Publications

April 2020
Teaching Note

Glossier: Co-Creating a Cult Brand with a Digital Community

By: Jill Avery

Teaching Note for HBS No. 519-022. Flush with cash from its Series C fundraise, cult beauty brand Glossier considers its next phase of growth, facing critical decisions on how to allocate its capital to support various marketing communications and distribution... View Details

Keywords: Digital Marketing; Crowdsourcing; CRM; Startup; Direct-to-consumer; DTC; Marketing; Marketing Strategy; Brands and Branding; Consumer Behavior; Customer Relationship Management; Venture Capital; Business Startups; Entrepreneurship; Social Media; Beauty and Cosmetics Industry; United States

April 2011 (Revised May 2011)
Case

EMC2: Delivering Customer Centricity

By: Thomas Steenburgh and Jill Avery

This case introduces the concept of customer centricity and traces its development at EMC, the world's leading data storage hardware and information management software company. EMC's customers had historically relied on EMC salespeople to guide them through the... View Details

Keywords: Business Model; Interpersonal Communication; Customer Relationship Management; Knowledge Acquisition; Marketing Strategy; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Salesforce Management; Social and Collaborative Networks; Internet; Information Technology Industry

March 2021 (Revised January 2022)
Case

Revlon: Surviving Covid-19

By: Kristin Mugford and Sarah Gulick

In October 2020, Revlon faced a crossroads. While it had been struggling with high levels of debt before COVID-19, the pandemic had caused it to go further into debt. Unlike other financial crises, many consumers had stopped buying skincare or cosmetics, and sales of... View Details

Keywords: COVID-19 Pandemic; Leveraged Buyouts; Insolvency and Bankruptcy; Financial Liquidity; Bonds; Corporate Finance; Borrowing and Debt; Beauty and Cosmetics Industry; Financial Services Industry; United States

July 2022
Supplement

General Mills: Responding to the Killing of George Floyd (B)

By: Debora L. Spar and Alicia Dadlani

Jeff Harmening, CEO of General Mills, one of the world's largest manufacturers of breakfast cereals and packaged foods, was deeply disturbed and instantly aware that he and General Mills would need to respond. George Floyd, an African-American man who had been accused... View Details

Keywords: Race; Decisions; Social Issues; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Consumer Products Industry; Minneapolis; Minnesota; United States

Shikhar Ghosh is a Professor of Management Practice in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit. He currently teaches in the elective curriculum and is the course head for 3 Technologies that will Change the World. Shikhar received the Apgar Award for innovation in... View Details

29 Oct 2008
Research & Ideas

The Next Marketing Challenge: Selling to ’Simplifiers’

Rich and Famous." As they grew richer, pressure increased on those below to trade up. And, as they traded up, pressure increased in turn on the well-off to buy even more—the... View Details

Keywords: by John Quelch; Retail; Consumer Products; Entertainment & Recreation

December 2019 (Revised December 2022)
Case

TXU (A): Powering the Largest Leveraged Buyout in History

By: Trevor Fetter, Erik Snowberg and Rebecca M. Henderson

This case is designed to support a lively discussion about the relative merits of shareholder vs. stakeholder perspectives in the context of a company that provides a vital public service that has important environmental implications. The 2007 purchase of TXU, the... View Details

Keywords: Leveraged Buyouts; Transformation; Insolvency and Bankruptcy; Environmental Sustainability; Business and Shareholder Relations; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Energy Generation; Non-Renewable Energy; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Utilities Industry; Energy Industry; Texas

11 Oct 2015
News

Students favour menu of food industry courses

Research Summary

Exclusivity and Control (joint with A. Hagiu)

We analyze platform competition for content in the presence of strategic interactions between content distributors and content providers. Contrary to standard results concerning double marginalization and pricing of complementary goods, we prove that a platform gaining... View Details

December 2024
Article

Proxy Advisory Firms and Corporate Shareholder Engagement

By: Aiyesha Dey, Austin Starkweather and Joshua White

We study how Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) affect firms’ engagement with shareholders. Our analyses exploit a quasi-natural experiment using say-on-pay voting outcomes near a threshold that triggers ISS to review engagement activities. Firms receiving ISS... View Details

Keywords: Business and Shareholder Relations; Governing and Advisory Boards; Policy; Voting

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December 2020
Article

Monetary Policy and Global Banking

By: Falk Bräuning and Victoria Ivashina

When central banks adjust interest rates, the opportunity cost of lending in local currency changes, but—in absence of frictions—there is no spillover effect to lending in other currencies. However, when equity capital is limited, global banks must benchmark domestic... View Details

Keywords: Global Banks; Monetary Policy Transmission; Cross-border Lending; Banks and Banking; Financial Markets; Global Range

SSRN

Find at Harvard

March 1986 (Revised July 1986)
Case

Applications for Financial Futures

Consists of a series of four brief descriptions of the use of financial futures as hedging vehicles: a savings and loan hedging the rollover of three-month money market certificates with T-bill futures, a corporate debt issuer hedging the cost of a future debt issue... View Details

Keywords: Financial Instruments

September 2025
Article

Sticky Capital Controls

By: Miguel Acosta-Henao, Laura Alfaro and Andrés Fernández

There is much ongoing debate on the merits of capital controls as effective policy instruments. The differing perspectives are due in part to a lack of empirical studies that look at the intensive margin of controls, which in turn has prevented a quantitative... View Details

Keywords: Capital Controls; Macroprudential Policies; Stickiness; Intensive; (S, S) Costs; Capital; Management; Macroeconomics; Governance Controls; Mathematical Methods

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2019
Article

An Empirical Study of Rich Subgroup Fairness for Machine Learning

By: Michael J Kearns, Seth Neel, Aaron Leon Roth and Zhiwei Steven Wu

Kearns et al. [2018] recently proposed a notion of rich subgroup fairness intended to bridge the gap between statistical and individual notions of fairness. Rich subgroup fairness picks a statistical fairness constraint (say, equalizing false positive rates across... View Details

Keywords: Machine Learning; Fairness; AI and Machine Learning

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30 May 2000
Research & Ideas

Market Makers Bid for Success

goods for sale on any one site can be distributed to all the other sites in our network for bidding. So, as a marketplace operator, you get your own marketplace, you get your own brand. But you also get the... View Details

Keywords: by Staff; Web Services; Technology

17 May 2022
News

Robert F. Lanzillotti Prize for Assistant Professor Alex MacKay

November 2008 (Revised February 2009)
Case

Omron: Sensing Society

By: Rosabeth M. Kanter and Ethan S Bernstein

"Leading profitable growth is only part of the goal. We cannot live without breathing, but we do not live in order to take a breath,” said Omron's President and CEO, Hisao Sakuta, in 2008. Omron, a $7B global supplier of sensors, control system components, advanced... View Details

Keywords: Change Management; Transformation; Competitive Advantage; Leadership; Goals and Objectives; Globalized Firms and Management; Innovation and Invention; Values and Beliefs; Mission and Purpose; Electronics Industry

March 2016
Teaching Note

MasterCard: Driving Financial Inclusion

By: Sunil Gupta

Since joining MasterCard (MC) in 2010, CEO Ajay Banga had made advancing financial inclusion (FI)—bringing formal financial services to marginalized populations—an important goal for the company. In 2014, MC had entered a number of partnerships with governments and... View Details

Keywords: Financial Inclusion; Banking; Equality and Inequality; Credit Cards; Developing Countries and Economies; Banking Industry; South Africa; Nigeria

November 2023 (Revised April 2024)
Case

Wallbox

By: Álvaro Rodríguez Arregui and Max Hancock

Enric Asunción co-founded Wallbox, a private EV charger company, in Spain in 2015. As CEO, Asunción transformed the company from a small start-up, focused on the European market, to a multimillion-dollar enterprise with offices on three continents. In 2021, a private... View Details

Keywords: Technology Adoption; Going Public; Acquisition; Business Exit or Shutdown; Business Startups; Entrepreneurial Finance; Spain; United States; United Kingdom