Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(2,959)
- Faculty Publications (967)
- May 2017 (Revised March 2018)
- Case
Predicting Consumer Tastes with Big Data at Gap
By: Ayelet Israeli and Jill Avery
CEO Art Peck was eliminating his creative directors for The Gap, Old Navy, and Banana Republic brands and promoting a collective creative ecosystem fueled by the input of big data. Rather than relying on artistic vision, Peck wanted the company to use the mining of big... View Details
Keywords: Retailing; Preference Elicitation; Big Data; Predictive Analytics; Artificial Intelligence; Fashion; Marketing; Marketing Strategy; Marketing Channels; Brands and Branding; Consumer Behavior; Demand and Consumers; Analytics and Data Science; Forecasting and Prediction; E-commerce; Apparel and Accessories Industry; Consumer Products Industry; Fashion Industry; Retail Industry; United States; Canada; North America
- May 2017
- Case
Four Products: Predicting Diffusion (2017)
By: John Gourville
One job of product managers, marketers, strategic planners, and other corporate executives is to predict what the demand will be for a new product. This task is easier for certain classes of new products than for others. For new consumer package goods, for instance,... View Details
- April 14, 2017
- Article
Companies Like United Need to Cultivate Good Judgment, and Free Their Employees to Use It
By: John A. Deighton
United Airlines has pledged to improve its training programs and empower its employees to put customers first in the wake of a video showing a passenger being dragged from a plane. Of all the U.S. air carriers, United should have known the power of social media and... View Details
- April–May 2017
- Article
Career Concerns of Banking Analysts
By: Joanne Horton, George Serafeim and Shan Wu
We study how career concerns influence banking analysts' forecasts and how their forecasting behavior benefits both them and bank managers. We show that banking analysts issue early in the year relatively more optimistic and later in the year more pessimistic forecasts... View Details
- March 2017 (Revised February 2025)
- Case
Edwin Land: The Art and Science of Innovation
By: Tom Nicholas, Christopher T. Stanton and Matthew G. Preble
Throughout the second half of the 20th century, Polaroid first invented—and then continuously reinvented—the field of instant photography. Under the leadership of its mercurial founder Edwin Land, the company regularly released new instant cameras and films, often... View Details
Keywords: Instant Photography; Company History; Change Management; Disruption; Forecasting and Prediction; Entrepreneurship; Business History; Innovation Strategy; Disruptive Innovation; Innovation and Management; Intellectual Property; Patents; Product Marketing; Brands and Branding; Product Launch; Product Development; Chemical Industry; Consumer Products Industry; United States
- March 2017 (Revised March 2022)
- Case
Flashion: Art vs. Science in Fashion Retailing
By: Kris Ferreira and Karim R. Lakhani
Kate Wilson, retail analytics manager at Flashion, a fashion flash-sale site, is tasked with developing analytics to optimize pricing for first-exposure products on the site. Many in the industry have relied on years of experience and intuition to determine pricing—can... View Details
- 2017
- Working Paper
Learning by Doing: The Value of Experience and the Origins of Skill for Mutual Fund Managers
By: Elisabeth Kempf, Alberto Manconi and Oliver Spalt
Learning by doing matters for professional investors. We develop a new methodology to show that mutual fund managers outperform in industries where they have obtained experience on the job. The key to our identification strategy is that we look "inside" funds and... View Details
- March–April 2017
- Article
Sink or Swim: The Role of Workplace Context in Shaping Career Advancement and Human-Capital Development
By: Shinjinee Chattopadhyay and Prithwiraj Choudhury
We develop and test predictions on how early-career challenges arising from the workplace context affect short- and long-term career advancement of individuals. Typically an organization’s decision to deploy a manager to one of several possible contexts is endogenous... View Details
- 2017
- Working Paper
Exploring the Relationship between Architecture Coupling and Software Vulnerabilities: A Google Chrome Case
By: Robert Lagerstrom, Carliss Y. Baldwin, Alan MacCormack, Dan Sturtevant and Lee Doolan
Employing software metrics, such as size and complexity, for predicting defects has been given a lot of attention over the years and has proven very useful. However, the few studies looking at software architecture and vulnerabilities are limited in scope and findings.... View Details
- February 2017 (Revised June 2017)
- Case
ExxonMobil: Business as Usual? (A)
By: George Serafeim, Shiva Rajgopal and David Freiberg
Climate change was becoming an important societal and business issue as more governments were introducing climate change related regulations and investors became increasibly worried about stranded assets within oil and gas firms. In September 2016, the U.S. Securities... View Details
- February 2017 (Revised June 2017)
- Supplement
ExxonMobil: Business as Usual? (B)
By: George Serafeim, Shiva Rajgopal and David Freiberg
The case presents ExxonMobil's response to growing pressure to disclose how climate change will impact their business. This includes multiple asset impairments and losing a proxy vote to shareholders to increase climate change related reporting. Supplements the (B)... View Details
Keywords: Oil ＆ Gas; Oil Prices; Oil Companies; Asset Impairment; Predictive Analytics; Sustainability; Environmental Impact; Innovation; Disclosure; Accounting; Valuation; Energy Sources; Ethics; Corporate Disclosure; Governance Compliance; Climate Change; Financial Reporting; Energy Industry; United States
- Article
Does 'Liking' Lead to Loving? The Impact of Joining a Brand's Social Network on Marketing Outcomes
Does “liking” a brand on Facebook cause a person to view it more favorably? Or is “liking” simply a symptom of being fond of a brand? We disentangle these possibilities and find evidence for the latter: brand attitudes and purchasing are predicted by consumers’... View Details
- January 2017 (Revised August 2017)
- Case
Weathernews
By: Karim R. Lakhani and Akiko Kanno
Tomohiro Ishibashi (Bashi), chief executive officer for B to S, and Julia Foote LeStage, chief innovation officer of Weathernews Inc., were addressing a panel at the HBS Digital Summit on creative uses of big data. They told the summit attendees about how the Sakura... View Details
- 9 Dec 2016
- Conference Presentation
Discovering Unknown Unknowns of Predictive Models
By: Himabindu Lakkaraju, Ece Kamar, Rich Caruana and Eric Horvitz
- December 2016
- Article
Social Network Utilization and the Impact of Academic Research in Marketing
By: Stav Rosenzweig, Amir Grinstein and Elie Ofek
The forces that drive the impact of academic research articles in the marketing discipline are of great interests to authors, editors, and the discipline’s policy makers. A key understudied driver is social network utilization by academic researchers. In this paper, we... View Details
- November 2016 (Revised April 2018)
- Case
reMarkable: e-Writing the Future
By: Elie Ofek and Curtis Hsu
Magnus Wanberg is the creator of reMarkable, a breakthrough e-writer device set apart from similar products on the market by having solved the frustrating “slow ink” problem typically experienced on pen-based electronic devices, thus providing a “pen and paper” like... View Details
Keywords: Entrepreneurial Marketing; Innovation Management; Go To Market Strategy; Marketing Plan; Target Market; Digital Devices; Consumer Electronics; Forecasting; Information Technology; Marketing Strategy; Innovation and Management; Marketing Channels; Entrepreneurship; Forecasting and Prediction; Product Marketing; Product Development; Electronics Industry
- November 15, 2016
- Article
Prediction Markets Didn't Call Trump's Win, Either
- 2016
- Working Paper
Innovation Network
By: Daron Acemoglu, Ufuk Akcigit and William Kerr
Technological progress builds upon itself, with the expansion of invention in one domain propelling future work in linked fields. Our analysis uses 1.8 million U.S. patents and their citation properties to map the innovation network and its strength. Past innovation... View Details
- October 11, 2016
- Article
Innovation Network
By: Daron Acemoglu, Ufuk Akcigit and William R. Kerr
Technological progress builds upon itself, with the expansion of invention in one domain propelling future work in linked fields. Our analysis uses 1.8 million U.S. patents and their citation properties to map the innovation network and its strength. Past innovation... View Details
- October 2016 (Revised April 2018)
- Case
DataXu: Selling Ad Tech
By: Frank V. Cespedes, John Deighton, Lisa Cox and Olivia Hull
DataXu served marketers by buying digital advertising for brands using its demand-side platform. It sought a way to build a more predictable revenue stream in the very transactional media marketplace, and hoped that two new marketing analytics products would give it a... View Details