Publications

October 1992 (Revised December 1992)
Case

American Connector Company (A)

By: Gary P. Pisano

American Connector Co. is forced to reexamine operations at its Sunnyvale plant when a Japanese competitor announces plans to build an "ultimate" plant in the United States. Case examines issues related to benchmarking a competitor's manufacturing capabilities and... View Details

Keywords: Production; Infrastructure; Competitive Strategy; Global Strategy; Policy; Strategic Planning; Performance Productivity; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques; Performance Effectiveness; Sunnyvale; Japan

19 Jan 2021
Working Paper Summaries

The Value of Descriptive Analytics: Evidence from Online Retailers

Keywords: by Ron Berman and Ayelet Israeli; Retail; Technology

Research Summary

Personal Selling and Sales Management

By: Das Narayandas

Das is currently investigating benchmark practices in personal selling and sales management across a variety of industries. He is also conducting field studies to understand how firms are leveraging interactive technologies to support their field sales efforts. View Details

Blog

Exceptional Learning—Wherever You Are

Can a virtual learning experience be as dynamic, energetic, and powerful as a classroom session? With its Live Online Classroom, HBS proves that the answer is a resounding yes. Through an initiative that started long before COVID-19 mandated a new landscape for virtual... View Details

April 2013
Teaching Plan

Barclays and the LIBOR Scandal

By: Clayton S. Rose and Aldo Sesia

In the summer of 2012, Barclays plc, one of the largest banks in the world, agreed to settle with authorities and acknowledged that the firm had manipulated LIBOR (London Inter-Bank Offered Rate)—a benchmark reference rate that was fundamental to the operation of... View Details

Keywords: Financial Systems; Financial Services; Corruption; Regulation; General Management; Management; Leadership; Economic Systems; Crime and Corruption; Ethics; Culture; Banking Industry; Financial Services Industry; United Kingdom

13 Dec 2012
News

Is ESG Information for Investors Losing its Competitive Edge?

Article

Repairing the Damage: The Effect of Price Knowledge and Gender on Auto-Repair Price Quotes

By: Meghan Busse, Ayelet Israeli and Florian Zettelmeyer

In this paper we investigate whether sellers treat consumers differently on the basis of how well informed consumers appear to be. We implement a large-scale field experiment in which callers request price quotes from automotive repair shops. We show that sellers alter... View Details

Keywords: Pricing; Price Discrimination; Automobiles; Field Experiment; Information; Fairness; Price; Knowledge Use and Leverage; Internet and the Web; Gender; Service Industry; Auto Industry

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2022
Article

OpenXAI: Towards a Transparent Evaluation of Model Explanations

By: Chirag Agarwal, Satyapriya Krishna, Eshika Saxena, Martin Pawelczyk, Nari Johnson, Isha Puri, Marinka Zitnik and Himabindu Lakkaraju

While several types of post hoc explanation methods have been proposed in recent literature, there is very little work on systematically benchmarking these methods. Here, we introduce OpenXAI, a comprehensive and extensible opensource framework for evaluating and... View Details

Keywords: Measurement and Metrics; Analytics and Data Science

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

June 1995 (Revised April 1997)
Case

Integron Incorporated: The Integrated Components Division (ICD)

A high-technology manufacturing company was recently given profit-and-loss "stand-alone" status by its parent. No longer a captive supplier, it must seek new markets for its technology and products on the outside world. Describes a benchmarking study by a group of... View Details

Keywords: Technology; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Restructuring; Manufacturing Industry

03 Feb 2017
News

Repairing the Damage: The Effect of Price Knowledge and Gender on Auto Repair Price Quotes

24 Sep 2008
Working Paper Summaries

CEO and CFO Career Penalties to Missing Quarterly Analysts Forecasts

Keywords: by Rick Mergenthaler, Shiva Rajgopal & Suraj Srinivasan

2023
Article

Evaluating Explainability for Graph Neural Networks

By: Chirag Agarwal, Owen Queen, Himabindu Lakkaraju and Marinka Zitnik

As explanations are increasingly used to understand the behavior of graph neural networks (GNNs), evaluating the quality and reliability of GNN explanations is crucial. However, assessing the quality of GNN explanations is challenging as existing graph datasets have no... View Details

Keywords: Analytics and Data Science

2020
Working Paper

Designing, Not Checking, for Policy Robustness: An Example with Optimal Taxation

By: Benjami Lockwood, Afras Y. Sial and Matthew C. Weinzierl

Economists typically check the robustness of their results by comparing them across plausible ranges of parameter values and model structures. A preferable approach to robustness—for the purposes of policymaking and evaluation—is to design policy that takes these... View Details

Keywords: Optimal Taxation; Robust Optimization; Taxation; Income; Policy; Design

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Contrary to basic finance principles, high-beta and high-volatility stocks have long underperformed low-beta and low-volatility stocks. This anomaly may be partly explained by the fact that the typical institutional investor's mandate to beat a fixed benchmark... View Details

September 2020
Case

Drinkworks: Home Bar by Keurig

By: Sunil Gupta, Jonathan Levav and Julia Kelley

In the summer of 2018, Drinkworks CEO Nathaniel Davis needed to make a number of go-to-market decisions ahead of his company’s upcoming product launch. Formed through a joint venture between Keurig Dr. Pepper and Anheuser-Busch InBev, Drinkworks had developed an... View Details

January 2003 (Revised February 2011)
Tool

Business Analysis and Valuation Model (Version 5)

By: Paul M. Healy, Krishna G. Palepu and Jonathan Barnett

Once you enter company financial statements, this software enables you to standardize them to a common format, make any needed adjustments to the company's accounting, and make assumptions about the company's future performance. The model then provides financial ratios... View Details

Keywords: Financial Statements; Standards; Mathematical Methods; Valuation

2020
Working Paper

Best Ideas

By: Miguel Antón, Randolph B. Cohen and Christopher Polk

We ﬁnd that the stocks in which active mutual fund or hedge fund managers display the most conviction towards ex-ante, their “Best ideas,” outperform the market, as well as the other stocks in those managers’ portfolios, by approximately 2.8 to 4.5 percent per year,... View Details

Keywords: Mutual Funds; Managerial Skill; Market Efficiency; Investment Funds; Management; Investment Portfolio; Decision Making