Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(3,587)
- Faculty Publications (711)
- December 2014 (Revised July 2021)
- Case
Discovery Limited
By: Michael E. Porter, Mark R. Kramer and Aldo Sesia
Discovery Ltd. is a South Africa-based insurance company. Started in the early 1990s, Discovery used behavioral economics and data collection to innovate in the health care insurance industry. Its founder Adrian Gore believed that the company's products needed to not... View Details
- 2014
- Working Paper
College Admissions as Non-Price Competition: The Case of South Korea
By: Christopher Avery, Alvin E. Roth and Soohyung Lee
This paper examines non-price competition among colleges to attract highly qualified students, exploiting the South Korean setting where the national government sets rules governing applications. We identify some basic facts about the behavior of colleges before and... View Details
- Article
Team Scaffolds: How Mesolevel Team Structures Enable Role-based Coordination in Temporary Groups
By: Melissa A. Valentine and Amy C. Edmondson
This paper shows how mesolevel structures support effective coordination in temporary groups. Prior research on coordination in temporary groups describes how roles encode individual responsibilities so that coordination between relative strangers is possible. We... View Details
- 2016
- Working Paper
Henry A. Kissinger as Negotiator: Background and Key Accomplishments
By: James K. Sebenius, Laurence A. Green and Eugene B. Kogan
Following a brief summary of Henry A. Kissinger’s career, this paper describes six of his most pivotal negotiations: the historic establishment of U.S. diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China, the easing of geopolitical tension with the Soviet Union,... View Details
- October 2014 (Revised February 2017)
- Case
Europe, Russia, and the Age of Gas Revolution
By: Rawi Abdelal, Leonardo Maugeri and Sogomon Tarontsi
The 2014 Ukraine crisis once again exposed the mutually limiting knot—a web of commercial relationships and oil and gas pipelines—that historically tied the European Union and Russia closely. In this crisis, a familiar conundrum preoccupied minds in the corridors of... View Details
- Winter 2014
- Article
Retail Inventory: Managing the Canary in the Coal Mine!
By: Vishal Gaur, Saravanan Kesavan and Ananth Raman
Retail inventory is a statistic that is closely watched by retailers as well as their investors, lenders, and suppliers. Retailers not only benefit from inventory, but also bear the cost of excess inventory. Investors, lenders, and suppliers interpret this statistic... View Details
- October 2014
- Article
The Promise of Positive Optimal Taxation: Normative Diversity and a Role for Equal Sacrifice
A prominent assumption in modern optimal tax research is that the objective of taxation is Utilitarian. I present new survey evidence that most people disagree with this assumption, preferring tax policies based at least in part on a classic alternative objective: the... View Details
- September 2014 (Revised June 2016)
- Case
Whole Foods: The Path to 1,000 Stores
By: David F. Drake, Ryan W. Buell, Melissa Barton, Taylor Jones, Katrina Keverian and Jeffrey Stock
The case examines the operations strategy of Whole Foods, one of the largest natural grocery chains in the United States. In late 2013, Whole Foods was expanding rapidly, with a publicly-stated goal of growing from 351 to 1,000 domestic stores by 2022. It was also... View Details
- Article
Contextual Intelligence
By: Tarun Khanna
The author has come to a conclusion that may surprise you: trying to apply management practices uniformly across geographies is a fool's errand. Best practices simply don't travel well across borders. That's because conditions not just of economic development but of... View Details
- 2014
- Book
The Power of Noticing: What the Best Leaders See
By: Max Bazerman
This book will examine the common failure to notice critical information due to bounded awareness. The book will document a decade of research showing that even successful people fail to notice the absence of critical and readily available information in their... View Details
- August 2014
- Article
Mortgage Convexity
By: Samuel G. Hanson
Most home mortgages in the United States are fixed-rate loans with an embedded prepayment option. When long-term rates decline, the effective duration of mortgage-backed securities (MBS) falls due to heightened refinancing expectations. I show that these changes in MBS... View Details
- July 2014
- Case
Paramount Equipment, Inc.
By: Carliss Y. Baldwin and Wei Wang
Paramount Equipment, Inc., based in Fort Wayne, Indiana, is a large manufacturer of cranes and compact construction equipment, aerial work platforms, and food service equipment. Founded in 1987, Paramount now had manufacturing operations in 24 countries. However, it... View Details
- 2014
- Article
The Governance of Social Enterprises: Mission Drift and Accountability Challenges in Hybrid Organizations
By: Alnoor Ebrahim, Julie Battilana and Johanna Mair
We examine the challenges of governance facing organizations that pursue a social mission through the use of market mechanisms. These hybrid organizations, often referred to as social enterprises, combine aspects of both charity and business at their core. In this... View Details
- June 2014 (Revised January 2017)
- Case
Focus Financial Partners and the U.S. RIA Industry in 2014
By: Luis Viceira and Emily A. Chien
In the Spring of 2014, Rudy Adolf, CEO and founder of Focus Financial, and the two other co-founders of the firm are considering alternative growth strategies to solidify Focus Financial's position as a leading aggregator of independent wealth management firms in the... View Details
- Article
Integration of Online and Offline Channels in Retail: The Impact of Sharing Reliable Inventory Availability Information
By: Santiago Gallino and Antonio Moreno
Using a proprietary data set, we analyze the impact of the implementation of a “buy-online, pick-up-in-store” (BOPS) project. The implementation of this project is associated with a reduction in online sales and an increase in store sales and traffic. These results can... View Details
- Summer 2014
- Article
When Does a Platform Create Value by Limiting Choice?
By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Hanna Halaburda
We present a theory for why it might be rational for a platform to limit the number of applications available on it. Our model is based on the observation that even if users prefer application variety, applications often also exhibit direct network effects. When there... View Details
Keywords: Platform Governance; Direct Network Effects; Indirect Network Effects; Complements; Tragedy Of The Commons; Equilibrium Selection; Coordination; Foresight; Strategy; Value Creation; Digital Platforms; Balance and Stability; Decision Choices and Conditions; Consumer Behavior; Applications and Software; Network Effects
- May 2014 (Revised April 2016)
- Case
Three-Year Planning at Li & Fung Limited
By: Paul M. Healy and Keith Chi-ho Wong
Having been able to follow its own "three-year plan" on course constantly, Li & Fung Limited fell short of meeting its stretch earnings target for the first time in almost two decades, leading to a double-digit drop in stock price overnight. Questions were raised on... View Details
- April 2014 (Revised October 2015)
- Case
Texas Teachers and the New Texas Way
By: Matthew Rhodes-Kropf, Luis M. Viceira, John D. Dionne and Nathaniel Burbank
In 2011 Britt Harris, the Chief Investment Officer for the $107.4 billion Teachers Retirement System of Texas (TRS), was considering whether to pursue strategic partnerships with a group of large private equity firms. After spending four years aggressively moving the... View Details
- 2014
- Article
The Growth and Limits of Arbitrage: Evidence from Short Interest
By: Samuel G. Hanson and Adi Sunderam
We develop a novel methodology to infer the amount of capital allocated to quantitative equity arbitrage strategies. Using this methodology, which exploits time-variation in the cross section of short interest, we document that the amount of capital devoted to value... View Details
- April 2014
- Article
The Limits of Scale: Companies That Get Big Fast Are Often Left Behind. Here's Why.
By: Hanna Halaburda and Felix Oberholzer-Gee
The value of many products and services rises or falls with the number of customers using them; the fewer fax machines in use, the less important it is to have one. These network effects influence consumer decisions and affect companies' ability to compete. Strategists... View Details