Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(961)
- Faculty Publications (241)
- January 2021 (Revised March 2022)
- Teaching Note
Maritz Automotive
By: Ashley V. Whillans and Lamar Pierce
This case focuses on Charlotte Blank, the Chief Behavioral Officer at Maritz, as she tries to assist a major automotive manufacturer (CarCo) with increasing their sales by prepaying monthly bonuses to independently franchised car dealers and clawing them back if the... View Details
- January–February 2021
- Article
Compensation Packages That Actually Drive Performance
By: Boris Groysberg, Sarah Abbott, Michael R. Marino and Metin Aksoy
By aligning executives’ financial incentives with company strategy, a firm can inspire its management to deliver superior results. But it can be hard to get pay packages right. In this article four experts break down the key elements of compensation and explain how to... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
The Market for Healthcare in Low Income Countries
By: Abhijit Banerjee, Abhijit Chowdhury, Jishnu Das, Jeffrey Hammer, Reshmaan Hussam and Aakash Mohpal
Patient trust is an important driver of the demand for healthcare. But it may also impact supply:
doctors who realize that patients may not trust them may adjust their behavior in response. We
assemble a large dataset that assesses clinical performance using... View Details
- Article
Value of New Performance Information in Healthcare: Evidence from Japan
By: Susanna Gallani, Takehisa Kajiwara and Ranjani Krishnan
Mandatory measurement and disclosure of outcome measures are commonly used policy tools in
healthcare. The effectiveness of such disclosures relies on the extent to which the new information produced by the mandatory system is internalized by the healthcare... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Private Equity and COVID-19
By: Paul A. Gompers, Steven N. Kaplan and Vladimir Mukharlyamov
We survey more than 200 private equity (PE) managers from firms with $1.9 trillion of assets under management (AUM) about their portfolio performance, decisionmaking and activities during the Covid-19 pandemic. Given that PE managers have significant incentives to... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
The ESG-Innovation Disconnect: Evidence from Green Patenting
By: Lauren Cohen, Umit G. Gurun and Quoc H. Nguyen
No firm or sector of the global economy is untouched by innovation. In equilibrium, innovators will flock to (and innovation will occur where) the returns to innovative capital are the highest. In this paper, we document a strong empirical pattern in green patent... View Details
- August 2020
- Article
Workplace Knowledge Flows
By: Jason Sandvik, Richard Saouma, Nathan Seegert and Christopher Stanton
We conducted a field experiment in a sales firm to test whether improving knowledge flows between coworkers affects productivity. Our design allows us to compare different management practices and to isolate whether frictions to knowledge transmission primarily reside... View Details
- March 2020
- Article
Do Managers Matter? A Natural Experiment from 42 R&D Labs in India
By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Tarun Khanna and Christos A. Makridis
We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in the staggered entry of new managers into India’s 42 public R&D labs between 1994 and 2006 to study how alignment between the CEO and middle-level managers affect research productivity. We show that the introduction of new lab... View Details
- February 2020
- Article
Effects of a Tournament Incentive Plan Incorporating Managerial Discretion in a Geographically Dispersed Organization
By: Carolyn Deller and Tatiana Sandino
Using retail chain data, we study the effects of a tournament incentive plan based primarily on objective performance, but incorporating managerial discretion in the selection of winners. In principle, such plans could motivate employees to perform both at a high... View Details
- January 2020
- Case
SK Group: Social Progress Credits
By: George Serafeim, Ethan Rouen and David Freiberg
SK Group was one of the largest companies South Korea. A family-run conglomerate consisting of around 120 subsidiaries and employing more than 100,000, SK was tightly knit into the fabric of Korean society. SK viewed their future success as contingent upon the strength... View Details
Keywords: Impact; Impact Investing; Impact Measurement; Social Value; Social Development; Conglomerates; Measurement Of Purpose; ESG; ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) Performance; Capital Markets; Innovation; Environmental Impact; Collaboration; Social Enterprise; Social and Collaborative Networks; Social Issues; Measurement and Metrics; Value Creation; Cooperation; Environmental Sustainability; Employment; Accounting; Energy Industry; Telecommunications Industry; Chemical Industry; South Korea
- January 2020
- Article
The Job Rating Game: Revolving Doors and Analyst Incentives
By: Elisabeth Kempf
Investment banks frequently hire analysts from rating agencies. While many argue that this "revolving door" creates captured analysts, it can also create incentives to improve accuracy. To study this issue, I construct an original dataset, linking analysts to their... View Details
- 2019
- Working Paper
Intelligent Design of Inclusive Growth Strategies
By: Robert S. Kaplan, George Serafeim and Eduardo Tugendhat
Improving corporate engagement with society, as advocated in the Business Roundtable’s 2019 statement, should not be viewed as a zero-sum proposition where attention to new stakeholders detracts from delivering shareholder value. Corporate programs for sustainable and... View Details
- September 2019 (Revised December 2022)
- Case
Cooking Down a Storm: Changing Culture at Pasta Serafina (A)
By: Susanna Gallani, Francesca Gino and Raffaella Sadun
Plant management at Pasta Serafina, a pasta producer in the south of Italy, is struggling to contain employee absenteeism. While the misbehavior is concentrated in a minority of the workers, its effects impact not only the plant’s performance, but also the climate and... View Details
- September 2019
- Case
Shell: A Company of Opportunity?
By: Joseph B. Fuller and Emer Moloney
The Opportunity Hub was a cloud-based platform that enabled managers to market projects they were working on and associated resourcing needs as “Opportunity Owners” and employees, or “Opportunity Seekers,” to browse these statements of need and engage when they had... View Details
Keywords: Business Divisions; Change Management; Competency and Skills; Experience and Expertise; Talent and Talent Management; Energy; Energy Sources; Non-Renewable Energy; Renewable Energy; Human Resources; Employees; Retention; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Innovation and Management; Innovation Strategy; Technological Innovation; Jobs and Positions; Job Design and Levels; Knowledge Sharing; Knowledge; Knowledge Use and Leverage; Labor; Human Capital; Labor Unions; Leading Change; Resource Allocation; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Performance Evaluation; Performance Productivity; Strategic Planning; Projects; Motivation and Incentives; Business Strategy; Social and Collaborative Networks; Technology Platform; Chemical Industry; Energy Industry; Information Technology Industry; Technology Industry; United Kingdom; Netherlands
- August 2019
- Case
Bark Gift Shop Ltd.
By: Susanna Gallani, Jan Bouwens and Peter Kroos
This case describes a setting in which the CFO of Bark Gift Shop Ltd., a gift items retailer, discovers an undesired pattern in the performance data suggesting that her shop managers that perform well during the first part of the year, purposely reduce their effort in... View Details
- April 2019
- Case
Barber Cardiosystems
By: Ranjay Gulati and Paul S. Myers
Barber Cardiosystems, based in Melbourne, Australia, designs and manufactures therapeutic devices used for treatment of coronary conditions. Over four decades, it has grown to be among the top 200 medical device companies in the world. It competes against much larger... View Details
- April 2019 (Revised January 2025)
- Case
Clear Link Technologies, LLC: Driving Sales with Peer Effects
By: Christopher Stanton, Richard Saouma and Olivia Hull
The importance of a good peer or coworker is widely discussed, but understanding the glue that makes coworkers valuable is less understood. This case sheds light on the importance of peers and the practices and environments that make a group greater than the sum of its... View Details
Keywords: Talent and Talent Management; Interactive Communication; Experience and Expertise; Decision Making; Training; Design; Compensation and Benefits; Knowledge Acquisition; Knowledge Sharing; Human Capital; Working Conditions; Measurement and Metrics; Outcome or Result; Performance; Performance Improvement; Research; Sales; Salesforce Management; Motivation and Incentives; Telecommunications Industry; Utah; United States
- April 2019
- Article
Incentives for Public Goods Inside Organizations: Field Experimental Evidence
By: Andrea Blasco, Olivia S. Jung, Karim R. Lakhani and Michael Menietti
Understanding why employees go the extra mile at work is a key problem for many organizations. We conduct a field experiment at a medical organization to study motivations for employees to submit project proposals for organizational improvement. In total, we analyze... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
When Does Gamified Training Improve Performance? The Roles of Office and Leader Engagement
By: Ryan W. Buell, Wei Cai and Tatiana Sandino
Gamified training is a novel management control system in which companies use gamification
techniques to engage and motivate employees to learn. This study empirically examines the
performance consequences of gamified training using data from a natural field... View Details
- January 2019 (Revised February 2020)
- Case
Should a Pension Fund Try to Change the World? Inside GPIF's Embrace of ESG
By: George Serafeim
In the fall of 2018, Hiro Mizuno, the Chief Investment Officer (CIO) of GPIF, the Japanese Government Pension Fund, was reflecting on his efforts to integrate Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) issues into every aspect of GPIF’s portfolio. His efforts ranged... View Details