Publications
Publications
Show Results For
- All HBS Web
(3,526)
- Faculty Publications (761)
Testing
→
- 2012
- Article
Signing at the Beginning Makes Ethics Salient and Decreases Dishonest Self-reports in Comparison to Signing at the End
By: L. Shu, N. Mazar, F. Gino, D. Ariely and M. Bazerman
Many written forms required by businesses and governments rely on honest reporting. Proof of honest intent is typically provided through signature at the end of the document, e.g., tax returns or insurance policy forms. Still, people sometimes cheat to advance their... View Details
Keywords: Nudge; Morality; Honesty; Self-report; Policy-making; Ethics; Corporate Disclosure; Reports; Policy
- 2012
- Working Paper
What Do Managers Do? Exploring Persistent Performance Differences among Seemingly Similar Enterprises
By: Robert Gibbons and Rebecca Henderson
Social networks and social groups have both been seen as important to discouraging malfeasance and supporting the global pro-social norms that underlie social order, but have typically been treated either as pure substitutes or as having completely independent effects.... View Details
- July 2012
- Article
Discrete Choice Cannot Generate Demand That Is Additively Separable in Own Price
By: Sonia Jaffe and Scott Duke Kominers
We show that in a unit demand discrete choice framework with at least three goods, demand cannot be additively separable in own price. This result sharpens the analogous result of Jaffe and Weyl (2010) in the case of linear demand and has implications for testing of... View Details
- 2012
- Article
Exploring Re-Identification Risks in Public Domains
By: Aditi Ramachandran, Lisa Singh, Edward Porter and Frank Nagle
While re-identification of sensitive data has been studied extensively, with the emergence of online social networks and the popularity of digital communications, the ability to use public data for re-identification has increased. This work begins by presenting two... View Details
- Article
Testing Substitutability
By: John William Hatfield, Nicole Immorlica and Scott Duke Kominers
We provide an algorithm for testing the substitutability of a length-N preference relation over a set of contracts X in time O(|X|3⋅N3). Access to the preference relation is essential for this result: We show that a substitutability-testing algorithm with access only... View Details
- March–April 2012
- Article
The Rise and Fall of Small Worlds: Exploring the Dynamics of Social Structure
By: Ranjay Gulati, Maxim Sytch and Adam Tatarynowicz
This paper explores the interplay between social structure and economic action by examining some of the evolutionary dynamics of an emergent network that coalesces into a small-world system. The study highlights the small-world system's evolutionary dynamics at both... View Details
- June 2012 (Revised December 2017)
- Technical Note
Strategy and Strategic Decisions
This note introduces a framework for formulating strategy that helps a manager identify which decisions are strategic—and thus which decisions to focus on (both when developing strategy and when executing it)—and that provides a practical test for whether a particular... View Details
- 2012
- Working Paper
The Cost of Friendship
By: Paul A. Gompers, Yuhai Xuan and Vladimir Mukharlyamov
This paper explores two broad questions on collaboration between individuals. First, we investigate what personal characteristics affect people's desire to work together. Second, given the influence of these personal characteristics, we analyze whether this attraction... View Details
- June 2012
- Article
The Transparency Paradox: A Role for Privacy in Organizational Learning and Operational Control
Using data from embedded participant-observers and a field experiment at the second largest mobile phone factory in the world, located in China, I theorize and test the implications of transparent organizational design on workers' productivity and organizational... View Details
Keywords: Transparency; Privacy; Organizational Learning; Operational Control; Organizational Performance; Chinese Manufacturing; Field Experiment; Rights; Interpersonal Communication; Management Practices and Processes; Ethics; Corporate Disclosure; Performance Productivity; Boundaries; Organizations; Social and Collaborative Networks; Labor and Management Relations; Power and Influence; Manufacturing Industry; China
- May 2012
- Case
Evergreen Natural Markets 2012
By: Rosabeth M. Kanter and Paul S. Myers
Evergreen Natural Markets is a successful food retailer located in the Rocky Mountain region of the U.S. Having grown through acquisition, it has a reputation for improving the companies it purchases while retaining previous management. This strategy has succeeded due... View Details
- May 2012
- Article
Adding Bricks to Clicks: Predicting the Patterns of Cross-Channel Elasticities over Time
By: Jill Avery, Thomas J. Steenburgh, John Deighton and Mary Caravella
The authors propose a conceptual framework to explain whether and when the introduction of a new retail store channel helps or hurts sales in existing direct channels. A conceptual framework separates short- and long-term effects by analyzing the capabilities of a... View Details
Keywords: Marketing; Channels; Channels Of Distribution; Distribution; Retailing; Channel Management; Channel Migration; Multichannel Retailing; Framework; Customers; Marketing Channels; Sales; Internet and the Web; Demand and Consumers; Competency and Skills; Distribution Channels; E-commerce; Retail Industry; United States
- 2012
- Working Paper
No News Is Good News: CSR Strategy and Newspaper Coverage of Negative Firm Events
By: Jiao Luo, Stephan Meier and Felix Oberholzer-Gee
One of the benefits of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programs, it has been argued, is that they build up a reservoir of public good will, shielding companies in times of trouble. In this paper, we test the view that CSR provides protection from public ire by... View Details
- Article
The Stock Selection and Performance of Buy-Side Analysts
We examine the selection and performance of stocks recommended by analysts at a large investment firm relative to those of sell-side analysts during the period mid-1997 and 2004. The buy-side firm's analysts issued less optimistic recommendations for stocks with larger... View Details
- December 2011 (Revised July 2013)
- Background Note
Hypothesis-Driven Entrepreneurship: The Lean Startup
By: Thomas Eisenmann, Eric Ries and Sarah Dillard
Firms that follow a hypothesis-driven approach to evaluating entrepreneurial opportunity are called "lean startups." Entrepreneurs in these startups translate their vision into falsifiable business model hypotheses, then test the hypotheses using a series of "minimum... View Details
- 2011
- Working Paper
Discretion Within the Constraints of Opportunity: Gender Homophily and Structure in a Formal Organization
By: Adam M. Kleinbaum, Toby E. Stuart and Michael L. Tushman
Homophily in social relations is widely documented. We know that homophily results from both individual preferences and uneven opportunities for interaction, but how these two mechanisms interact in formal organizations is not well understood. We argue that... View Details
- December 2011
- Article
Prices or Knowledge? What Drives Demand for Financial Services in Emerging Markets?
By: Shawn A. Cole, Thomas Sampson and Bilal Zia
Financial development is critical for growth, but its micro-determinants are not well understood. We test leading theories of low demand for financial services in emerging markets, combining novel survey evidence from Indonesia and India with a field experiment. We... View Details
- September 2011
- Article
Information Risk and Fair Value: An Examination of Equity Betas
By: Edward J. Riedl and George Serafeim
Using a sample of U.S. financial institutions, we exploit recent mandatory disclosures of financial instruments designated as fair value level 1, 2, and 3 to test whether greater information risk in financial instrument fair values leads to higher cost of capital. We... View Details
- September 2011
- Article
On Testing Business Models
By: D. Huelsbeck, K. Merchant and Tatiana Sandino
This study explored management decisions regarding formal empirical testing of business models. It documented a test of one company's business model under seemingly favorable conditions for such a test – a successful single product firm following a consistent strategy... View Details
- July – August 2011
- Article
Foundations of Organizational Trust: What Matters to Different Stakeholders?
By: Michael Pirson and Deepak Malhotra
Prior research on organizational trust has not rigorously examined the context specificity of trust nor distinguished between the potentially varying dimensions along which different stakeholders base their trust. As a result, dominant conceptualizations of... View Details
- July–August 2011
- Article
Putting Business Models Under the Microscope
By: K. Merchant, Tatiana Sandino and D. Huelsbeck
The article provides advice for financial managers on evaluating business models for corporate performance measurement. Emphasis is given to a study sponsored by the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA) that examined the business model of a medical... View Details