Publications

April 2019 (Revised June 2019)
Case

Western Governors University: 10x Vision

By: William R. Kerr and Susie L. Ma

Western Governors University (WGU) was a nonprofit institution of higher education whose online learning model served more than 100,000 students in 2019 and was scaling rapidly. President Scott Pulsipher wanted to expand WGU’s reach to millions more with a plan called... View Details

Keywords: Online Education; Enrollment; Scaling; Higher Education; Internet and the Web; Business Model; Expansion; Growth and Development Strategy; Education Industry; United States

April 2019 (Revised March 2020)
Case

Handy: The Future of Work? (A)

By: Nien-hê Hsieh and Kieron Stopforth

Witnessing numerous lawsuits alleging that online platform companies misclassified workers as contractors when they were actually employees, Handy’s founders faced a series of decisions. Handy was an online platform business that enabled customers to book appointments... View Details

Keywords: Employment; Working Conditions; Entrepreneurship; Compensation and Benefits; Internet and the Web; Ethics; Fairness; Service Industry; United States

October 2011 (Revised September 2014)
Case

Music and the (Real) World: Thirty Years of MTV

By: Mukti Khaire and Eleanor Kenyon

The case is useful for teaching students the structure of creative industries - especially fashion - and the issues to consider when attempting disruptive innovation and entrepreneurship in these industries. View Details

Keywords: Industry Structures; Entrepreneurship; Disruptive Innovation; Internet and the Web; Networks

June 2010
Article

What Causes Industry Agglomeration? Evidence from Coagglomeration Patterns

By: Glenn Ellison, Edward Glaeser and William R. Kerr

Why do firms cluster near one another? We test Marshall's theories of industrial agglomeration by examining which industries locate near one another, or coagglomerate. We construct pairwise coagglomeration indices for US manufacturing industries from the Economic... View Details

Keywords: Production; Economics; Industry Clusters; Analytics and Data Science; Labor; Theory; Goods and Commodities; United States; United Kingdom

01 Sep 2012
News

Alumni, Faculty, and Other Experts Offer Career Advice

Three HBS alumni will present online seminars in this fall’s Career Management Webinar Series, a resource offered by Alumni Career & Professional Development. Mark Chussil (MBA 1979) will discuss creating your ideal life; Jill Miller Perrin (MBA 1985) will analyze how... View Details

Keywords: Colleges, Universities, and Professional Schools; Educational Services

01 Sep 2008
News

Farming for Fuel

What happens when a group of Missouri corn farmers gets into the energy business? With consumers paying more than double for gasoline than they did a year ago, turning crops into fuel, not food, seems like a good way to go — but not so fast. In “Mid-Missouri Energy,”... View Details

Keywords: Julia Hanna; Animal Production and Aquaculture; Agriculture; Colleges, Universities, and Professional Schools; Educational Services

2022
Article

A Human-Centric Take on Model Monitoring

By: Murtuza Shergadwala, Himabindu Lakkaraju and Krishnaram Kenthapadi

Predictive models are increasingly used to make various consequential decisions in high-stakes domains such as healthcare, finance, and policy. It becomes critical to ensure that these models make accurate predictions, are robust to shifts in the data, do not rely on... View Details

Keywords: AI and Machine Learning; Research and Development; Demand and Consumers

September–October 2022
Article

Should Your Company Sell on Amazon?: Reach Comes at a Price

By: Ayelet Israeli, Leonard A. Schlesinger, Matt Higgins and Sabir Semerkant

Selling on Amazon allows brands to reach millions of consumers—but that exposure comes with costs. They include smaller margins, more competition, the risk of commoditization, and less knowledge about customers. In this article, the authors present a scorecard to... View Details

Find at Harvard

Register to Read

November–December 2021
Article

Does Gender Matter? The Effect of Management Responses on Reviewing Behavior

By: Davide Proserpio, Isamar Troncoso and Francesca Valsesia

We study the effect of management responses on the reviewing behavior of self-identified female and male reviewers. Using data from Tripadvisor, we show that after hotels begin to respond to reviews, the probability that a negative review comes from a self-identified... View Details

Keywords: Word Of Mouth; Online Reviews; Management Responses; E-commerce; Gender; Prejudice and Bias; Digital Platforms; Customers

SSRN

Find at Harvard

2019
Working Paper

The Impact of the General Data Protection Regulation on Internet Interconnection

By: Ran Zhuo, Bradley Huffaker, KC Claffy and Shane Greenstein

The Internet comprises thousands of independently operated networks, where bilaterally negotiated interconnection agreements determine the flow of data between networks. The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) imposes strict restrictions on... View Details

Keywords: Personal Data; Privacy Regulation; GDPR; Interconnection Agreements; Internet and the Web; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; European Union

February 2019
Case

Halliday's OASIS

By: Scott Duke Kominers and Nicole Tempest Keller

Wade Watts has won control of the OASIS – a futuristic, immersive virtual reality game world. He must decide on rules, rights, and marketplace design, balancing the founding principles of the OASIS with the platform’s potentially negative externalities. View Details

Keywords: Managing Markets; Corporate Responsibility; Virtual Reality; Digital Platforms; Management; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Social Media; United States

August 17, 2016
Article

How a Cancer Center Rapidly Developed Patient-Centered Outcome Measures

By: Kevin P. Shah, Tracy E. Spinks and Thomas W. Feeley

In 2014, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center created a streamlined process for developing measure sets for patient-centered outcomes, including provider-generated and patient-reported outcomes, at an accelerated pace. These comprehensive sets are... View Details

Keywords: Information Technology; Measurement and Metrics; Quality; Service Delivery; Health Care and Treatment; Health Industry; Texas

November 2014
Supplement

The Grommet - Video Supplement

By: Lynda M. Applegate, Karen Gordon Mills, Lena G. Goldberg and Annelena Lobb

Keywords: Retail; Internet and the Web; Entrepreneurship; Product Launch; E-commerce; Retail Industry

14 Apr 2010
News

The Huffington Post Goes to HBS

Keywords: Professor Tom Eisenmann; Information; Information

22 Feb 2022
News

Launch Codes

capitalized, loss-making technology company is what it took for me to learn that! —Steve Papa (MBA 1999) founder of Endeca; founder and current CEO at Parallel Wireless; longtime NVC judge and mentor Tenacity Amid Uncertainty I applied to... View Details

Keywords: Dan Morrell; illustrations by Alvaro Dominguez

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

Keywords: Trust; Competency and Skills; Forecasting and Prediction; Ethics; Framework; Analytics and Data Science; Surveys; Organizations; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Identity; Perspective

Find at Harvard

01 Jun 2007
News

Mission Possible

started planning that school, now known as Year Up. Headquartered in Boston with sites in three other cities, Year Up’s mission is to help “disconnected youth” access real career opportunities through an intense year of training in professional and practical skills in... View Details

Keywords: Roger Thompson; Margie Kelley; Business Schools & Computer & Management Training; Educational Services; Social Assistance; Health, Social Assistance

05 Nov 2001
Research & Ideas

Venture Capital Goes Boom—or Bust?

Energy facility, when he suddenly had a brainstorm that he knew would help him as well as others solve an all-too-common problem. 1 Using the "gopher" technology that had long made the exchange of files and programs across... View Details

Keywords: by Paul A. Gompers & Josh Lerner

December 2023
Case

Davivienda Bank's Upskilling and Reskilling Strategy in Colombia

By: Jorge Tamayo, Raffaella Sadun and Jenyfeer Martinez Buitrago

Set in 2022, this case describes the digital transformation strategy of Davivienda— a leading player in Colombia’s commercial banking and one of the companies belonging to Grupo Bolívar, a major Colombian financial conglomerate—and the bank’s upskilling and reskilling... View Details