Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(653)
- Faculty Publications (98)
- April 2019
- Teaching Note
The a2 Milk Company
By: Benjamin C. Esty and Daniel Fisher
The a2 Milk Company (a2MC) became the most valuable company listed on the New Zealand stock exchange in 2018 by capitalizing on a biochemical discovery related to the protein composition of cow's milk. Because many people find the A1 protein difficult to digest, and... View Details
Keywords: Judo Economics; Market Entry; Innovation; Barriers To Response; Industry Attractiveness; Advantage Horizon; Sustainability; First-mover Advantage; Scope; Strategy Execution; Strategic Evolution; Biochemistry; Genetics; Branding; Commodity; Milk; Dairy; Infant Formula; Farming; Porter's Five Forces; Market Entry and Exit; Disruption; Innovation and Invention; Competitive Advantage; Corporate Strategy; Value Creation; Competition; Brands and Branding; Five Forces Framework; Consumer Products Industry; New Zealand; Australia; China
- February 2019 (Revised September 2021)
- Case
The a2 Milk Company
By: Benjamin C. Esty and Daniel Fisher
The a2 Milk Company (a2MC) became the most valuable company listed on the New Zealand stock exchange in 2018 by capitalizing on a biochemical discovery related to the protein composition of cow's milk. Because many people find the A1 protein difficult to digest, and... View Details
Keywords: Judo Economics; Market Entry; Innovation; Barriers To Response; Industry Attractiveness; Advantage Horizon; Sustainability; First-mover Advantage; Scope; Strategy Execution; Strategic Evolution; Biochemistry; Genetics; Branding; Commodity; Milk; Dairy; Infant Formula; Farming; Porter's Five Forces; Competitive Advantage; Corporate Strategy; Value Creation; Competition; Disruption; Innovation and Invention; Five Forces Framework; Market Entry and Exit
- 2019
- Working Paper
The Impact of Increasing Search Frictions on Online Shopping Behavior: Evidence from a Field Experiment
By: Donald Ngwe, Kris J. Ferreira and Thales Teixeira
Many online stores are designed such that shoppers can easily access any available discounted products. We propose that deliberately increasing search frictions by placing small obstacles to locating discounted items can improve online retailers’ margins and even... View Details
- January 2019 (Revised February 2019)
- Supplement
The a2 Milk Company
By: Benjamin C. Esty, Daniel Fisher and Greg Saldutte
The a2 Milk Company (a2MC) became the most valuable company listed on the New Zealand stock exchange in 2018 by capitalizing on a biochemical discovery related to the protein composition of cow's milk. Because many people find the A1 protein difficult to digest, and... View Details
Keywords: Judo Economics; Market Entry; Innovation; Barriers To Response; Industry Attractiveness; Advantage Horizon; Sustainability; First-mover Advantage; Scope; Strategy Execution; Strategic Evolution; Biochemistry; Genetics; Branding; Commodity; Milk; Dairy; Infant Formula; Farming; Porter's Five Forces; Competitive Advantage; Corporate Strategy; Value Creation; Competition; Market Entry and Exit; Disruption; Innovation and Invention; Five Forces Framework; Consumer Products Industry; New Zealand; Australia; China
- July 2018 (Revised December 2018)
- Case
SOFWERX: Innovation at U.S. Special Operations Command
By: Herman Leonard, Mitchell Weiss, Jin Hyun Paik and Kerry Herman
James “Hondo” Geurts, the Acquisition Executive for U.S. Special Operations Command, was in the middle of his Senate confirmation hearing in 2017 to become Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisition. The questions had a common theme: how... View Details
Keywords: James Geurts; Innovation; Public Entrepreneurship; Open Innovation; Crowdsourcing; Contests; Prototyping; SOFWERX; Special Operations; SOCOM; Govtech; Procurement; FAR; EZ-Fly; Navy; Department Of Defense; Innovation and Invention; Innovation and Management; Innovation Leadership; Entrepreneurship; Public Sector; Acquisition; Public Administration Industry; United States
- 2017
- Article
The Energizing Nature of Work Engagement: Toward a New Need-Based Theory of Work Motivation
By: Paul Green, Eli Finkel, Grainne Fitzsimons and Francesca Gino
We present theory suggesting that experiences at work that meet employees’ expectations of need fulfillment drive work engagement. Employees have needs (e.g., a desire to be authentic) and they also have expectations for how their job or their organization will fulfill... View Details
- January–February 2017
- Article
Buying Your Way into Entrepreneurship
By: Richard S. Ruback and Royce Yudkoff
An increasingly popular route to success as a small business owner is “acquisition entrepreneurship”—buying and running an existing operation. If you’re considering such a path, the authors offer practical advice for each stage of the process. Think it through. Do you... View Details
- November 2016
- Article
Corporate Sustainability: First Evidence on Materiality
By: Mozaffar Khan, George Serafeim and Aaron Yoon
Using newly available materiality classifications of sustainability topics, we develop a novel dataset by hand-mapping sustainability investments classified as material for each industry into firm-specific sustainability ratings. This allows us to present new evidence... View Details
- October 2016
- Case
Turkasset: Bringing Customer-Centricity to Debt Collection
By: Dennis Campbell and Gamze Yucaoglu
In December 2014, in preparation for the year-end board presentation, Hilmi Guvenal (PMD 1993), shareholder and CEO of Turkasset, and Ilker Yoney, COO, sat down to discuss Turkasset’s five- and ten-year strategic plans. Since taking leadership of the company in 2009,... View Details
Keywords: Customer Satisfaction; Customer Experience; Customer Service; Customer-centric; Emerging Market; Customer Focus; Employee Empowerment; Employee Engagement; Employee Training; Staffing; Operations Management; Quality Management; Service Management; Service Quality; Continuous Improvement; Turkasset; Collections Agency; NPL; Call Center; Financial Services; Borrowing and Debt; Customer Focus and Relationships; Organizational Culture; Operations; Management; Service Operations; Quality; Competitive Advantage; Cost vs Benefits; Financial Services Industry; Turkey
- August 2, 2016
- Article
Uncalculating Cooperation Is Used to Signal Trustworthiness
By: Jillian J. Jordan, Moshe Hoffman, Martin A. Nowak and David G. Rand
Humans frequently cooperate without carefully weighing the costs and benefits. As a result, people may wind up cooperating when it is not worthwhile to do so. Why risk making costly mistakes? Here, we present experimental evidence that reputation concerns provide an... View Details
- Article
Can Analysts Assess Fundamental Risk and Valuation Uncertainty? An Empirical Analysis of Scenario-Based Value Estimates
By: Peter R. Joos, Joseph D. Piotroski and Suraj Srinivasan
We use a dataset of sell-side analysts' scenario-based valuation estimates to examine whether analysts reliably assess the risk surrounding a firm's fundamental value. We find that the spread in analysts' state-side contingent valuations captures the riskiness of... View Details
- June 2016
- Article
Social and Spatial Clustering of People at Humanity's Largest Gathering
By: Ian Barnett, Tarun Khanna and Jukka-Pekka Onnela
Macroscopic behavior of scientific and societal systems results from the aggregation of microscopic behaviors of their constituent elements, but connecting the macroscopic with the microscopic in human behavior has traditionally been difficult. Manifestations of... View Details
- February 2016 (Revised October 2017)
- Case
The Jungle and the Debate over Federal Meat Inspection in 1906
By: David Moss and Marc Campasano
In early June 1906, the House Committee on Agriculture heard testimony from two investigators appointed by President Theodore Roosevelt to verify allegations of unsanitary conditions at Chicago slaughterhouses that had appeared in Upton Sinclair's recent novel, The... View Details
- February 2016 (Revised May 2016)
- Case
Dinr: My First Start-up (A)
By: Shikhar Ghosh and Kristina Maslauskaite
In May 2012, a young employee at Google's London office, Markus Berger, was thinking whether he should quit his job and go after his dream of becoming an entrepreneur. Berger's idea was to create Dinr, a company that would offer an upscale food ingredient delivery... View Details
- October 2015
- Article
Agglomerative Forces and Cluster Shapes
By: William R. Kerr and Scott Duke Kominers
We model spatial clusters of similar firms. Our model highlights how agglomerative forces lead to localized, individual connections among firms, while interaction costs generate a defined distance over which attraction forces operate. Overlapping firm interactions... View Details
- July 2015
- Article
The Impact of Corporate Social Responsibility on Investment Recommendations: Analysts' Perceptions and Shifting Institutional Logics
By: Ioannis Ioannou and George Serafeim
We explore the impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR) ratings on sell-side analysts' assessments of firms' future financial performance. We suggest that when analysts perceive CSR as an agency cost, due to the prevalence of an agency logic, they produce... View Details
- Article
Do Strict Capital Requirements Raise the Cost of Capital? Bank Regulation, Capital Structure and the Low Risk Anomaly
By: Malcolm Baker and Jeffrey Wurgler
Traditional capital structure theory predicts that reducing banks' leverage reduces the risk and cost of equity but does not change the weighted average cost of capital, and thus the rates for borrowers. We confirm that the equity of better-capitalized banks has lower... View Details
- March 2015
- Article
Signaling to Partially Informed Investors in the Newsvendor Model
By: William Schmidt, Vishal Gaur, Richard Lai and Ananth Raman
We investigate a puzzling phenomenon in which firms make investment decisions that purposefully do not maximize expected profits. Using an extension to the newsvendor model, we focus on a relatively common scenario in which the firm's investor has imperfect information... View Details
- 2015
- Working Paper
Thick as Thieves? Dishonest Behavior and Egocentric Social Networks
By: Jooa Julia Lee, Dong-Kyun Im, Bidhan Parmar and Francesca Gino
People experience a threat to their moral self-concept in the face of discrepancies between their moral values and their unethical behavior. We theorize that people's need to restore their view of themselves as moral activates thoughts of a high-density personal social... View Details
- Article
Heuristics Guide the Implementation of Social Preferences in One-Shot Prisoner's Dilemma Experiments
By: Jillian J. Jordan, Valerio Capraro and David G. Rand
Cooperation in one-shot anonymous interactions is a widely documented aspect of human behavior. Here we shed light on the motivations behind this behavior by experimentally exploring cooperation in a one-shot continuous-strategy Prisoner’s Dilemma (i.e. one-shot... View Details