Publications

SSRN

2023
Working Paper

Scoring and Funding Breakthrough Ideas: Evidence from a Global Pharmaceutical Company

By: Joshua Krieger, Ramana Nanda, Ian Hunt, Aimee Reynolds and Peter Tarsa

We study resource allocation to early-stage ideas at an internal startup program of one the largest pharmaceutical firms in the world. Our research design enables us to elicit every evaluator’s scores across five different attributes, before seeing how they would... View Details

Keywords: Project Selection; Pharmaceuticals; Financing Innovation; Resource Allocation; Innovation and Invention; Research and Development

January 2021
Case

Toyota and Its Labor Union in Argentina (A)

By: Jorge Tamayo, Erik Snowberg and Jenyfeer Martinez Buitrago

In 2011, Daniel Herrero, CEO of Toyota Argentina (TASA) since 2010, was about to meet with the Secretary-General of the union representing automotive industry workers in the country. The company produced vehicles in Argentina since 1997 at their plant at Zárate, and,... View Details

Keywords: Manufacturing Performance; Bargaining; Production; Performance; Labor Unions; Labor and Management Relations; Fairness; Factories, Labs, and Plants; Auto Industry; Argentina

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June 2012
Article

Consequence-Cause Matching: Looking to the Consequences of Events to Infer Their Causes

By: Robyn A. LeBoeuf and Michael I. Norton

We show that people non-normatively infer event causes from event consequences. For example, people inferred that a product failure (computer crash) had a large cause (widespread computer virus) if it had a large consequence (job loss), but that the identical failure... View Details

Keywords: Causal Inference; Product; Forecasting and Prediction; Motivation and Incentives; Failure

18 Apr 2022
HBS Case

Dick’s Sporting Goods Followed Its Conscience on Guns—and It Paid Off

reaction on Wall Street was muted—and by the end of the day, Walmart, L.L. Bean, and Kroger all announced similar gun-sale restrictions of their own. Dick’s Sporting Goods did lose millions in sales in the months immediately following... View Details

Keywords: by Jay Fitzgerald

06 May 2024
Research & Ideas

The Critical Minutes After a Virtual Meeting That Can Build Up or Tear Down Teams

they carefully manage the relationship. About four months into the study, the researchers observed a much different reaction to a similar change in code ownership by the other team they were observing, which they named Team Prism. Again,... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

07 Nov 2014
Working Paper Summaries

Do Experts or Collective Intelligence Write with More Bias? Evidence from Encyclopædia Britannica and Wikipedia

Keywords: by Shane Greenstein & Feng Zhu; Information; Publishing

05 Sep 2023
Book

Failing Well: How Your ‘Intelligent Failure’ Unlocks Your Full Potential

goal that requires breaking new ground and is not just retreading work that’s already been done, such as a copycat drug or a technology that’s similar to another one on the market. “There is no new knowledge to produce the results you... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

May 2020
Article

Identifying Sources of Inefficiency in Health Care

By: Amitabh Chandra and Douglas O. Staiger

In medicine, the reasons for variation in treatment rates across hospitals serving similar patients are not well understood. Some interpret this variation as unwarranted and push standardization of care as a way of reducing allocative inefficiency. However, an... View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Performance Efficiency; Performance Productivity; Mathematical Methods

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2016
Working Paper

Popular Acceptance of Inequality Due to Innate Brute Luck and Support for Classical Benefit-Based Taxation

By: Matthew C. Weinzierl

U.S. survey respondents' views on distributive justice are shown to differ in two specific, related ways from what is conventionally assumed in modern optimal tax research. A large share of respondents, and in some cases a large majority, resist the full equalization... View Details

Keywords: Equality and Inequality; Attitudes; Taxation; Theory; United States

February 2013
Article

Does Shareholder Proxy Access Improve Firm Value? Evidence from the Business Roundtable Challenge

By: Bo Becker, Guhan Subramanian and Daniel B. Bergstresser

We use the Business Roundtable's challenge to the SEC's 2010 proxy access rule as a natural experiment to measure the value of shareholder proxy access. We find that firms that would have been most vulnerable to proxy access, as measured by institutional ownership and... View Details

Keywords: Financial Markets; Business and Shareholder Relations

24 Oct 2023
HBS Case

From P.T. Barnum to Mary Kay: Lessons From 5 Leaders Who Changed the World

company’s CEO, and called him at home. Caught off guard but intrigued, Hewlett chatted with Jobs for 20 minutes and gave him a summer position. Several years later, a similar tactic worked at video-game company Atari, when a shaggy-haired... View Details

Keywords: by Avery Forman

26 Sep 2006
First Look

First Look: September 26, 2006

Working PapersScale Without Mass: Business Process Replication and Industry Dynamics Authors:Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee, Michael Sorell, and Feng Zhu Abstract Since the mid-1990s, productivity growth has accelerated in the U.S. economy. In this paper, we... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

05 Jul 2006
Working Paper Summaries

Exploring the Structure of Complex Software Designs: An Empirical Study of Open Source and Proprietary Code

Keywords: by Alan D. MacCormack, John Rusnak & Carliss Y. Baldwin; Video Game; Web Services

June 29, 2022
Other Article

Strategic Complexity? Using Experiments to Understand and Overcome Obfuscation

By: Michael Luca, Ginger Zhe Jin and Daniel Martin

Credit card companies must decide what product features to disclose to consumers, such as payment schedules, penalties, and fees--and also whether to present them clearly or bury them in the fine print. Firms face similar choices in settings ranging from privacy... View Details

Keywords: Obfuscation; Credit Cards; Strategic Incentives; Complexity; Agreements and Arrangements; Customers; Consumer Behavior; Financial Services Industry

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March 2023
Supplement

Halftime for Heidelberg

By: Debora L. Spar

The case follows President Rob Huntington as he seeks to find a viable way forward for Heidelberg University.
Located in Tiffin, Ohio, Heidelberg is a small, private, four-year university. As with many similar institutions of higher education, it currently faces... View Details

Keywords: University; University Administration; University Endowment; Endowments; Brand Management; Higher Education; Strategic Planning; Brands and Branding; Education Industry; Ohio; United States

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April 2020 (Revised May 2021)
Case

Middlebury College: Energy2028

By: Brian Trelstad, Michael Norris and John McKinley

In 2018, Middlebury College’s board of trustees is considering a proposal called Energy2028 that would push the small, liberal arts and sciences college in Vermont to become a net zero carbon emitter, decrease energy usage by 25%, divest fossil fuels from its... View Details

Keywords: Divestment; Energy; Higher Education; Energy Conservation; Climate Change

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November 2020
Article

Casting Conference Calls

By: Lauren Cohen, Dong Lou and Christopher J. Malloy

We explore a subtle but important mechanism through which firms can control information flow to the markets. We find that firms that “cast” their conference calls by disproportionately calling on bullish analysts tend to underperform in the future. Firms that call on... View Details

Keywords: Strategic Release; Firms; Conference Calls; Information; Strategy; Asset Pricing

SSRN

June 2020
Article

Parallel Play: Startups, Nascent Markets, and the Effective Design of a Business Model

By: Rory McDonald and Kathleen Eisenhardt

Prior research advances several explanations for entrepreneurial success in nascent markets but leaves a key imperative unexplored: the business model. By studying five ventures in the same nascent market, we develop a novel theoretical framework for understanding how... View Details

Keywords: Search; Legitimacy; Organizational Innovation; Organizational Learning; Mechanisms And Processes; Institutional Entrepreneurship; Qualitative Methods; Business Model Design; Business Model; Business Startups; Entrepreneurship; Emerging Markets; Adaptation; Competition; Strategy

November 2003
Article

The Macroeconomics of Happiness

By: Rafael Di Tella, Robert MacCulloch and Andrew J. Oswald

We show that macroeconomic movements have strong effects on the happiness of nations. First, we find that there are clear microeconomic patterns in the psychological well-being levels of a quarter of a million randomly sampled Europeans and Americans from the 1970s to... View Details

Keywords: Macroeconomics; Happiness