Publications

February 1991
Case

Burlington Northern: The ARES Decision (B)

By: Julie H. Hertenstein and Robert S. Kaplan

The ARES team formally proposes that Burlington Northern implement the ARES system. The project meets resistance. In light of financial restructuring and high level of debt, executives wonder whether the company can afford ARES. Weak links during the ARES development... View Details

Keywords: Accounting Audits; Restructuring; Cost vs Benefits; Decision Choices and Conditions; Borrowing and Debt; Capital Budgeting; Projects; Technology Adoption; Service Industry

23 May 2014
News

Can You Crowdsource a Big Idea?

Research Summary

Top Management Teams

Michael Roberto is studying how senior management teams function, and how chief executives lead these teams effectively. Many chief executives can identify their top management team, but this set of executives does not necessarily perform critical tasks and make... View Details

June 2021
Case

HelloSelf: Search

By: John R. Wells and Benjamin Weinstock

In August 2018, after nearly six months of searching, Charles Wells was convinced that he should found HelloSelf to help people improve their sense of mental wellbeing. Those feeling mentally unwell would receive support from fully qualified clinical psychotherapists,... View Details

Keywords: Mental Health; Health Care and Treatment; Internet and the Web; Business Model; Product Launch

Spring 2020
Article

Establishing High Performing Teams: Lessons from Health Care

By: Michael Anne Kyle, Emma-Louise Aveling and Sara J. Singer

Effective teams can be significant drivers of innovations that enable broader quality improvements and efficiency gains across organizations. But despite the wealth of research and managerial expertise describing characteristics of effective teams, people and... View Details

Keywords: Groups and Teams; Performance Effectiveness

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May 2016
Article

Matching with Slot-Specific Priorities: Theory

By: Scott Duke Kominers and Tayfun Sönmez

We introduce a two-sided, many-to-one matching with contracts model in which agents with unit demand match to branches that may have multiple slots available to accept contracts. Each slot has its own linear priority order over contracts; a branch chooses contracts by... View Details

Keywords: Matching With Contracts; Stability; Strategy-proofness; School Choice; Affirmative Action; Airline Seat Upgrades; Contracts; Market Design; Marketplace Matching; Balance and Stability

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20 Nov 2019
News

Factories without walls: How Autodesk is redesigning the work of architecture, construction, and manufacturing

2010
Working Paper

A Brief Postwar History of U.S. Consumer Finance

By: Andrea Ryan, Gunnar Trumbull and Peter Tufano

This article describes the consumer finance sector in the US since World War II. We first define the sector in terms of the functions delivered by firms (payments, savings/investing, borrowing, managing risk, and providing advice.) We provide time series evidence on... View Details

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Borrowing and Debt; Mortgages; Personal Finance; Business History; Innovation and Invention; Risk and Uncertainty; Financial Services Industry; United States

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June 2007 (Revised October 2007)
Case

Information Technology and Clinical Operations at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center

By: Richard M.J. Bohmer, F. Warren McFarlan and Julia Rose Adler-Milstein

Describes the history of clinical computing at Boston's Beth Israel Hospital and the development, since the 1996 merger to form the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, of an information system designed to support the delivery of patient care. The hospitals' CIO, John... View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Product Design; Service Delivery; Information Technology; Applications and Software; Health Industry; Boston

Web

Organizational Behavior - Doctoral

School are prepared to pursue an interdisciplinary inquiry into issues that are broadly related to the functioning of individuals within groups, at either the micro or macro level. Graduates of our program go on to become the leading... View Details

March 2008
Article

Is Yours a Learning Organization?

By: David A. Garvin, Amy C. Edmondson and Francesca Gino

This article includes a one-page preview that quickly summarizes the key ideas and provides an overview of how the concepts work in practice along with suggestions for further reading. An organization with a strong learning culture faces the unpredictable deftly.... View Details

Keywords: Interpersonal Communication; Learning; Surveys; Leading Change; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques; Organizational Culture

Research Summary

Business Leadership Coalitions

By: James E. Austin

This multiyear research project has been studying the creation and functioning of the organizations business leaders have created in order to mobilize their collective capabilities to address significant issues and problems facing them and their communities. These... View Details

Article

Games of Threats

By: Elon Kohlberg and Abraham Neyman

A game of threats on a finite set of players, N, is a function d that assigns a real number to any coalition, S ⊆ N, such that d(S) = -d(N\S). A game of threats is not necessarily a coalitional game as it may fail to satisfy the condition d(Ø) = 0. We show that analogs... View Details

Keywords: Shapley Value; Coalitional Game; Game Theory; Mathematical Methods

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Fall 2011
Article

A Brief Postwar History of U.S. Consumer Finance

By: Gunnar Trumbull and Peter Tufano

In this brief history of U.S. consumer finance since World War II, the sector is defined based on the functions delivered by firms in the form of payments, savings and investing, borrowing, managing risk, and providing advice. Evidence of major trends in consumption,... View Details

Keywords: Consumer Finance; Consumer Credit; U.s. History; Consumer Behavior; Personal Finance; Credit; Trends; History; United States

17 Jul 2007
First Look

First Look: July 17, 2007

to platform leadership change that does not rely on Schumpeterian creative destruction: platform envelopment. By leveraging common components and shared user relationships, one platform provider can move into another's market, combining its own View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

Program

Behavioral Economics—Virtual

challenges and career decisions Who Should Attend Executives with at least 10 years of experience who lead functional areas such as product development, human resources, talent management, marketing, advertising, business development, or... View Details

Program

High Potentials Leadership Program

participants from different functions will facilitate collaboration, teamwork, and learning across the organization by creating: A core group of talented, driven individuals who think about leadership and the challenges confronting... View Details

2009
Article

Compelled to Help: Effects of Direct and Indirect Exchange on Perceived Obligation in Professional Networks

By: Roy Y.J. Chua, Billian Sullivan and Michael W. Morris

This research examines felt obligation to help others in employees' and managers' professional networks using a social exchange perspective. We hypothesize that obligation toward others would follow the norms of both direct and indirect reciprocity. Direct reciprocity... View Details

Keywords: Perspective; Conflict of Interests; Research; Surveys; Networks; Forecasting and Prediction; Social Issues

March 1993 (Revised April 1995)
Case

IBM After-Sales Service

By: Janice H. Hammond

IBM has established a service delivery system to provide service and maintenance parts for its installed base of computers. The case outlines the competitive pressures IBM faces from alternative providers of maintenance services (e.g. other OEMs, third-party... View Details

Keywords: Service Delivery; Service Operations; Supply Chain; Supply Chain Management; Logistics; Operations; Distribution; Customer Focus and Relationships; Competitive Strategy; Computer Industry