Publications

2014
Working Paper

Digital Discrimination: The Case of Airbnb.com

By: Benjamin Edelman and Michael Luca

Online marketplaces often contain information not only about products, but also about the people selling the products. In an effort to facilitate trust, many platforms encourage sellers to provide personal profiles and even to post pictures of themselves. However,... View Details

Keywords: Prejudice and Bias; Internet and the Web; Race; Trust; Renting or Rental; Accommodations Industry; Real Estate Industry

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Marketing Awards & Honors - Faculty & Research

Case Centre Award in the Marketing Category for her case with Thomas Steenburgh and Naseem Dahod, “HubSpot: Inbound Marketing and Web 2.0” (HBS Case No. 509-049). Anita Elberse : Awarded Amazon’s "Best Books of 2013," Business and... View Details

02 Dec 2002
Research & Ideas

The Secret of How Microsoft Stays on Top

that required the firm to rethink its strategy. We chose to examine the rise of the World Wide Web, given that this transition brought about the rise of a new product category—the Web browser. Microsoft therefore needed to develop a... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

16 Dec 2022
Research & Ideas

Why Technology Alone Can't Solve AI's Bias Problem

combat ranking biases, web developers have created “fair-ranking algorithms” that try to serve up a more equitable list of relevant results in a search query. For example, a fair-ranking algorithm might ensure women and other... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Technology

February 2002 (Revised October 2005)
Case

BMWFilms

By: Youngme E. Moon and Kerry Herman

Jim McDowell, VP of marketing at BMW North America, is debating how to follow up the success of his latest marketing campaign, "BMWFilms." This campaign features five short films for the Internet, directed by some of the hottest young directors in Hollywood. By all... View Details

Keywords: Consumer Behavior; Internet and the Web; Marketing Strategy; Film Entertainment; Innovation and Invention; Auto Industry; North and Central America

25 Mar 2015
HBS Case

Tate’s Digital Makeover Transforms the Traditional Museum

Twitter' but when asked why or to what end, often there isn't a lot of strategic thinking behind their decision to be in social media." As apps, blogs, and social media have transformed the Internet in the past decade from the static content environment of View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Education

August 2023
Case

WayCool: Reimagining the Food Supply Chain

By: Paul Gompers and Kairavi Dey

Founded in 2015, WayCool, is an Indian agri-tech start-up that built a B2B operation acquiring fruits and vegetables from product-specific agriculture companies and small-holding farmers. It sold them to business customers, such as local retail stores, restaurants, and... View Details

Keywords: Agribusiness; Digital Transformation; Operations; Business Strategy; Supply Chain; Performance; Business Startups; Growth and Development Strategy; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Food and Beverage Industry; Technology Industry; Web Services Industry; Asia; South Asia

March 2023
Case

Ransomware Attack at Colonial Pipeline Company

By: Suraj Srinivasan and Li-Kuan Ni

On the morning of May 7, 2021, Colonial Pipeline Company became aware that the company had been the victim of a malicious ransomware attack that had stolen and locked up company data. The extortionists demanded 75 bitcoins (worth about $4.4 million at the time) in... View Details

15 Mar 2017
Lessons from the Classroom

More Than 900 Examples of How Climate Change Affects Business

This word cloud is composed of blog posts by more than 900 students describing how individual organizations are likely to be affected by climate change. Image by Patrick Clapp Last fall, first-year MBA students at Harvard Business School received a new assignment in... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Green Technology

January 2021 (Revised March 2022)
Case

Arçelik: From a Dealer Network to an Omnichannel Experience

By: Ayelet Israeli and Fares Khrais

Arçelik Turkey, the country’s market leader in household appliances, was at an omnichannel crossroads in January 2020. Arçelik was a B2B player utilizing a dealership network with an umbrella of brands and had one of the largest brick-and-mortar store networks in... View Details

February 2021 (Revised March 2022)
Case

Marvin: A Personalized Telehealth Approach to Mental Health

By: Regina E. Herzlinger, Eshani Sharma, Andrew Nguyen, Thomas Arsenault, Carin-Isabel Knoop and Julia Kelley

More than one third of Americans were said to suffer some type of behavioral health ailment at some point in their lifetime, with many people requiring chronic therapy or intervention. Despite significant clinical needs, access to reliable treatment has been difficult... View Details

Keywords: Mental Health; Applications; Startup Management; Telehealth; Health Care Entrepreneurship; Health ＆ Wellness; Health Care; Health Care and Treatment; Customization and Personalization; Internet and the Web; Entrepreneurship; Growth and Development Strategy; Applications and Software

25 May 2021
Research & Ideas

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

groups is less significant. The research was partly inspired by Zhang’s own experiences with Airbnb, and by a previous study in which she analyzed whether adding professional web touches, such as expert property photographs, produce more... View Details

Keywords: by Lane Lambert; Technology; Accommodations

December 2018
Case

DraftKings and the Future of Fantasy Sports

By: Robert F. Higgins and Julia Kelley

Founded in 2012, DraftKings helped change the fantasy sports landscape by popularizing daily fantasy sports (DFS), or short-term fantasy sports tournaments that offered big cash prizes to winners. The company’s valuation exceeded $1 billion by 2015, but DraftKings soon... View Details

11 May 2009
Research & Ideas

The IT Leader’s Hero Quest

change in the presentation?" "Nothing like that. We're experiencing an outage this morning, for about the last forty minutes. Customer Service is down. None of the call center systems are working, and the Web site is locked... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

24 Apr 2019
Research & Ideas

The 'Amazon Effect' Is Changing Online Price Competition—and the Fed Needs to Pay Attention

unusual to find stores from the same chain selling a product for different prices in different regions or online. Cavallo attributes this to the transparency afforded by the internet and customers’ concerns about fairness. “The web allows... View Details

Keywords: by Roberta Holland; Retail

30 Mar 2018
What Do You Think?

What Should Mark Zuckerberg Do?

amesy SUMMING UP: Should Facebook Change Its Business Model? Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, received a great deal of advice from respondents to this month’s column. It included ideas that haven’t gained much attention in the press. Along with the advice came comments... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett; Web Services; Web Services

August 2013 (Revised December 2014)
Case

Taking Dell Private

By: David J. Collis, David B. Yoffie and Matthew Shaffer

In July 2012, Michael Dell, CEO and founder of Dell, Inc., met with a representative of Silver Lake Partners to explore taking his company private. The company, which he had founded in his dorm room as a college freshman and which had made him the youngest Fortune 500... View Details

Keywords: Strategy; Going Private; The PC Market; Market For Corporate Control; Corporate Strategy; Leveraged Buyouts; Change Management; Private Equity; Market Entry and Exit; Private Ownership; Information Infrastructure; Applications and Software; Internet and the Web; Computer Industry; Technology Industry; United States

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