Publications

June 2023
Supplement

Roche: ESG and Access to Healthcare

By: George Serafeim

In May 2022, Roche Group, one of the largest healthcare companies in the world, hosted its first ESG investor event focused exclusively on its efforts to impact access to healthcare. While Roche had recently set an ambitious goal to double the number of patients that... View Details

2023
Working Paper

Design-Based Confidence Sequences: A General Approach to Risk Mitigation in Online Experimentation

By: Dae Woong Ham, Michael Lindon, Martin Tingley and Iavor Bojinov

Randomized experiments have become the standard method for companies to evaluate the performance of new products or services. In addition to augmenting managers’ decision-making, experimentation mitigates risk by limiting the proportion of customers exposed to... View Details

Keywords: Performance Evaluation; Research and Development; Analytics and Data Science; Consumer Behavior

SSRN

May 2023
Article

Incentive Effects of Subjective Allocations of Rewards and Penalties

By: Wei Cai, Susanna Gallani and Jee-Eun Shin

We examine the incentive effects of subjectivity in allocating tournament-based rewards and punishments. We use data from a company where reward and punishment decisions are based on a combination of objective metrics and subjective performance assessments. Rankings... View Details

Keywords: Subjectivity; Tournament-based Incentives; Rewards; Penalties; Expectancy Theory; Employees; Compensation and Benefits; Management; Decisions; Performance; Measurement and Metrics

April 2023
Article

The Real Exchange Rate, Innovation and Productivity

By: Laura Alfaro, Alejandro Cuñat, Harald Fadinger and Yanping Liu

We evaluate manufacturing firms' responses to changes in the real exchange rate (RER) using detailed firm-level data for a large set of countries for the period 2001-2010. We uncover the following stylized facts about regional variation of manufacturing firms'... View Details

Keywords: Real Exchange Rate; Firm Level Data; Innovation; Productivity; Exporting; Importing; Credit Constraints; Currency Exchange Rate; Innovation and Invention; Performance Productivity

March 2023
Background Note

A Primer on OKRs

By: Suraj Srinivasan and Li-Kuan (Jason) Ni

The OKR framework is a popular goal-setting and strategy execution tool that uses goal setting through “Objectives” and measuring performance using “Key Results” on a periodic basis to measure and drive performance. The OKR framework has been adopted and practiced at... View Details

Keywords: Business Organization; Talent and Talent Management; Framework; Corporate Governance; Goals and Objectives; Growth and Development; Growth and Development Strategy; Growth Management; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques; Management Practices and Processes; Management Skills; Management Systems; Measurement and Metrics; Outcome or Result; Performance Effectiveness; Performance Evaluation; Performance Expectations; Performance Productivity; Performance Efficiency

March 2023
Case

Roche: ESG and Access to Healthcare

By: George Serafeim, Susanna Gallani and Benjamin Maletta

In May 2022, Roche Group, one of the largest healthcare companies in the world, hosted its first ESG investor event focused exclusively on its efforts to impact access to healthcare. While Roche had recently set an ambitious goal to double the number of patients that... View Details

February 2023
Supplement

Performance Management at Afreximbank (B)

By: Robert S. Kaplan, Siko Sikochi, Anna Ngarachu and Namrata Arora

Supplements the (A) case. Founded in October 1993, the Cairo-based African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) was a specialized continental financial institution designed to address the low level of intra-African trade, the decline in financial flows to Africa, the... View Details

Keywords: COVID-19 Pandemic; Performance Evaluation; Organizational Culture; Crisis Management; Banking Industry; Africa

2023
Article

A Randomized Trial of Behavioral Nudges Delivered through Text Messages to Increase Influenza Vaccination among Patients with an Upcoming Primary Care Visit

By: Mitesh S. Patel, Katherine L. Milkman, Linnea Gandhi, Heather N. Graci, Dena Gromet, Hung Ho, Joseph S. Kay, Timothy W. Lee, Jake Rothschild, Modupe Akinola, John Beshears, Jonathan E. Bogard, Alison Buttenheim, Christopher Chabris, Gretchen B. Chapman, James J. Choi, Hengchen Dai, Craig R. Fox, Amir Goren, Matthew D. Hilchey, Jillian Hmurovic, Leslie John, Dean Karlan, Melanie Kim, David Laibson, Cait Lamberton, Brigitte C. Madrian, Michelle N. Meyer, Maria Modanu, Jimin Nam, Todd Rogers, Renante Rondina, Silvia Saccardo, Maheen Shermohammed, Dilip Soman, Jehan Sparks, Caleb Warren, Megan Weber, Ron Berman, Chalanda N. Evans, Seung Hyeong Lee, Christopher K. Snider, Eli Tsukayama, Christophe Van den Bulte, Kevin G. Volpp and Angela L. Duckworth

Purpose: To evaluate if nudges delivered by text message prior to an upcoming primary care visit can increase influenza vaccination rates.
Design: Randomized, controlled trial.
Setting: Two health systems in the Northeastern US between September 2020 and... View Details

Keywords: Vaccination; Health Care and Treatment; Interpersonal Communication; Communication Technology; Behavior; Health Industry

2023
Working Paper

The Link Between Integrative Bargaining and Leadership Evaluations

By: Julian J. Zlatev and Francis J. Flynn

We draw from implicit leadership theory and the dual concern theory of conflict resolution to posit a link between negotiation style and leadership evaluations. Specifically, we propose that individuals who are more skilled at integrative, but not distributive,... View Details

Keywords: Prosocial Behavior; Leadership; Negotiation; Conflict and Resolution; Performance Evaluation

January 2023
Case

Crow Holdings Development: Mass Timber Construction

By: John D. Macomber, Robert Hernandez and Kyle MertensMeyer

Jim McCaffery and Cody Armbrister of Crow Holdings Development evaluate the pros and cons of committing to mass timber construction instead of conventional concrete or steel for a new 260,000 SF multi-story office building in Texas. Benefits include substantially... View Details

Keywords: Real Estate Development; Architecture; Air Quality; Health ＆ Wellness; Office Property; Sustainability; Carbon Abatement; Natural Environment; Environmental Accounting; Green Buildings; Design; Construction; Cost vs Benefits; Environmental Sustainability; Construction Industry; Real Estate Industry; Texas

2023
Article

Experimental Evaluation of Individualized Treatment Rules

By: Kosuke Imai and Michael Lingzhi Li

The increasing availability of individual-level data has led to numerous applications of individualized (or personalized) treatment rules (ITRs). Policy makers often wish to empirically evaluate ITRs and compare their relative performance before implementing them in a... View Details

Keywords: Causal Inference; Heterogeneous Treatment Effects; Precision Medicine; Uplift Modeling; Analytics and Data Science; AI and Machine Learning

December 13, 2022
Article

6 Ways Companies Fail to Help Workers Grow

By: Joseph Fuller, Matthew Sigelman and Nik Dawson

The authors recently studied Fortune 250 companies and ranked them based on the lived experience of three million of their U.S. workers. One of their key findings was that even top-ranked firms fail to deliver consistently on worker advancement. To understand why this... View Details

Keywords: Personal Development and Career; Training; Business Model; Outcome or Result; Performance Evaluation; Opportunities

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November 2022
Article

My Boss' Passion Matters as Much as My Own: The Interpersonal Dynamics of Passion Are a Critical Driver of Performance Evaluations

By: Jon M. Jachimowicz, Andreas Wihler and Adam D. Galinsky

Companies often celebrate employees who successfully pursue their passion. Academic research suggests that these positive evaluations occur because of the passion percolating inside the employee. We propose that supervisors are also a key piece of this puzzle:... View Details

Keywords: Passion; Job Performance; Motivation; Emotions; Performance Evaluation; Interpersonal Communication

September 2022
Background Note

On CUE: The Quest for Optimal Customer Unit Economics

By: Elie Ofek, Barak Libai and Eitan Muller

Startups are often evaluated by how well they perform on unit economics, defined as the ratio of a customer’s lifetime value (LTV) to acquisition costs (CAC). A common target for unit economics, advocated by many VCs and analysts, is 3:1 (i.e., LTV/CAC=3). While there... View Details

Keywords: Unit Economics; Business Startups; Performance Evaluation; Customer Value and Value Chain; Customer Relationship Management; Analysis

2022
Article

Towards Robust Off-Policy Evaluation via Human Inputs

By: Harvineet Singh, Shalmali Joshi, Finale Doshi-Velez and Himabindu Lakkaraju

Off-policy Evaluation (OPE) methods are crucial tools for evaluating policies in high-stakes domains such as healthcare, where direct deployment is often infeasible, unethical, or expensive. When deployment environments are expected to undergo changes (that is, dataset... View Details

Keywords: Analytics and Data Science; Research

July 8, 2022
Article

How to Conduct a Great Performance Review

By: Frank V. Cespedes

Dissatisfaction with performance appraisals is pervasive, but they remain an essential managerial responsibility. The purpose of performance reviews is two-fold: an accurate and actionable evaluation of performance, and then development of that person’s skills in line... View Details

Keywords: Performance Review; Feedback; Employees; Management Skills

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June 2022
Teaching Plan

Pacesetters

By: Jeffrey J. Bussgang and Mel Martin

Teaching Plan for HBS Case No. 322-019. City Sealcoating CEO Keith Chaney had just publicly called out the Boston Chamber of Commerce for their slow progress on their supplier diversity program, Pacesetters. Established in 2018 by regional business leaders,... View Details

Keywords: Minority-owned Businesses; Procurement; Racial Wealth Gap; Diversity; Small Business; Restructuring; Contracts; Goals and Objectives; Performance Improvement; Performance Evaluation; United States; Massachusetts

2022
Article

Probing GNN Explainers: A Rigorous Theoretical and Empirical Analysis of GNN Explanation Methods.

By: Chirag Agarwal, Marinka Zitnik and Himabindu Lakkaraju

As Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are increasingly employed in real-world applications, it becomes critical to ensure that the stakeholders understand the rationale behind their predictions. While several GNN explanation methods have been proposed recently, there has... View Details

Keywords: Graph Neural Networks; Explanation Methods; Mathematical Methods; Framework; Theory; Analysis

2022
Working Paper

An Anatomy of Performance Monitoring

By: Achyuta Adhvaryu, Anant Nyshadham and Jorge Tamayo

Performance monitoring is a mainstay management tool in most organizations. Yet we still know little about whether—and why—better monitoring yields better performance in practice. To shed light on these questions, we study the introduction of a performance monitoring... View Details

Keywords: Performance Monitoring; Worker Skills; Skill Depreciation; Managerial Inattention; On-the-job Training; Productivity; Multitasking; Quick Serve Restaurants; Performance Evaluation; Employees; Competency and Skills; Training; Performance Productivity; Management; Information Technology; Food and Beverage Industry; Puerto Rico