtual Restaurants

By: Jorge Tamayo, Rembrand Koning and Jenyfeer Martinez Buitrago

This case delves into the expansion strategy of Foodology, a cloud kitchen startup based in Bogotá that operated across four Latin American countries (Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, and Peru). Co-founders Daniela Izquierdo and Juan Guillermo Azuero (both HBS, 2019) grappled... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Food; Digital Platforms; Product Launch; Growth and Development Strategy; Business Strategy; Business Model; Business Startups; Profit; Marketing Strategy; Expansion; Diversification; Food and Beverage Industry; Latin America; South America; Colombia; Brazil; Mexico; Peru

Educators

Article

The Price of Anarchy of Self-Selection in Tullock Contests

By: Hau Chan, David C. Parkes and Karim R. Lakhani

Crowdsourcing platforms operate by offering their clients the ability to obtain cost-effective solutions for their problems through contests. The top contestants with the best solutions are rewarded, and the submitted solutions are provided to the clients. Within the... View Details

Keywords: Crowdsourcing Contests; Game Theory

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Article

Imprinting: Toward A Multilevel Theory

By: Christopher Marquis and Andras Tilcsik

The concept of imprinting has attracted considerable interest in numerous fields—including organizational ecology, institutional theory, network analysis, and career research—and has been applied at several levels of analysis, from the industry to the individual. This... View Details

Keywords: History; Situation or Environment; Research; Organizations; Power and Influence

12 Feb 2013
Working Paper Summaries

Do Bonuses Enhance Sales Productivity? A Dynamic Structural Analysis of Bonus-Based Compensation Plans

Keywords: by Doug J. Chung, Thomas Steenburgh & K. Sudhir

2010
Working Paper

Growth through Heterogeneous Innovations

By: Ufuk Akcigit and William R. Kerr

We study how exploration versus exploitation innovations impact economic growth through a tractable endogenous growth framework that contains multiple innovation sizes, multi-product firms, and entry/exit. Firms invest in exploration R&D to acquire new product lines... View Details

Keywords: Business Ventures; Decision Choices and Conditions; Economic Growth; Investment; Innovation and Invention; Patents; Size; Research and Development; United States

2007
Working Paper

Bandwidth Allocation in Peer-to-Peer Filesharing Networks

By: Albert Creus-Mir, Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Andres Hervas-Drane

We present a model of bandwidth allocation in a stylized peer-to-peer file sharing network with s peers (sharers) who share files and download from each other and f peers (freeriders) who download from sharers but do not contribute files. Assuming that upload bandwidth... View Details

Keywords: Information Infrastructure; Resource Allocation

Video

Introducing the Kraft Precision Medicine Accelerator at Harvard Business School

01 Dec 2015
Research & Ideas

What to Do When Your Organization Has Dueling Missions

A couple of years ago, hip-hop artist Macklemore topped the Billboard 100 chart with Thrift Shop, a paean to buying inexpensive used clothing from Goodwill Industries. Indeed, like the rapper, millions of people know Goodwill primarily as a successful retailer; in... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

2013
Working Paper

Imprinting: Toward A Multilevel Theory

By: Christopher Marquis and Andras Tilcsik

The concept of imprinting has attracted considerable interest in numerous fields—including organizational ecology, institutional theory, network analysis, and career research—and has been applied at several levels of analysis, from the industry to the individual. This... View Details

Keywords: History; Situation or Environment; Organizational Design; Organizational Structure

SSRN

The concept of imprinting has attracted considerable interest in numerous fields—including organizational ecology, institutional theory, network analysis, and career research—and has been applied at several levels of analysis, from the industry to the individual.... View Details

Article

A Prescriptive Analytics Framework for Optimal Policy Deployment Using Heterogeneous Treatment Effects

By: Edward McFowland III, Sandeep Gangarapu, Ravi Bapna and Tianshu Sun

We define a prescriptive analytics framework that addresses the needs of a constrained decision-maker facing, ex ante, unknown costs and benefits of multiple policy levers. The framework is general in nature and can be deployed in any utility maximizing context, public... View Details

Keywords: Prescriptive Analytics; Heterogeneous Treatment Effects; Optimization; Observed Rank Utility Condition (OUR); Between-treatment Heterogeneity; Machine Learning; Decision Making; Analysis; Mathematical Methods

We define a prescriptive analytics framework that addresses the needs of a constrained decision-maker facing, ex ante, unknown costs and benefits of multiple policy levers. The framework is general in nature and can be deployed in any utility maximizing... View Details

Research Summary

Bargaining with Imperfect Enforcement

Joint work with Mark Williams, formerly of Exeter College, Oxford.

The game-theoretic bargaining literature insists on non-cooperative bargaining procedure but allows cooperative implementation of agreements. The effect of this is to allow free-reign of bargaining... View Details

Forthcoming
Article

Branch-and-Price for Prescriptive Contagion Analytics

By: Alexandre Jacquillat, Michael Lingzhi Li, Martin Ramé and Kai Wang

Contagion models are ubiquitous in epidemiology, social sciences, engineering, and management. This paper formulates a prescriptive contagion analytics model where a decision maker allocates shared resources across multiple segments of a population, each governed by... View Details

Keywords: COVID-19; Mathematical Methods

2013
Case

Ningbo FOTILE Kitchen Ware Co., Ltd.

By: F. Warren McFarlan, Zheng Xiaoming, Yuren Fang and Hong Zhang

Since 2008, FOTILE has actively introduced philosophies of the traditional Chinese culture—such as benevolence, justice, courtesy, wisdom and faith—into its management, which it believes to compensate for deficiencies in Western management concepts and creates a new... View Details

Keywords: Human Resource Management; China; Human Resources; Leadership; Management; Strategy; China

March 2011 (Revised December 2012)
Case

Demand Media

By: John Deighton and Leora Kornfeld

Google search had helped Demand Media grow to be a $1.9 billion online publisher. Then, social media and smartphone apps began to change the way people navigated the Internet. How should Demand Media respond? The business ran on a radically new model in which a stable... View Details

Keywords: Business Model; Information Publishing; Consumer Behavior; Customization and Personalization; Internet and the Web; Publishing Industry

Educators

2023
Working Paper

The Market for Healthcare in Low Income Countries

By: Abhijit Banerjee, Abhijit Chowdhury, Jishnu Das, Jeffrey Hammer, Reshmaan Hussam and Aakash Mohpal

Patient trust is an important driver of the demand for healthcare. But it may also impact supply: doctors who realize that patients may not trust them may adjust their behavior in response. We assemble a large dataset that assesses clinical performance using... View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Quality; Developing Countries and Economies; Trust

2013
Teaching Note

Ningbo FOTILE Kitchen Ware Co., Ltd. (TN)

By: F. Warren McFarlan, Zheng Xiaoming, Yuren Fang and Hong Zhang

Since 2008, FOTILE has actively introduced philosophies of the traditional Chinese culture—such as benevolence, justice, courtesy, wisdom and faith—into its management, which it believes to compensate for deficiencies in Western management concepts and creates a new... View Details

Keywords: Human Resource Management; China; Human Resources; Leadership; Management; Strategy; China

Fall 2022
Article

China's Political Economy and International Backlash: From Interdependence to Security Dilemma Dynamics

By: Margaret Pearson, Meg Rithmire and Kellee Tsai

Contrary to expectations that economic interdependence might lessen security conflict between China and the U.S. and its allies, much of the contestation between China and several OECD countries has focused on firms and economic links. This paper explains the... View Details

Keywords: Globalized Markets and Industries; Government and Politics; Information Technology; China