Publications
Publications
Show Results For
- All HBS Web
(8,148)
- Faculty Publications (741)
- Article
Unexpected Benefits of Deciding by Mind Wandering
By: Colleen Giblin, Carey K. Morewedge and Michael I. Norton
The mind wanders, even when people are attempting to make complex decisions. We suggest that such mind wandering—allowing one's thoughts to wander until the "correct" choice comes to mind—can positively impact people's feelings about their decisions. We compare... View Details
- Article
Consumers' Misunderstanding of Health Insurance
By: George Loewenstein, Joelle Y. Friedman, Barbara McGill, Sarah Ahmad, Suzanne Linck, Stacey Sinkula, John Beshears, James J. Choi, Jonathan Kolstad, David Laibson, Brigitte C. Madrian, John A. List and Kevin G. Volpp
We report results from two surveys of representative samples of Americans with private health insurance. The first examines how well Americans understand, and believe they understand, traditional health insurance coverage. The second examines whether those insured... View Details
- October 2013
- Article
With a Little Help from My (Random) Friends: Success and Failure in Post-Business School Entrepreneurship
By: Josh Lerner and Ulrike Malmendier
To what extent do peers affect our occupational choices? This question has been of particular interest in the context of entrepreneurship and policies to create a favorable environment for entry. Such influences, however, are hard to identify empirically. We exploit... View Details
- August 2013
- Technical Note
Raising the Level of Abstraction
By: Willy Shih
This technical note discusses abstraction as a way of generalizing a process or component for wider application. By hiding complexity inside a module, abstraction enables system designers to think at a higher level. This lowers entry barriers to using (and reusing) a... View Details
- August 2013
- Case
Desi Shack: Location Choice in the Big Apple
By: William R. Kerr and Alexis Brownell
Desi Shack is a “fast casual” restaurant, started by two HBS alumni, that serves Indian and Pakistani cuisine in midtown Manhattan. The founders are looking to expand into a second location and also plan to hire a COO, and there is very little room for error in the... View Details
- July 2013 (Revised May 2024)
- Case
BMVSS: Changing Lives, One Jaipur Limb at a Time
By: Srikant Datar and Saloni Chaturvedi
Bhagwan Mahaveer Viklang Sahayata Samiti (BMVSS) is an Indian not-for-profit organization engaged in assisting differently-abled persons by providing them with the legendary low-cost prosthesis, the Jaipur Foot, and other mobility-assisting devices, free of cost. Known... View Details
- 2013
- Chapter
The Most Successful CEOs Come from Within
By: Joseph L. Bower
The financial crisis of 2008 and the Great Recession caused a crisis of public confidence in business and American-style capitalism, with its focus on maximizing shareholder value. Corporate leaders understood that reform was needed and that they needed to commit... View Details
- June 2013 (Revised September 2015)
- Case
Procter & Gamble
By: Jay W. Lorsch and Kathleen Durante
On July 12, 2012, Bill Ackman's Pershing Square Capital Management announced publicly that it had purchased about $2 billion of Procter and Gamble (P&G) stock. Shares in the company closed up 3.75% the day the disclosure was made public. Ackman told the New York... View Details
- May 2013 (Revised March 2014)
- Case
Strategy and the Strategist
This short case presents a series of brief accounts, observations, and quotations that challenge students to think about the role of the CEO — and of the CEO's (possibly strong) beliefs and convictions — in strategy. It focuses in particular on three issues and their... View Details
- 2013
- Book
Happy Money: The Science of Happier Spending
By: Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton
If you think money can't buy happiness, you're not spending it right. Two rising stars in behavioral science explain how money can buy happiness—if you follow five core principles of smarter spending. Happy Money offers a tour of new research on the science of... View Details
- May 2013
- Article
Health Care's Service Fanatics: How the Cleveland Clinic Leaped to the Top of the Patient-satisfaction Surveys
By: James Merlino and Ananth Raman
The Cleveland Clinic has long had a reputation for medical excellence. But in 2009 the CEO acknowledged that patients did not think much of their experience there, and he decided to act. Since then the Clinic has leaped to the top tier of patient-satisfaction surveys,... View Details
- May 2013
- Article
How to Negotiate with VCs
By: Deepak Malhotra
VC-entrepreneur partnership agreements often contain flaws that become highly damaging as the parties come up against issues of power, trust, and much more. Yet many of the flaws are systematic and predictable—and hence preventable. The author, a longtime consultant to... View Details
- May 2013
- Article
Sweatshop Labor Is Wrong Unless the Shoes Are Cute: Cognition Can Both Hurt and Help Motivated Moral Reasoning
By: Neeru Paharia, Kathleen Vohs and Rohit Deshpandé
The present research investigated the dual role of cognition as either an enabler of moral reasoning or self-interested motivated reasoning for endorsing sweatshop labor. Experiment 1A showed motivated reasoning: participants were more likely to endorse the use of... View Details
- 2013
- Article
What Goes Up Must Come Down? Experimental Evidence on Intuitive Forecasting
By: John Beshears, James J. Choi, Andreas Fuster, David Laibson and Brigitte C. Madrian
Do laboratory subjects correctly perceive the dynamics of a mean-reverting time series? In our experiment, subjects receive historical data and make forecasts at different horizons. The time series process that we use features short-run momentum and long-run partial... View Details
- April 2013
- Case
Luca de Meo at Volkswagen Group
By: Linda A. Hill and Dana M. Teppert
Luca de Meo, chief marketing officer of Volkswagen Group, reflects on his time leading the marketing department at Volkswagen Passenger Cars brand. In particular, he thinks about the environmental sustainability initiative launched by marketing called "Think Blue" and... View Details
- April 2013
- Case
The Walt Disney Company: The Entertainment King (Abridged)
By: Michael G. Rukstad and David J. Collis
The first ten pages of this case are comprised of the company's history, from 1923 to 2001. The Walt years are described, as is the company's decline after his death and its resurgence under Eisner. The last five pages are devoted to Eisner's strategic challenges in... View Details
- March 2013
- Case
Grupo ABC and Nizan Guanaes's Path from Brazil to the World
By: Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Gustavo Herrero and Ricardo Reisen De Pinho
Internationally recognized Brazilian Nizan Guanaes, co-founder of Grupo ABC, a rapidly growing global advertising firm ranked 18th in 2011, had aspirations to be in the top 10 by 2015. Grupo ABC thrived by identifying national (Brazilian) challenges and incorporating... View Details
- 2015
- Working Paper
Online Word of Mouth and Product Review Disagreement
By: Frank Nagle and Christoph Riedl
Studies of online word of mouth have frequently posited―but never systematically conceptualized and explored―that the level of disagreement between existing product reviews can impact the volume and the valence of future reviews. In this study we develop a theoretical... View Details
- March 2013 (Revised April 2014)
- Case
Barnes & Noble: Managing the E-Book Revolution
By: Alan MacCormack, Brian Kimball Dunn and Chris F. Kemerer
The case describes competition in the market for E-Books, and Barnes & Noble's Strategy in this industry. As a traditional retailer, B&N was challenged by the introduction of digital technologies that allow books to be published, distributed and sold to consumers... View Details
- March 2013
- Article
Advertising's New Medium: Human Experience
Standard ad messaging and conventional creative executions and placements are rapidly becoming outmoded. To win consumers' attention and trust, marketers must think less about what advertising says to its targets and more about what it does for them. Rather than... View Details