Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(3,080)
- Faculty Publications (531)
- January 2024 (Revised February 2024)
- Case
OpenAI: Idealism Meets Capitalism
By: Shikhar Ghosh and Shweta Bagai
In November 2023, the board of OpenAI, one of the most successful companies in the history of technology, decided to fire Sam Altman, its charismatic and influential CEO. Their decision shocked the corporate world and had people wondering why OpenAI had designed a... View Details
- January 2024
- Article
Population Interference in Panel Experiments
By: Kevin Wu Han, Guillaume Basse and Iavor Bojinov
The phenomenon of population interference, where a treatment assigned to one experimental unit affects another experimental unit’s outcome, has received considerable attention in standard randomized experiments. The complications produced by population interference in... View Details
- November 2023 (Revised April 2025)
- Case
Norse Atlantic Airways
By: Willy Shih
Bjørn Tore Larsen, Norse Atlantic Airways' founder and CEO, hadn't planned to get into the airline business. But when the COVID-19 pandemic depressed the global demand for air travel and the lease rates for jetliners, he realized if ever he was going to get into the... View Details
- 2023
- Book
How the Harvard Business School Changed the Way We View Organizations
By: Jay W. Lorsch
The story of the field of organizational behavior (which overlaps considerably with the origin story of Harvard Business School) and how it created the “medical model” of systems thinking—anchored in the practices of listening, observing, testing, and only then... View Details
Keywords: Organizational Behavior; Systems Thinking; Medical Model; Organizations; Behavior; System; History
- November–December 2023
- Article
Look the Part? The Role of Profile Pictures in Online Labor Markets
By: Isamar Troncoso and Lan Luo
Profile pictures are a key component of many freelancing platforms, a design choice that can impact hiring and matching outcomes. In this paper, we examine how appearance-based perceptions of a freelancer’s fit for the job (i.e., whether a freelancer "looks the part"... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Black-box Training Data Identification in GANs via Detector Networks
By: Lukman Olagoke, Salil Vadhan and Seth Neel
Since their inception Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have been popular generative models across images, audio, video, and tabular data. In this paper we study whether given access to a trained GAN, as well as fresh samples from the underlying distribution, if... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
In-Context Unlearning: Language Models as Few Shot Unlearners
By: Martin Pawelczyk, Seth Neel and Himabindu Lakkaraju
Machine unlearning, the study of efficiently removing the impact of specific training points on the
trained model, has garnered increased attention of late, driven by the need to comply with privacy
regulations like the Right to be Forgotten. Although unlearning is... View Details
- October 2023
- Article
Product Variety, the Cost of Living, and Welfare Across Countries
By: Alberto Cavallo, Robert C. Feenstra and Robert Inklaar
We use the structure of the Melitz (2003) model to compute the cost of living and welfare across 47 countries, and compare these to conventional measures of prices and real consumption from the International Comparisons Project (ICP). The cost of living is inferred... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
The Customer Journey as a Source of Information
By: Nicolas Padilla, Eva Ascarza and Oded Netzer
In the face of heightened data privacy concerns and diminishing third-party data access,
firms are placing increased emphasis on first-party data (1PD) for marketing decisions.
However, in environments with infrequent purchases, reliance on past purchases 1PD... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
The Effect of Childhood Environment on Political Behavior: Evidence from Young U.S. Movers, 1992–2021
By: Jacob R. Brown, Enrico Cantoni, Sahil Chinoy, Martin Koenen and Vincent Pons
We ask how childhood environment shapes political behavior. We measure young voters’ participation and party affiliation in nationally comprehensive voter files and reconstruct their childhood location histories based on their parents’ addresses. We compare outcomes of... View Details
- September 2023 (Revised January 2024)
- Case
Helmy Abouleish: Making a Desert Bloom
By: Geoffrey G. Jones and Maxim Pike Harrell
This case examines the history of prominent Egyptian-based social enterprise SEKEM from its foundation in 1977 until the COP27 conference held in Sharm El-Sheikh in 2022. Led by father and son team Ibrahim and Helmy Abouleish, SEKEM turned desert into farmland using... View Details
- Summer 2023
- Article
(Un)principled Agents: Monitoring Loyalty after the End of the Royal African Company Monopoly
By: Anne Ruderman and Marlous van Waijenburg
The revocation of the Royal African Company's monopoly in 1698 inaugurated a transformation of the transatlantic slave trade. While the RAC’s exit from the slave trade has received scholarly attention, little is known about the company’s response to the loss of its... View Details
- September 2023
- Case
The Meteoric Rise of Skims
Since its founding in 2019 by Kim Kardashian and Jens Grede, Skims, a solutions-oriented brand creating the next generation of underwear, loungewear, and shapewear with an eye toward body-type and skin-tone inclusivity, has experienced a meteoric rise. Kardashian, who... View Details
Keywords: Brand; Branding; Direct-to-consumer; DTC; Influencers; Influencer Marketing; Fashion; Growth; Direct Marketing; Influence; Reputation; Social Inference; Consumer Goods; Consumer Products; Female Entrepreneur; Female Protagonist; Entrepreneurship And Strategy; Brand ＆ Product Management; Competitive Advantage; Online Followers; Retail; Retail Formats; Retailing; Online Retail; Celebrities; Celebrity; Celebrity Endorsement; Go To Market Strategy; Apparel; Startup Marketing; Startups; Social Influencers; Brands and Branding; Growth and Development Strategy; Growth Management; Distribution Channels; Digital Marketing; Advertising; Power and Influence; Social Media; Fashion Industry; Apparel and Accessories Industry; Consumer Products Industry; United States
- 2023
- Working Paper
LALIGA—From a Soccer Competition Organizer to a Global Player in the Sports and Entertainment Industry
By: Stephen A. Greyser, Kenneth Cortsen and Juan Fuentes Fernández
LALIGA, the first- and second-tier professional soccer league (known as “football” outside of the U.S. and Canada) in Spain, enters its 100th soccer season later this decade. The most popular game in the world (Giulianotti, 2012) has gone through many changes since... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
How People Use Statistics
By: Pedro Bordalo, John J. Conlon, Nicola Gennaioli, Spencer Yongwook Kwon and Andrei Shleifer
We document two new facts about the distributions of answers in famous statistical problems: they are i) multi-modal and ii) unstable with respect to irrelevant changes in the problem. We offer a model in which, when solving a problem, people represent each hypothesis... View Details
- July 2023 (Revised July 2023)
- Background Note
Generative AI Value Chain
By: Andy Wu and Matt Higgins
Generative AI refers to a type of artificial intelligence (AI) that can create new content (e.g., text, image, or audio) in response to a prompt from a user. ChatGPT, Bard, and Claude are examples of text generating AIs, and DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion are... View Details
- 2023
- Book
Suharto's Cold War: Indonesia, Southeast Asia, and the World
By: Mattias Fibiger
After the murder of senior generals in the Indonesian army by elements of the country's communist party in 1965, General Suharto orchestrated the mass killing of some half a million leftists and fellow travelers. But his ambitions spanned far beyond perpetrating a... View Details
- July 2023
- Article
Design and Analysis of Switchback Experiments
By: Iavor I Bojinov, David Simchi-Levi and Jinglong Zhao
In switchback experiments, a firm sequentially exposes an experimental unit to a random treatment, measures its response, and repeats the procedure for several periods to determine which treatment leads to the best outcome. Although practitioners have widely adopted... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Firm Visibility and Acquisition Likelihood: Evidence from Seeking Alpha Coverage
By: Pu Gu, Benjamin Yost and Yuan Zou
This study investigates whether social media coverage influences a firm’s likelihood of being acquired. Specifically, we hypothesize that coverage of a firm on the Seeking Alpha platform raises its visibility to potential acquirers and M&A advisers (i.e., investment... View Details
- June 2023 (Revised February 2025)
- Case
Doing Business in Lima, Peru
By: Jeffrey T. Polzer, Leonard A. Schlesinger and Max Hancock
This case examines the challenges and opportunities of doing business in Peru. It highlights Peru's economic transformation in the decades leading up to 2024 in the context of its history, culture, and politics. The case gives an overview of some of the main obstacles... View Details