Publications

Ta-Wei (David) Huang is a PhD candidate in Quantitative Marketing at Harvard Business School. His research integrates causal inference and machine learning to address methodological challenges and unintended consequences in targeting, personalization, and online... View Details

October 2019
Case

Kaspi.kz IPO

By: Victoria Ivashina and Esel Çekin

This case follows Kaspi.kz, a private equity (Baring Vostok) co-owned retail bank in Central Asia that evolved into a fintech, payments and e-commerce company. It provides insights into private equity financing, portfolio company management, and initial public offering... View Details

Keywords: Finance; Private Equity; Initial Public Offering; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Central Asia

August 2017 (Revised November 2017)
Case

Paktor: Designing a Dating App

By: Michael Luca, Stephanie Chan and Essie Alamsyah

Paktor is a popular mobile-based online dating app from Singapore, where a user can swipe right or left on a profile to indicate her interest in a potential match. The case is designed to explore issues related to pricing, market design, and launch strategies in the... View Details

Keywords: Mobile and Wireless Technology; Design; Price; Product Launch; Global Strategy

Teaching

Overview

By: Christina M. Wallace

Christina Wallace teaches Launching Tech Ventures in the second-year MBA program and is co-course head for The Entrepreneurial Manager in the first-year MBA program. She created an Entrepreneurial Marketing course for HBS Online and regularly teaches entrepreneurship,... View Details

February 2010 (Revised October 2010)
Case

YouTube: Time to Charge Users?

By: Anita Elberse and Sunil Gupta

In January 2010, YouTube, the world's largest online video aggregator, was still seeking to become profitable. Was the time right for Google, YouTube's parent company, to charge users seeking to upload content, as some analysts had suggested—and if so, who should be... View Details

Keywords: Digital Marketing; Business Model; Cost; Profit; Revenue; Consumer Behavior; Internet and the Web; Motion Pictures and Video Industry

May 2021 (Revised February 2024)
Teaching Note

THE YES: Reimagining the Future of E-Commerce with Artificial Intelligence (AI)

By: Ayelet Israeli and Jill Avery

THE YES, a multi-brand shopping app launched in May 2020 offered a new type of buying experience for women’s fashion, driven by a sophisticated algorithm that used data science and machine learning to create and deliver a personalized store for every shopper, based on... View Details

Keywords: Data; Data Analytics; Artificial Intelligence; AI; AI Algorithms; AI Creativity; Fashion; Retail; Retail Analytics; E-Commerce Strategy; Platform; Platforms; Big Data; Preference Elicitation; Predictive Analytics; App Development; ＂Marketing Analytics＂; Advertising; Mobile App; Mobile Marketing; Apparel; Online Advertising; Referral Rewards; Referrals; Female Ceo; Female Entrepreneur; Female Protagonist; Analytics and Data Science; Analysis; Creativity; Marketing Strategy; Brands and Branding; Consumer Behavior; Demand and Consumers; Forecasting and Prediction; Marketing Channels; Digital Marketing; Internet and the Web; Mobile and Wireless Technology; AI and Machine Learning; E-commerce; Digital Platforms; Fashion Industry; Retail Industry; Apparel and Accessories Industry; Consumer Products Industry; United States

25 Jan 2016
Working Paper Summaries

Racial Discrimination in the Sharing Economy: Evidence from a Field Experiment

Keywords: by Benjamin G. Edelman, Michael Luca & Daniel Svirsky; Tourism; Travel; Technology

28 Nov 2018
HBS Case

On Target: Rethinking the Retail Website

data about its online customers—products purchased, browsing habits, items abandoned in shopping carts—yet it wasn’t fully leveraging all that information. The company began to see this huge pile of e-commerce data as the... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman; Retail

August 2013 (Revised September 2015)
Case

Coursera

By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Hyunjin Kim

By providing free and open-access online courses at a large scale, Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) platforms seek to innovate the business models of the traditional higher education industry. In a little over a year, Coursera had grown at a rapid rate to emerge as a... View Details

Keywords: Business Models; Strategy; Competition; Business Model; Internet and the Web; Higher Education; Competitive Advantage; Education Industry

02 May 2016
HBS Seminar

Chiara Farronato, Harvard Business School

23 Mar 2018
Working Paper Summaries

Experience Markets: An Application to Outsourcing and Hiring

Keywords: by Christopher T. Stanton and Catherine Thomas

June 2014
Case

Going Social: Durex in China

By: Mikolaj Jan Piskorski and Aaron Smith

When Reckitt Benckiser (RB), a leading consumer goods company, first entered China, it encountered significant challenges. RB's strategy relied on selling high margin products supported by cost-effective advertising and distribution, but the highly competitive Chinese... View Details

Keywords: Distribution; Multinational Firms and Management; Internet and the Web; Marketing Communications; Brands and Branding; Consumer Products Industry; China

January 2022
Case

Bee-ing Better at Bombas

By: Elizabeth A. Keenan, Youngme Moon and John Masko

David Heath and Randy Goldberg founded Bombas in 2013 to serve two missions: to deliver the “best socks in the history of feet,” and to donate socks (the most requested item in homeless shelters) to Americans experiencing homelessness. Eight years later, Bombas had... View Details

Keywords: Social Entrepreneurship; Values and Beliefs; Brands and Branding; Marketing Strategy; Digital Marketing; Distribution; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Mission and Purpose; Quality; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Human Needs; Poverty; Growth and Development Strategy; Apparel and Accessories Industry; New York (city, NY)

25 Jul 2011
Research & Ideas

How Disruptive Innovation is Remaking the University

Editor's note: It has been more than a decade since the publication of The Innovator's Dilemma, in which Clayton M. Christensen introduced the idea of disruptive technologies—those unexpected products and services that shake up the market... View Details

Keywords: by Clayton M. Christensen & Henry J. Eyring; Education

20 Aug 2020
Blog Post

Being patients compelled us. Sequoia inspired us. HBS sustained us.

better than us. Which at the time, wasn’t saying much. Today, Deborah and I (an HBS MBA 2010 graduate) run FertilityIQ, an online educational resource used by over 90% of all US fertility patients. We’re imperfect, but we’ve managed to... View Details

February 2001
Case

BarnesandNoble.com (C)

By: Jeffrey F. Rayport, Dickson Louie and William A. Sahlman

At the end of 1999, Steve Riggio, the vice chairman and acting CEO of barnesandnoble.com, wonders what his company should do next against Amazon.com, the online retailer who is the leading online book seller in the United States. While barnesandnoble.com has been... View Details

Keywords: Competitive Strategy; Competitive Advantage; Internet and the Web; Diversification; Brands and Branding; Retail Industry

16 Jul 2007
Research & Ideas

Understanding the ‘Want’ vs. ’Should’ Decision

with Milkman and Rogers, they discuss their working paper "I'll Have the Ice Cream Soon and the Vegetables Later: Decreasing Impatience over Time in Online Grocery Orders," which looks at our tendency as consumers to choose... View Details

Keywords: by Sarah Jane Gilbert; Retail; Entertainment & Recreation

April 2007
Case

Schibsted

By: Bharat N. Anand and Sophie Hood

In 2006, newspaper firms in developed markets were severely threatened on three fronts: the growth of online news, online classified advertising, and free newspapers. Schibsted, however, had managed to cope with these challenges successfully, and had become something... View Details

Keywords: Transition; Product Launch; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Adaptation; Competitive Advantage; Media and Broadcasting Industry; Scandinavia

September 2016 (Revised September 2017)
Case

Zalora Philippines: From Growth to Profitability

By: Donald Ngwe and Thales Teixeira

In May 2015 Paulo Campos, co-founder and CEO of Zalora Philippines, found himself at a crucial turning point in his young company’s development. In just three years, Zalora had come from entering the Philippine fashion retail industry as an unknown quantity to becoming... View Details

Keywords: Internet and the Web; Business Subsidiaries; Business Growth and Maturation; Fashion Industry; Retail Industry; Sweden; Southeast Asia; Philippines