Publications

Rajiv Lal, is the Stanley Roth, Sr. Professor of Retailing at Harvard Business School. He is currently teaching an elective MBA course on the Business of Smart Connected Products/IOT. He has been responsible for the retailing curriculum and has served as the course... View Details

October 2021
Case

Unshrinking the Pie: Desirée Stolar's Negotiation Saga (A)

By: James K. Sebenius and Alex Green

When Desirée (“Des”) Stolar’s wool sweater shrank two sizes, the Harvard Business School student worked with classmates to develop a solution that both fixed her problem and launched Unshrinkit, a successful consumer goods company with a widely-available product for... View Details

Keywords: Bargaining; Startups; Negotiation; Contracts; Negotiation Tactics; Entrepreneurship; Business Startups; Strategy; Consumer Products Industry

03 Mar 2008
Research & Ideas

Marketing Your Way Through a Recession

need to know more than ever how consumers are redefining value and responding to the recession. Price elasticity curves are changing. Consumers take more time searching for durable View Details

Keywords: by John Quelch

February 1987 (Revised August 1988)
Case

Gillette Personal Care Division: Marketing Planning and Control

Bill Ryan, president of the Gillette Co.'s Personal Care Division, is considering changing the division's planning and control system for marketing. White Rain, the division's most recent success, had been launched by taking shortcuts through the system, while other... View Details

Keywords: Marketing; Management Systems; Consumer Products Industry; United States

July 2022
Supplement

General Mills: Responding to the Killing of George Floyd (B)

By: Debora L. Spar and Alicia Dadlani

Jeff Harmening, CEO of General Mills, one of the world's largest manufacturers of breakfast cereals and packaged foods, was deeply disturbed and instantly aware that he and General Mills would need to respond. George Floyd, an African-American man who had been accused... View Details

Keywords: Race; Decisions; Social Issues; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Consumer Products Industry; Minneapolis; Minnesota; United States

24 Mar 2008
Research & Ideas

Reducing Risk with Online Advertising

merchants with these same marketing programs. Q: How should consumers protect themselves from potential fraud? A: It's highly desirable to keep your computer free of the sorts of bad software that I've described. There is a View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Video Game; Web Services

16 Apr 2007
Research & Ideas

Delivering the Digital Goods: iTunes vs. Peer-to-Peer

analysis reveals that, contrary to intuition, prices low enough to "kill" p2p are not optimal in large markets. The industry is better off setting higher prices and attracting those consumers ready to pay due to congestion.... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Music

26 Jun 2019
Research & Ideas

Why the US-China Tariff Standoff Hurts American Companies More

significantly cut their prices, while Chinese exporters have not reduced the prices of the goods they sell to US importers. "This nearly complete pass-through of tariffs to the total price paid by importers suggests the tariff... View Details

Keywords: by Danielle Kost; Retail; Manufacturing; Steel

02–03 Dec 2022
HBS Alumni Events

D^3 Catalyst: No Code Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence

Do you want to delve into Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, but you feel overwhelmed and intimidated? Do you want to leverage the power of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence without writing any code? Do you want to leverage Machine Learning and... View Details

Research Summary

Dissertation - Social Structure and Mechanisms of Collective Production:Evidence from Wikipedia

Andreea's dissertation research examines social networks in the setting of collective production, defined as collective action oriented towards production of collective goods - goods available for consumption by all members of a group whenever they... View Details

Research Summary

Business and Low Income Sectors: The Creation of Economic and Social Value

In the last three decades, innovative commercial solutions have emerged in developing nations focusing on providing effective responses to the hugely underserved needs of low-income populations, both as consumers as well as active participants in productive value... View Details

20 Aug 2001
Research & Ideas

Making an Ally of Uncle Sam

may not involve government. Value-net games have to do with cooperation and competition among businesses. 7 Public interest games pit coalitions of businesses, and even entire industries, against nonbusiness organizations like unions, View Details

Keywords: by Michael Watkins, Mickey Edwards & Usha Thakrar

02 Nov 2006
Working Paper Summaries

Managing Functional Biases in Organizational Forecasts: A Case Study of Consensus Forecasting in Supply Chain Planning

Keywords: by Rogelio Oliva & Noel H. Watson

September 2016 (Revised February 2017)
Case

Angie's List: Ratings Pioneer Turns 20

By: Robert J. Dolan and Ayelet Israeli

In 1995, before people “googled” or “yelped,” Angela Hicks (HBS, 2000) was establishing her Angie’s List as a pioneer in the accumulation and dissemination of consumer rating information. Hicks focused on the home repair and maintenance market and, as she put it,... View Details

01 Aug 2018
What Do You Think?

Are Free Trade and Free Markets Quaint Ideas From the Past?

consumers and workers, and the political realities of modern governments. That appears to be a central message conveyed by responses to this month’s column. Ian Brinkley raised the issue of shifting needs of trading partners as a problem... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

September 2020
Case

Drinkworks: Home Bar by Keurig

By: Sunil Gupta, Jonathan Levav and Julia Kelley

In the summer of 2018, Drinkworks CEO Nathaniel Davis needed to make a number of go-to-market decisions ahead of his company’s upcoming product launch. Formed through a joint venture between Keurig Dr. Pepper and Anheuser-Busch InBev, Drinkworks had developed an... View Details