Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(860)
- Faculty Publications (197)
- 2024
- Book
Fintech, Small Business & the American Dream: How Technology Is Transforming Lending and Shaping a New Era of Small Business Opportunity
By: Karen G. Mills
The second edition of Fintech, Small Business & the American Dream, builds on the groundbreaking 2019 book with new insights on how technology and artificial intelligence are transforming small business lending. This ambitious view covers the significance of... View Details
- 2024
- Article
Neyman Meets Causal Machine Learning: Experimental Evaluation of Individualized Treatment Rules
By: Michael Lingzhi Li and Kosuke Imai
A century ago, Neyman showed how to evaluate the efficacy of treatment using a randomized experiment under a minimal set of assumptions. This classical repeated sampling framework serves as a basis of routine experimental analyses conducted by today’s scientists across... View Details
- July 2024 (Revised January 2025)
- Case
Dynamic Pricing at Wendy's: Where's the Beef?
By: Elie Ofek, Alicia Dadlani and Martha Hostetter
In early 2024, Wendy’s new CEO announced on an earnings call that the company would install digital menus in its US locations so it could begin testing dynamic pricing—changing prices up or down in response to shifts in supply and demand – as well as allow engaging in... View Details
- July 2024
- Case
Knowledge-Enabled Financial Advice: Digital Transformation at Edward Jones
By: Lauren Cohen, Richard Ryffel, Grace Headinger and Sophia Pan
Edward Jones, a wealth management advisory firm that prided itself on its interpersonal connections and face-to-face interactions, was eager to augment their services with AI capabilities. Built on 1-to-1 close-knit relationships, the firm had more than 15,000 offices... View Details
Keywords: Fintech; Innovation And Strategy; Financial Advisors; Big Data; Artificial Intelligence; Digitization; Financial Institutions; Business Strategy; Competitive Advantage; Technology Adoption; Business Plan; Technological Innovation; Interpersonal Communication; Communication Intention and Meaning; Communication Strategy; Transformation; Employee Stock Ownership Plan; Disruptive Innovation; Innovation Strategy; Innovation and Management; Innovation Leadership; Knowledge Acquisition; Knowledge Use and Leverage; Customer Relationship Management; AI and Machine Learning; Digital Strategy; Financial Services Industry; St. Louis; Missouri; United States; Canada
- July 2024
- Article
AI, ROI, and Sales Productivity
Artificial intelligence (AI) is now a loose term for many different things and at the peak of its hype curve. So managers hitch-their-pitch to the term in arguing for resources. But like any technology, its business value depends upon actionable use cases embraced by... View Details
- July 2024
- Article
Chatbots and Mental Health: Insights into the Safety of Generative AI
By: Julian De Freitas, Ahmet Kaan Uğuralp, Zeliha Uğuralp and Stefano Puntoni
Chatbots are now able to engage in sophisticated conversations with consumers. Due to the ‘black box’ nature of the algorithms, it is impossible to predict in advance how these conversations will unfold. Behavioral research provides little insight into potential safety... View Details
- July 2024
- Article
How Artificial Intelligence Constrains Human Experience
By: A. Valenzuela, S. Puntoni, D. Hoffman, N. Castelo, J. De Freitas, B. Dietvorst, C. Hildebrand, Y.E. Huh, R. Meyer, M. Sweeney, S. Talaifar, G. Tomaino and K. Wertenbroch
Many consumption decisions and experiences are digitally mediated. As a consequence, consumer behavior is increasingly the joint product of human psychology and ubiquitous algorithms (Braun et al. 2024; cf. Melumad et al. 2020). The coming of age of Large Language... View Details
- July 2024
- Case
Replika AI: Alleviating Loneliness (A)
By: Shikhar Ghosh and Shweta Bagai
Eugenia Kuyda launched Replika AI in 2017 as an empathetic digital companion to combat loneliness and provide emotional support. The platform surged in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic, offering non-judgmental support to isolated users. By 2023, Replika boasted... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Private Equity and Digital Transformation
By: Brian K. Baik, Wilbur Chen and Suraj Srinivasan
We study the role which private equity (PE) plays in digital transformation. We find that PE investment is associated with greater investments into portfolio firm’s digital technologies, as measured by IT expenditures and the hiring demand for AI skills. This... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
The Value of AI Innovations
By: Wilbur Xinyuan Chen, Terrence Tianshuo Shi and Suraj Srinivasan
We study the value of AI innovations as it diffuses across general and application sectors, using the United States Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO) AI patent dataset. Investors value these innovations more than others, as AI patents exhibit a 9% value premium,... View Details
- May 2024
- Supplement
HubSpot and Motion AI (B): Generative AI Opportunities
By: Jill Avery
The technologies driving artificial intelligence (AI) had progressed significantly since HubSpot’s acquisition of Motion AI in 2017. Generative AI was the newest major development. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies such as HubSpot were analyzing how generative AI... View Details
- May 2024
- Teaching Note
AI Wars
By: Andy Wu and Matt Higgins
Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 723-434. In 2024, the world was looking to Google to see what the search giant and long-time putative technical leader in artificial intelligence (AI) would do to compete in the massively hyped technology of generative AI popularized over... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Old Moats for New Models: Openness, Control, and Competition in Generative AI
By: Pierre Azoulay, Joshua L. Krieger and Abhishek Nagaraj
Drawing insights from the field of innovation economics, we discuss the likely competitive environment shaping generative AI advances. Central to our analysis are the concepts of appropriability—whether firms in the industry are able to control the knowledge generated... View Details
- May–June 2024
- Article
Should Your Brand Hire a Virtual Influencer?
By: Serim Hwang, Shunyuan Zhang, Xiao Liu and Kannan Srinivasan
Followers respond more favorably to sponsored posts by virtual influencers versus those by humans, costs are lower, and creating an influencer from scratch allows marketers to introduce more diversity. View Details
- May 2024
- Article
The Health Risks of Generative AI-Based Wellness Apps
By: Julian De Freitas and G. Cohen
Artifcial intelligence (AI)-enabled chatbots are increasingly being used to
help people manage their mental health. Chatbots for mental health and
particularly ‘wellness’ applications currently exist in a regulatory ‘gray area’.
Indeed, most generative AI-powered... View Details
- April 2024 (Revised December 2024)
- Case
Anthropic: Building Safe AI
By: Shikhar Ghosh and Shweta Bagai
In late 2024, Anthropic, a leading AI safety and research company, achieved a significant breakthrough with computer use capabilities that allowed AI to interact with computers like humans. Co-founded by former OpenAI employees and known for its generative AI... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Human-Computer Interactions in Demand Forecasting and Labor Scheduling Decisions
By: Caleb Kwon, Ananth Raman and Jorge Tamayo
We investigate whether corporate officers should grant managers discretion to override AI-driven demand forecasts and labor scheduling tools. Analyzing five years of administrative data from a large grocery retailer using such an AI tool, encompassing over 500 stores,... View Details
- April 2024
- Article
A Machine Learning Algorithm Predicting Risk of Dilating VUR among Infants with Hydronephrosis Using UTD Classification
By: Hsin-Hsiao Scott Wang, Michael Lingzhi Li, Dylan Cahill, John Panagides, Tanya Logvinenko, Jeanne Chow and Caleb Nelson
Backgrounds: Urinary Tract Dilation (UTD) classification has been designed to be a more objective grading system to evaluate antenatal and post-natal UTD. Due to unclear association between UTD classifications to specific anomalies such as vesico-ureteral reflux (VUR),... View Details
- April 2024 (Revised November 2024)
- Case
Moderna: Pioneering a People Platform to Accelerate Science Innovation
By: Tatiana Sandino, Emil Dy and Samuel Grad
Moderna was founded in 2010 to explore how messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) could be used to create breakthrough medicines by encoding instructions for the body to create antibodies. When Stéphane Bancel (HBS 2000) took over in 2011, he bet on the potential of this... View Details
Keywords: Disruptive Innovation; Talent and Talent Management; Selection and Staffing; AI and Machine Learning; Digital Strategy; Innovation and Management; Leadership Development; Management Practices and Processes; Management Systems; Organizational Culture; Performance Evaluation; Alignment; Employee Relationship Management; Science-Based Business; Expansion; Pharmaceutical Industry; Biotechnology Industry; United States
- March 2024 (Revised April 2024)
- Case
Coursera's Foray into GenAI
By: Suraj Srinivasan, Michael Parzen and Radhika Kak
In early 2023, Maggioncalda, CEO of US EdTech firm Coursera, launched Project Genesis to develop a strategy for incorporating GenAI capabilities into the firm's offerings, asking his teams to focus on value to the firm and cost of implementation. The team identified... View Details