Publications

Educators

10 Aug 2015
Research & Ideas

New Medical Devices Get To Patients Too Slowly

innovator. By contrast, previous research by Harvard's David Carpenter and others found that first movers in new chemical drug categories typically receives the fastest FDA approval, with every follow-on drug in the same category taking... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Health; Technology

Willis M. Emmons

WILLIAM (WILLIS) EMMONS is Senior Lecturer and Director of the C. Roland Christensen Center for Teaching and Learning at Harvard Business School, a position he has held since 2004. As Director of the Christensen Center, Emmons oversees programs to... View Details

Keywords: airline; infrastructure industry; pharmaceuticals; telecommunications; utilities

Article

Learning Models for Actionable Recourse

By: Alexis Ross, Himabindu Lakkaraju and Osbert Bastani

As machine learning models are increasingly deployed in high-stakes domains such as legal and financial decision-making, there has been growing interest in post-hoc methods for generating counterfactual explanations. Such explanations provide individuals adversely... View Details

Keywords: Machine Learning Models; Recourse; Algorithm; Mathematical Methods

2022
Article

Towards Robust Off-Policy Evaluation via Human Inputs

By: Harvineet Singh, Shalmali Joshi, Finale Doshi-Velez and Himabindu Lakkaraju

Off-policy Evaluation (OPE) methods are crucial tools for evaluating policies in high-stakes domains such as healthcare, where direct deployment is often infeasible, unethical, or expensive. When deployment environments are expected to undergo changes (that is, dataset... View Details

Keywords: Analytics and Data Science; Research

26 Jan 2018
HBS Seminar

John Helveston, Boston University

Article

Innovation Contests for High-Tech Procurement

By: Jin Hyun Paik, Martin Scholl, Rinat A. Sergeev, Steven Randazzo and Karim R. Lakhani

Innovation managers rarely use crowdsourcing as an innovative instrument despite extensive academic and theoretical research. The lack of tools available to compare and measure crowdsourcing, specifically contests, against traditional methods of procuring goods and... View Details

Keywords: Open Innovation; Contests; Crowdsourcing; Nasa; Evaluation; Acquisition; Information Technology; Innovation and Invention; Performance Evaluation; Framework

23 Sep 2013
Working Paper Summaries

Applying Random Coefficient Models to Strategy Research: Testing for Firm Heterogeneity, Predicting Firm-Specific Coefficients, and Estimating Strategy Trade-Offs

Keywords: by Juan Alcácer, Wilbur Chung, Ashton Hawk & Gonçalo Pacheco-de-Almeida

How Google Sold Its Engineers on Management

High-performing knowledge workers often question whether managers actually contribute much, especially in a technical environment. Until recently, that was the case at Google, a company filled with self-starters who viewed management as more destructive than beneficial... View Details

December 2019
Technical Note

Technical Note on Bayesian Statistics and Frequentist Power Calculations

By: Amitabh Chandra and Ariel Dora Stern

This Technical Note provides an introduction to Bayes’ Rule and the statistical intuition that stems from it. In this note, we review the concepts that underlie Bayesian statistics, and we offer several simple mathematical examples to illustrate applications of Bayes’... View Details

Keywords: Bayesian Statistics; Mathematical Methods

Educators

September 1974 (Revised April 1975)
Case

Ocean Spray Cranberries, Inc. (A)

At the conclusion of a small-scale pilot survey, management must decide whether to invest in a larger survey or terminate the project. The objective of the study is to use psychographic measurement techniques to study the alternative positions of cranberry sauce.... View Details

Keywords: Surveys; Product Positioning; Mathematical Methods; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Food and Beverage Industry

Educators

Web

PhD Programs - Doctoral

requirements and curriculum, read student profiles as well as student research , and placement information. The PhD in Business Administration grounds students in the disciplinary theories and research View Details

13 Nov 2013
Research & Ideas

Should Men’s Products Fear a Woman’s Touch?

cigarettes. “Even though there was a functional need for men to drink lower-calorie soda, men couldn't bridge the gender gap image-wise without a new brand and product just for them” Research shows that loyal customers often get upset... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Consumer Products; Food & Beverage; Auto

July 2006
Article

Bringing History (Back) into International Business

By: G. Jones and Tarun Khanna

We argue that the field of international business should evolve its rhetoric from the relatively uncontroversial idea that 'history matters' to exploring how it matters. We discuss four conceptual channels through which history matters, illustrating each with a major... View Details

25 May 2021
Research & Ideas

White Airbnb Hosts Earn More. Can AI Shrink the Racial Gap?

percent. "One thing we can say: The algorithm is race-blind." By relying on intuition and other methods to set rates, many hosts of all backgrounds were overpricing their properties. The research team found... View Details

Keywords: by Lane Lambert; Technology; Accommodations

2022
Working Paper

TalkToModel: Explaining Machine Learning Models with Interactive Natural Language Conversations

By: Dylan Slack, Satyapriya Krishna, Himabindu Lakkaraju and Sameer Singh

Practitioners increasingly use machine learning (ML) models, yet they have become more complex and harder to understand. To address this issue, researchers have proposed techniques to explain model predictions. However, practitioners struggle to use explainability... View Details

Keywords: Natural Language Conversations; Predictive Models; AI and Machine Learning

22 Jan 2014
Working Paper Summaries

Separating Homophily and Peer Influence with Latent Space

Keywords: by Joseph P. Davin, Sunil Gupta & Mikołaj Jan Piskorski

2015
Working Paper

Financial Patent Quality: Finance Patents After State Street

By: Josh Lerner, Andrew Speen, Mark Baker and Ann Leamon

In the past two decades, patents of inventions related to financial services ("finance patents"), as well as litigation around these patents, have surged. One of the repeated concerns voiced by academics and practitioners alike has been about the quality of these... View Details

Keywords: Patents; Lawsuits and Litigation; Finance

09 Jan 2024
Blog Post

Insights From Harvard Business School’s Peek Program

Peek is an annual online program for current undergraduate students that provides an opportunity to try out the HBS case method of study, join a leadership development discussion, gain an understanding of the career flexibility and... View Details

2015
Chapter

Consumer Neuroscience: Revealing Meaningful Relationships Between Brain and Consumer Behavior

By: Hilke Plassmann and Uma R. Karmarkar

The goal of this chapter is to give an overview of the nascent field of consumer neuroscience and discuss when and how it is useful to integrate the "black box" of the consumer's brain into consumer psychology. To reach this goal, we first briefly outline several... View Details

Keywords: Consumer Behavior; Cognition and Thinking