Publications

Summer 2011
Article

Context, Agency, and Identity: The Indian Fashion Industry and Traditional Indian Crafts

By: Mukti Khaire

Identity is an important resource for firms, since it is a critical precursor of an important strategic resource-legitimacy. However, identities of new firms in new industries are typically inchoate, since they cannot be classified within pre-existing cognitive... View Details

Keywords: History; Decision Making; Identity; Entrepreneurship; Outcome or Result; Fashion Industry; France; Italy; United Kingdom; India

2019
Chapter

Local States of Play: Land and Urban Politics in Reform-Era China

By: Meg Rithmire

Book Abstract: Although comparative politics is conventionally seen as the study of politics across countries, the field has a longstanding and increasingly prominent tradition in national contexts; focusing on subnational units, institutions, actors and processes.... View Details

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January 2018
Technical Note

Business at the Base of the Pyramid: Understanding Impact and Impact Evaluations

By: V. Kasturi Rangan and Tricia Gregg

Unlike financial success, there is no clear consensus regarding how best to define and measure social impact. This HBS Technical Note written for students of the HBS MBA course Business at the Base of the Pyramid (BBOP), offers readers pragmatic perspectives on how the... View Details

Keywords: Developing Countries and Economies; Social Issues; Value Creation; Human Needs; Performance Evaluation

2020
Working Paper

Scientific Production: An Exploration into Organization, Resource Allocation, and Funding

By: Jerry Thursby, Marie Thursby, Karim R. Lakhani, Kyle R. Myers, Nina Cohodes, Sarah Bratt, Dennis Byrski, Hannah Cohoon and Maria Roche

Production of scientific knowledge is core to civilizational advancement in economic and material wellbeing of societies. Despite its fundamental importance, however, a systematic effort to quantitatively study the factors underlying scientific production, particularly... View Details

Keywords: Funding; Science; Knowledge; Research; Information Management; Resource Allocation

July 2011 (Revised June 2013)
Case

Foxconn Technology Group (A)

By: Robert G. Eccles, George Serafeim and Beiting Cheng

In 2010, Foxconn Technology Group, the largest and fastest growing multinational company in the Electronic Manufacturing Services (EMS) industry, came under public scrutiny after a string of employee suicides reached the international press. Although the company was... View Details

17 Aug 2020
Research & Ideas

What the Stockdale Paradox Tells Us About Crisis Leadership

that major participants in the global economy operate by. The three most powerful economic actors in the world—the United States, China, and Europe—are growing further apart in their View Details

Keywords: by Boris Groysberg and Robin Abrahams

December 2005 (Revised March 2007)
Case

Innovation and Collaboration at Merrill Lynch

By: Boris Groysberg and Ingrid Vargas

In the spring of 2005, Candace Browning, head of Global Securities Research and Economics at Merrill Lynch, led about 500 Merrill Lynch analysts worldwide in a collaborative effort to produce innovative research, most of them accustomed to working independently in... View Details

Keywords: Leadership; Groups and Teams; Management Teams; Decision Making; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Negotiation; Mathematical Methods; Strategy; Human Resources; Motivation and Incentives; Banking Industry; Financial Services Industry

27 Feb 2018
First Look

First Look at New Research and Ideas, February 27, 2018

the socially constructed nature of helping behavior. That is, the parties must establish and maintain a helping frame for their interaction, especially when help-givers are high-status external leaders.... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

12 Apr 2022
Book

Racism, Colonialism, and Britain's Legacy of Violence

accretion of these scandals eroded Britain’s defenses and legitimacy. They also raised questions about the empire’s economic toll. Was Britain’s postwar imperial resurgence strategy a wise one? Had... View Details

Keywords: by Avery Forman

June 2022
Case

Mossadeq’s Gambit: The US, UK, and Iranian Oil Nationalization

By: Jeremy Friedman and Jingyu Liu

Many of the West’s political problems in the Middle East and in Iran in particular can be traced to the overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh by military forces supported by the American CIA and the British MI6 in August 1953. Mossadegh, at the head of a... View Details

Keywords: Neo-imperialism; History; Conflict Management; War; Globalized Economies and Regions; Natural Resources; National Security; Government and Politics; Globalized Markets and Industries; Middle East; Iran

2011
Article

Group Size and Incentives to Contribute: A Natural Experiment at Chinese Wikipedia

By: Michael Zhang and Feng Zhu

In this paper, we examine the causal relationship between group size and incentives to contribute in the setting of Chinese Wikipedia, the Chinese language version of an online encyclopedia that relies entirely on voluntary contributions. The group at Chinese Wikipedia... View Details

Keywords: Rights; Motivation and Incentives; Internet and the Web; Valuation; Groups and Teams; Knowledge Sharing; Behavior; Satisfaction; Size; Government and Politics; Economics; Information Technology Industry; Hong Kong; Taiwan; Singapore

16 Apr 2009
Working Paper Summaries

Gray Markets and Multinational Transfer Pricing

Keywords: by Romana L. Autrey & Francesco Bova

Article

Guanxi versus Networking: Distinctive Configurations of Affect- and Cognition-based Trust in the Networks of Chinese and American Managers

By: Roy Y.J. Chua, M.W. Morris and P. Ingram

This research investigates hypotheses about differences between Chinese and American managers in the configuration of trusting relationships within their professional networks. Consistent with hypotheses about Chinese familial collectivism, an egocentric network survey... View Details

Keywords: Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues; Managerial Roles; Relationships; Cognition and Thinking; Emotions; Social and Collaborative Networks; Trust; China; United States

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2020
Book

Capitalism at Risk: How Business Can Lead

By: Joseph L. Bower, Dutch Leonard and Lynn S. Paine

Who should take the lead in fixing market capitalism? Business—not government alone. The spread of capitalism worldwide has made people wealthier than ever before. But capitalism's future is far from assured. Pandemics, income inequality, resource depletion, mass... View Details

Keywords: Capitalism; Business And Society; Economic Systems; Economic Growth; Policy; Leading Change; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Business and Community Relations; Corporate Strategy

Article

Operations Research in the Public Sector and Nonprofit Organizations

By: Zilla Sinuany-Stern and H. David Sherman

Public sector and nonprofit organizations (NPO) have been growing substantially in number and size since the turn of the millennium. In light of the ongoing economic crises these sectors are expected to grow even more with expanded demands for services, increased need... View Details

Keywords: Third Sector; Operations; Public Sector; Nonprofit Organizations

2023
Chapter

Marketing Through the Machine’s Eyes: Image Analytics and Interpretability

By: Shunyuan Zhang, Flora Feng and Kannan Srinivasan

he growth of social media and the sharing economy is generating abundant unstructured image and video data. Computer vision techniques can derive rich insights from unstructured data and can inform recommendations for increasing profits and consumer utility—if only the... View Details

Keywords: Transparency; Marketing Research; Algorithmic Bias; AI and Machine Learning; Marketing

October 2021
Article

Changing Gambling Behavior through Experiential Learning

By: Shawn A. Cole, Martin Abel and Bilal Zia

This paper tests experiential learning as a debiasing tool to reduce gambling in South Africa, through a randomized field experiment. The study implements a simple, interactive game that simulates the odds of winning the national lottery through dice rolling.... View Details

Keywords: Debiasing; Experiential Learning; Behavioral Economics; Financial Education; Learning; Games, Gaming, and Gambling; Behavior; Decision Making

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October 2010
Article

Culture Clash: The Costs and Benefits of Homogeneity

By: Eric Van den Steen

This paper develops an economic theory of the costs and benefits of corporate culture-in the sense of shared beliefs and values in order to study the effects of "culture clash" in mergers and acquisitions. I first use a simple analytical framework to show that shared... View Details

Keywords: Cost vs Benefits; Organizational Culture; Economics; Information Management; Forecasting and Prediction; Values and Beliefs; Mergers and Acquisitions; Framework; Satisfaction; Motivation and Incentives; Power and Influence; Communication

2012
Article

A Field Study on the Acceptance and Use of a New Accounting System

By: V.G. Narayanan, Ranjani Krishnan and Jamshed J. Mistry

This study examines the attitudes, use, and acceptance of a new accounting system in a pharmaceutical corporation that switched from an Activity Based Costing System to the Theory of Constraints System (TOC). Using structuration theory as a framework, we posit that... View Details

Keywords: Theory Of Constraints; Structuration; Field Study; Accounting; Innovation and Invention