Publications

spring 1994
Article

Unilateral Commitments and the Importance of Process in Alliances

By: Ranjay Gulati, Tarun Khanna and Nitin Nohria

How the partners in an alliance view their joint venture can have much to do with its success or failure. Each partner fears that the other will get the larger payoff by acting opportunistically while it cooperates in good faith. The result is that both partners choose... View Details

Keywords: Management Style; Partners and Partnerships; Joint Ventures; Management Practices and Processes; Alliances; Trust; Game Theory

Article

Technology, Identity, and Inertia: Through the Lens of 'The Digital Photography Company'

By: Mary Tripsas

Organizations often experience difficulty when pursuing new technology. Large bodies of research have examined the behavioral, social, and cognitive forces that underlie this phenomenon; however, the role of an organization's identity remains relatively unexplored.... View Details

Keywords: Change Management; Disruptive Innovation; Organizational Culture; Behavior; Cognition and Thinking; Identity; Perception; Technology Adoption

August 2021
Article

Hoping for the Worst? A Paradoxical Preference for Bad News

By: Kate Barasz and Serena Hagerty

Nine studies investigate when and why people may paradoxically prefer bad news—e.g., hoping for an objectively worse injury or a higher-risk diagnosis over explicitly better alternatives. Using a combination of field surveys and randomized experiments, the research... View Details

Keywords: Decision Avoidance; Difficult Decisions; Judgment And Decision Making; Medical Decision-making; Decision Making; Behavior

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November 2006
Background Note

Technical Game Theory Note #4: Contracting and Strategic Alliances

By: Dennis A. Yao

Provides a game theory-based interpretation of contracting and strategic alliances and introduces the problem of moral hazard. View Details

Keywords: Contracts; Alliances; Game Theory

Educators

21 Apr 2010
Working Paper Summaries

Why Do Firms Use Non-Linear Incentive Schemes? Experimental Evidence on Sorting and Overconfidence

Keywords: by Ian Larkin & Stephen Leider

Article

Machine Learning Approaches to Facial and Text Analysis: Discovering CEO Oral Communication Styles

By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Dan Wang, Natalie A. Carlson and Tarun Khanna

We demonstrate how a novel synthesis of three methods—(1) unsupervised topic modeling of text data to generate new measures of textual variance, (2) sentiment analysis of text data, and (3) supervised ML coding of facial images with a cutting-edge convolutional neural... View Details

Keywords: CEOs; Communication Style; Machine Learning; Spoken Communication; Nonverbal Communication; Personal Characteristics; Analysis; Performance

30 Jan 2013
Working Paper Summaries

These Are the Good Old Days: Foreign Entry and the Mexican Banking System

Keywords: by Stephen Haber & Aldo Musacchio; Banking

2017
Article

Frictions or Mental Gaps: What's Behind the Information We (Don't) Use and When Do We Care?

By: Benjamin Handel and Joshua Schwartzstein

Consumers suffer significant losses from not acting on available information. These losses stem from frictions such as search costs, switching costs, and rational inattention, as well as what we call mental gaps resulting from wrong priors/worldviews, or relevant... View Details

Keywords: Information; Consumer Behavior

01 Dec 2018
News

Sustaining Business And Society For The Long Term

companies, and drive change, HBX introduced the online certifi cate program Sustainable Business Strategy in June 2018. Led by Rebecca Henderson, the John and Natty McArthur University Professor, the program... View Details

2014
Article

Executive Compensation and Human Capital Investments Through Industry Selection

By: Boris Groysberg and Eric Lin

We use proprietary data capturing compensation levels of executives placed by a global search firm to investigate how executives evaluate rewards and risks of human capital investment choices. Our findings suggest that more isolated industries with lower opportunity to... View Details

Keywords: Executive Compensation; Human Capital; Personal Development and Career

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Article

Interorganizational Alliances and the Performance of Firms: A Study of Growth and Innovation Rates in a High-technology Industry

Keywords: Organizations; Alliances; Performance; Business Ventures; Growth and Development; Innovation and Invention; Information Technology; Information; Technology Industry

February 2012
Article

CEO Relational Leadership and Strategic Decision Quality in Top Management Teams: The Role of Team Trust and Learning from Failure

By: Abraham Carmeli, Asher Tishler and Amy C. Edmondson

In this study, we examine a complex pathway through which CEOs, who exhibit relational leadership, may improve the quality of strategic decisions of their top management teams (TMTs) by creating psychological conditions of trust and facilitating learning from failures... View Details

Keywords: Leadership Development; Decisions; Management Teams; Trust; Learning; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques; Managerial Roles; Failure

2012
Working Paper

Why Every Company Needs a CSR Strategy and How to Build It

By: Kash Rangan, Lisa Chase and Sohel Karim

The authors argue for a strategic and pragmatic, rather than ideological, approach to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) that contrasts sharply with the prevailing Shared Value framework offered by Porter and Kramer (HBR; Jan.-Feb. 2011). We assert that, despite... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Corporate Strategy; Values and Beliefs; Profit; Practice

28 Sep 2023
News

Meet the New HBS Team Helping Alumni Clubs and Associations to Thrive

Stockwell joins HBS from Tufts University, where she worked in Career Services and External Relations. Prior to that, she worked at Forrester Research as a senior consultant in learning View Details

Keywords: Margie Kelley; community service

17 Dec 2001
Research & Ideas

Venture Capital: Hot Markets and Current Industry Trends

Principal, Seed Capital Partners, said up to 80 percent of his firm's time is spent working with companies, doing whatever needs to be done, including basic blocking and tackling, recruiting and hiring,... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Hanna

April 2023
Article

The Preference Survey Module: A Validated Instrument for Measuring Risk, Time, and Social Preferences

By: Armin Falk, Anke Becker, Thomas Dohmen, David B. Huffman and Uwe Sunde

Incentivized choice experiments are a key approach to measuring preferences in economics but are also costly. Survey measures are a low-cost alternative but can suffer from additional forms of measurement error due to their hypothetical nature. This paper seeks to... View Details

Keywords: Survey Validation; Experiment; Preference Measurement; Surveys; Economics; Behavior; Measurement and Metrics

October 2004 (Revised June 2006)
Background Note

A Note on Analyzing and Choosing a Job Offer

Provides insights and observations into the process of analyzing and choosing a job offer. Teaching Purpose: To assist in career planning. View Details

Keywords: Job Offer; Personal Development and Career