Publications
Publications
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(6,941)
- Faculty Publications (1,750)
- 2020
- Working Paper
Consumers Punish Firms That Cut Employee Pay in Response to COVID-19
By: Bhavya Mohan, Serena Hagerty and Michael Norton
Two experiments, including one incentive compatible study, examine the impact of cutting pay for executives versus employees in response to COVID-19 on consumer behavior. Study 1 explores the effect of announcing cuts or no cuts to CEO and employee pay, and shows that... View Details
- August 2020 (Revised May 2021)
- Case
PayPal: The Next Chapter
By: Michael Porter, Mark Kramer and Annelena Lobb
Can a social purpose and stakeholder capitalism confer a powerful competitive advantage in the age of COVID-19? For PayPal, the answer is yes. After spinning off from eBay in a 2015 IPO, the company declared its purpose as "democratizing financial services" by ensuring... View Details
- Article
Common Variants of the Oxytocin Receptor Gene Do Not Predict the Positive Mood Benefits of Prosocial Spending
By: Ashley V. Whillans, Lara B. Aknin, Colin Ross, Lihan Chen and Frances S. Chen
Who benefits most from helping others? Previous research suggests that common polymorphisms of the oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR) predict whether people behave generously and experience increases in positive mood in response to socially-focused experiences in daily... View Details
- August 2020
- Article
Does Spending Money on Others Promote Happiness? A Registered Replication Report
By: Lara B. Aknin, Elizabeth W. Dunn, Jason Proulx, Iris Lok and Michael I. Norton
Research indicates that spending money on others—prosocial spending—leads to greater happiness than spending money on oneself (e.g., Dunn, Aknin, & Norton, 2008, 2014). These findings have received widespread attention because they offer insight into why people engage... View Details
- August 2020
- Article
Leverage and the Beta Anomaly
By: Malcolm Baker, Mathias F. Hoeyer and Jeffrey Wurgler
The well-known weak empirical relationship between beta risk and the cost of equity—the beta anomaly—generates a simple tradeoff theory: As firms lever up, the overall cost of capital falls as leverage increases equity beta, but as debt becomes riskier the marginal... View Details
- September 2020
- Article
Relaxing Household Liquidity Constraints Through Social Security
By: Sylvain Catherine, Max Miller and Natasha Sarin
More than a quarter of working-age households in the United States do not have sufficient savings to cover their expenditures after a month of unemployment. Recent proposals suggest giving workers early access to a small portion of their future Social Security benefits... View Details
- July 2020
- Background Note
Gender Diversity on Boards: Views from Norway
By: Aiyesha Dey
The issue of gender diversity on boards has received increased attention in U.S markets over the past few years. In 2018, California introduced a law which required boards of U.S-listed firms with headquarters in California to include at least one female director by... View Details
- July 28, 2020
- Article
Economic Vulnerability of Households with Essential Workers
By: Grace McCormack, Christopher Avery, Ariella Kahn-Lang Spitzer and Amitabh Chandra
The label of “essential worker” reflects society’s needs but does not mean that society has compensated those workers for additional risks incurred on the job during the current pandemic. When an essential worker contracts severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus... View Details
- July 2020 (Revised January 2021)
- Case
Pattern Brands
By: Sunil Gupta, Elie Ofek and Julia Kelley
In March 2020, direct-to-consumer (DTC) company Pattern Brands needed to decide how to allocate resources across its different brands. Pattern Co-Founders Nick Ling and Emmett Shine hoped to avoid the pitfalls faced by some DTC companies—such as inability to scale and... View Details
Keywords: Direct-to-consumer; Brands and Branding; Marketing Channels; Marketing Strategy; Product Marketing; Product Launch; Product Positioning; Business Model; Business Startups; Growth and Development Strategy; Demand and Consumers; Business Strategy; Diversification; Competitive Advantage; Consumer Products Industry; Retail Industry; North and Central America; United States; New York (city, NY); New York (state, US)
- July 2020
- Article
Does Corporate Misconduct Affect the Future Compensation of Alumni Managers?
By: Boris Groysberg, Eric Lin and George Serafeim
Using data from a top-five global executive placement firm, the authors explore how an organization's financial misconduct may affect pay for former employees not implicated in wrongdoing. Drawing on stigma theory, they hypothesize that although such alumni did not... View Details
- July–September 2020
- Article
Innovation Contest: Effect of Perceived Support for Learning on Participation
By: Olivia Jung, Andrea Blasco and Karim R. Lakhani
Background: Frontline staff are well positioned to conceive improvement opportunities based on first-hand knowledge of what works and does not work. The innovation contest may be a relevant and useful vehicle to elicit staff ideas. However, the success of the... View Details
- Article
Quantifying the Benefits from a Care Coordination Program for Tracheostomy Placement in Neonates
By: Christen Caloway, Alisa Yamasaki, Kevin M. Callans, Mahek Shah, Robert S. Kaplan and Christopher Hartnick
Value-based care models are becoming instrumental in structuring clinical care delivery in our healthcare climate. Our objective was to determine the value associated with implementation of a Family-Centered Care Coordination (FCCC) program for neonates undergoing... View Details
- July–August 2020
- Article
Sarcasm, Self-Deprecation, and Inside Jokes: A User's Guide to Humor at Work
By: Brad Bitterly and Alison Wood Brooks
Humor is widely considered essential in personal relationships, but in leaders, it’s seen as an ancillary behavior. Though some leaders use humor instinctively, many more could wield it purposefully.
Humor helps build interpersonal trust and high-quality work... View Details
- June 2020 (Revised May 2022)
- Case
Vanguard Retail Operations (A)
By: Willy C. Shih and Antonio Moreno
The first two cases in this series are set in the financial services industry, and explore whether it is better for back-office workers to be generalists who provide the flexibility of being able to handle the complete range of transactions that the company faces or... View Details
- June 2020 (Revised August 2020)
- Supplement
Vanguard Retail Operations (B)
By: Willy C. Shih and Antonio Moreno
The first two cases in this series are set in the financial services industry, and explore whether it is better for back-office workers to be generalists who provide the flexibility of being able to handle the complete range of transactions that the company faces or... View Details
- June 2020
- Background Note
Customer Management Dynamics and Cohort Analysis
By: Elie Ofek, Barak Libai and Eitan Muller
The digital revolution has allowed companies to amass considerable amounts of data on their customers. Using this information to generate actionable insights is fast becoming a critical skill that firms must master if they wish to effectively compete and win in today’s... View Details
- June 2, 2020
- Article
How to 'Re-engineer' Your Business for Safety
By: Hubert Joly
Process reengineering was a massive trend in the 1990s. By focusing on improving either cost, quality, or service, a company could gain benefits in all three categories. Today, the principles that underpin process reengineering can be applied anew, with safety as a... View Details
- 2020
- Article
Inconvenient Truths: Interpreting the Origins of the Internet
By: Shane Greenstein
A conventional economic narrative provides intellectual underpinnings for governments to subsidize research and development ("R&D") that coordinates risky research to benefit many in society. This essay compares this narrative with the origins and invention of the... View Details
- 2020
- Article
Why Do User Communities Matter for Strategy?
By: Sonali K. Shah and Frank Nagle
In this essay, we explore how strategic management research and practice could benefit from considering the benefits and challenges obtainable through working with user communities. User communities represent a unique organizing structure for the exchange of ideas and... View Details
- May 2020
- Teaching Note
Talismark
By: Richard S. Ruback, Royce Yudkoff and Ahron Rosenfeld
Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 211-097. Talismark negotiated waste hauling contracts for small and medium size companies. Its owners, Charles Muszynski and Marshall Staiman, were able to grow the business by more than 30% per year since it was founded, but believed... View Details