Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(576)
- Faculty Publications (145)
- January 2019 (Revised February 2020)
- Case
Jay Gould, 'The Most Hated Man in America'
By: Tom Nicholas, John Masko and Matthew G. Preble
Railroad magnate Jay Gould, a controversial figure in the history of U.S. capitalism, was a disruptive influence on an industry that had previously relied on formal and informal agreements to move traffic long distances across lines operated by different companies.... View Details
- January 2019 (Revised July 2019)
- Case
New Balance: Managing Orders and Working Conditions
By: Michael W. Toffel, Eileen McNeely and Matthew Preble
New Balance Athletics, Inc., a major U.S.-based athletic footwear and apparel brand, sources most of its footwear products from independent suppliers whose factories are located in China, Indonesia, and Vietnam. Monica Gorman, vice president of responsible leadership... View Details
Keywords: Footwear; Athletic Footwear; Manufacturing; CSR; Sustainability; Quality Management; Supply Chains; Operations; Management; Production; Working Conditions; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Labor and Management Relations; Supply Chain Management; Supply Chain; Order Taking and Fulfillment; Apparel and Accessories Industry; Consumer Products Industry
- June 2018
- Article
Cost of Experimentation and the Evolution of Venture Capital
By: Michael Ewens, Ramana Nanda and Matthew Rhodes-Kropf
We study how technological shocks to the cost of starting new businesses have led the venture capital model to adapt in fundamental ways over the prior decade. We both document and provide a framework to understand the changes in the investment strategy of VCs in... View Details
- Book Review
Review of Global Tax Fairness edited by Thomas Pogge and Krishen Mehta
This timely volume (Global Tax Fairness, edited by Thomas Pogge and Krishen Mehta) on the proper taxation of multinational enterprises argues that several feasible, near-term reforms could substantially narrow the scope for tax avoidance by closing information gaps,... View Details
- March 2018 (Revised September 2019)
- Case
Chewy.com (A)
By: Jeffrey F. Rayport and Matthew G. Preble
In late 2013, Ryan Cohen, cofounder and CEO of online pet products retailer Chewy.com, faces a “bet the company decision”—whether to stay with a third-party logistics provider (3PL) for all of its e-commerce fulfillment or to take the function in house. Cohen worries... View Details
- January 2018
- Case
Scaling Swagbucks (A)
By: Jeffrey F. Rayport and Matthew G. Preble
In early 2014, Chuck Davis (HBS '86) has joined Swagbucks as its first professional CEO to scale a successful and profitable brand promotion and consumer research business. Davis came into the job while serving as a venture partner at TCV, a growth stage VC firm,... View Details
Keywords: Loyalty Management; Scaling; Scale; Entrepreneurship; Human Resources; Employees; Employee Relationship Management; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Culture; Organizational Design; Leading Change; Growth Management; Religion; Information Technology; Internet and the Web; Transition; Leadership; Web Services Industry; Technology Industry
- January 2018 (Revised July 2019)
- Case
Big Apple Circus: Time to Fold the Tent?
By: David G. Fubini and Matthew Wiger
By 2016, the Big Apple Circus has weathered many storms in its 38 seasons as one of the most well-known New York City nonprofits. Will Weiss, the executive director, has witnessed his share of chaos during four years at Big Apple. After a slight resurgence following... View Details
- January 2018
- Case
Kids & Company: Entering the U.S.
By: Boris Groysberg, Matthew G. Preble and Katherine Connolly Baden
In April 2017, Victoria Sopik and Jennifer Nashmi, CEO and CFO (respectively) of Kids & Company, a Canadian childcare provider that they had co-founded in the early 2000s and developed into a nearly 100-unit enterprise, are discussing how the company should proceed... View Details
Keywords: Child Care; Childcare; Day Care; Daycare; Early Childhood Education; Strategy; Growth and Development Strategy; Growth Management; Business Strategy; Competitive Strategy; Competitive Advantage; Expansion; Leadership; Marketing; Product Marketing; Brands and Branding; Service Delivery; Service Operations; Product Design; Product Development; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues; Selection and Staffing; Customer Focus and Relationships; Entrepreneurship; Service Industry; Education Industry; United States; Canada
- December 2017 (Revised November 2023)
- Technical Note
The BGIE Twenty (2024 version)
By: Alberto Cavallo, Kristin Fabbe, Mattias Fibiger, Jeremy Friedman, Reshmaan Hussam, Vincent Pons and Matthew Weinzierl
The purpose of this technical note is to explain the BGIE Twenty, an “idea-kit” that serves as the intellectual backbone of the BGIE course. Each year, the BGIE professors decide on the twenty ideas that we believe are the most important for students to study in... View Details
- November 2017
- Case
The 'Wonder Drug' That Killed Babies
By: Joshua Lev Krieger, Tom Nicholas and Matthew Preble
In the early 1960s, a popular drug taken by patients worldwide for a range of maladies was found to cause severe birth defects and other health problems in babies born to mothers who had taken it during a certain stage of fetal development. As many as 10,000 children... View Details
Keywords: Regulation; Business and Government Relations; Business and Community Relations; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Product Marketing; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Business History; Health; Government Legislation; Corporate Accountability; Ethics; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Pharmaceutical Industry; Public Administration Industry; United States; United Kingdom; Australia; Germany; Europe
- 2017
- Working Paper
Biased Beliefs About Random Samples: Evidence from Two Integrated Experiments
By: Daniel J. Benjamin, Don A. Moore and Matthew Rabin
This paper describes results of a pair of incentivized experiments on biases in judgments about random samples. Consistent with the Law of Small Numbers (LSN), participants exaggerated the likelihood that short sequences and random subsets of coin flips would be... View Details
- September 2017 (Revised January 2019)
- Case
FJ Management Inc.
By: Lynda M. Applegate and Matthew G. Preble
In late 2015, Crystal Call Maggelet, president and CEO of FJ Management, is working with her investment committee to help set the company’s strategic direction. Maggelet, daughter of the company’s founder, has led FJ Management since 2009 when she stepped in as CEO... View Details
Keywords: Turnaround; Company History; Family Business; Transformation; Volatility; Change Management; Entrepreneurship; Ethics; Moral Sensibility; Values and Beliefs; Cash Flow; Insolvency and Bankruptcy; Financial Liquidity; Financial Management; Governance; Corporate Governance; Governance Controls; Leadership; Leading Change; Crisis Management; Negotiation; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Family Ownership; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Business Strategy; Energy Industry; Travel Industry; Retail Industry; Service Industry; Utah
- September–October 2017
- Article
Blurring the Boundaries: The Interplay of Gender and Local Communities in the Commercialization of Social Ventures
By: Stefan Dimitriadis, Matthew Lee, Lakshmi Ramarajan and Julie Battilana
This paper examines the critical role of gender in the commercialization of social ventures. We argue that cultural beliefs about what is perceived to be appropriate work for each gender influence how founders of social ventures incorporate commercial activity into... View Details
Keywords: Community; Cultural Beliefs; Social Enterprise; Gender; Local Range; Commercialization; Culture
- 14 Aug 2017
- Conference Presentation
A Convex Framework for Fair Regression
By: Richard Berk, Hoda Heidari, Shahin Jabbari, Matthew Joseph, Michael J. Kearns, Jamie Morgenstern, Seth Neel and Aaron Roth
We introduce a flexible family of fairness regularizers for (linear and logistic) regression problems. These regularizers all enjoy convexity, permitting fast optimization, and they span the range from notions of group fairness to strong individual fairness. By varying... View Details
- July 2017 (Revised March 2018)
- Case
Magic Bus: From Childhood to Livelihood
By: V. Kasturi Rangan, Vikram Gandhi, Anjali Raina and Rachna Chawla
Founded in 1999 by Matthew Spacie to give poor children an opportunity to play, Magic Bus had evolved to a leading social enterprise engaged in sports for development, holistic childhood development, and livelihood training for youth between the ages of 6 to 18. By... View Details
- 2017
- Chapter
Innovation Policies
By: Ramana Nanda and Matthew Rhodes-Kropf
Past work has shown that failure tolerance by principals has the potential to stimulate innovation, but has not examined how this affects which projects principals will start. We demonstrate that failure tolerance has an equilibrium price – in terms of an investor’s... View Details
- Article
Beyond the Target Customer: Social Effects in CRM Campaigns
By: Eva Ascarza, Peter Ebbes, Oded Netzer and Matthew Danielson
Customer relationship management (CRM) campaigns have traditionally focused on maximizing the profitability of the targeted customers. The authors demonstrate that in business settings characterized by network externalities, a CRM campaign that is aimed at changing the... View Details
- 2018
- Working Paper
Coordination Frictions in Venture Capital Syndicates
By: Ramana Nanda and Matthew Rhodes-Kropf
An extensive literature on venture capital has studied asymmetric information and agency problems between investors and entrepreneurs, examining how separating entrepreneurs from the investor can create frictions that might inhibit the funding of good projects. It has... View Details
- April 2017
- Article
Financing Risk and Innovation
By: Ramana Nanda and Matthew Rhodes-Kropf
We provide a model of investment into new ventures that demonstrates why some places, times, and industries should be associated with a greater degree of experimentation by investors. Investors respond to financing risk―a forecast of limited future funding―by modifying... View Details
- March 2017
- Case
Swagbucks
By: Jeffrey F. Rayport and Matthew G. Preble
In early 2016, Chuck Davis, chairman and CEO of Prodege LLC, parent company of the brand promotion business Swagbucks, and Josef Gorowitz, Prodege’s founder and president, must decide whether to acquire MyPoints, a competitor to Swagbucks, after the company’s... View Details
Keywords: Loyalty Management; Scaling; Scale; Entrepreneurship; Human Resources; Employees; Employee Relationship Management; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Culture; Organizational Design; Leading Change; Growth Management; Religion; Technology; Online Technology; Internet; Transition; Leadership; Web Services Industry; Technology Industry; United States