Publications
Publications
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(1,511)
- Faculty Publications (441)
- February 2024
- Module Note
Data-Driven Marketing in Retail Markets
By: Ayelet Israeli
This note describes an eight-class sessions module on data-driven marketing in retail markets. The module aims to familiarize students with core concepts of data-driven marketing in retail, including exploring the opportunities and challenges, adopting best practices,... View Details
Keywords: Data; Data Analytics; Retail; Retail Analytics; Data Science; Business Analytics; ＂Marketing Analytics＂; Omnichannel; Omnichannel Retailing; Omnichannel Retail; DTC; Direct To Consumer Marketing; Ethical Decision Making; Algorithmic Bias; Privacy; A/B Testing; Descriptive Analytics; Prescriptive Analytics; Predictive Analytics; Analytics and Data Science; E-commerce; Marketing Channels; Demand and Consumers; Marketing Strategy; Retail Industry
- January 2024 (Revised February 2024)
- Course Overview Note
Managing Customers for Growth: Course Overview for Students
By: Eva Ascarza
Managing Customers for Growth (MCG) is a 14-session elective course for second-year MBA students at Harvard Business School. It is designed for business professionals engaged in roles centered on customer-driven growth activities. The course explores the dynamics of... View Details
- January 2024 (Revised February 2024)
- Exercise
Travelogo: Understanding Customer Journeys
By: Eva Ascarza, Nicolas Padilla and Oded Netzer
In late May 2023, Sarah Merino, the newly appointed manager of the Customer Insights group at Travelogo—an online travel booking platform—initiates a comprehensive analysis of clickstream data to understand the varied behaviors and needs of their users. In preparation... View Details
- January 2024 (Revised May 2024)
- Case
PortageBay and ESG Analytics
By: Vikram S. Gandhi and Radhika Kak
In 2023, sustainable investors faced several challenges. The first was the lack of access to standardized and vetted environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data, and equally, the interpretation of this data into investment-useful insights. Reducing reliance on... View Details
- 2024
- Report
The Eco-Digital EraTM: The Dual Transition to a Sustainable and Digital Economy
By: Suraj Srinivasan, Andy Feinstein, Amol Khadikar, Jiani Zhang, Noémie Lauer, Hiral Shah, Sally Epstein, Jerome Buvat and Vaishnavee Ananth
Since the proliferation of smartphones and social media in the late 2000s, digital has captured an increasingly large portion of the economy. In this Capgemini Research Institute report, The Eco-Digital EraTM: The dual transition to a sustainable and... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Enhancing Treatment Effect Prediction on Privacy-Protected Data: An Honest Post-Processing Approach
By: Ta-Wei Huang and Eva Ascarza
As firms increasingly rely on customer data for personalization, concerns over privacy and regulatory compliance have grown. Local Differential Privacy (LDP) offers strong individual-level protection by injecting noise into data before collection. While... View Details
- 2023
- Article
Benchmarking Large Language Models on CMExam—A Comprehensive Chinese Medical Exam Dataset
By: Junling Liu, Peilin Zhou, Yining Hua, Dading Chong, Zhongyu Tian, Andrew Liu, Helin Wang, Chenyu You, Zhenhua Guo, Lei Zhu and Michael Lingzhi Li
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have transformed the field of question answering (QA). However, evaluating LLMs in the medical field is challenging due to the lack of standardized and comprehensive datasets. To address this gap, we introduce CMExam,... View Details
- 2023
- Other Article
The Harvard USPTO Patent Dataset: A Large-Scale, Well-Structured, and Multi-Purpose Corpus of Patent Applications
By: Mirac Suzgun, Luke Melas-Kyriazi, Suproteem K. Sarkar, Scott Duke Kominers and Stuart Shieber
Innovation is a major driver of economic and social development, and information about many kinds of innovation is embedded in semi-structured data from patents and patent applications. Though the impact and novelty of innovations expressed in patent data are difficult... View Details
- 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
- October 2023 (Revised April 2024)
- Case
Veeva Systems: The Next Frontier
By: Satish Tadikonda and William Marks
Born out of a desire to bring technological advances in enterprise software into the healthcare vertical, Peter Gassner and Matt Wallach founded Veeva to bring life sciences companies into the digital age for data management in both the commercial and R&D sectors. Over... View Details
- October–December 2023
- Article
A Practical Guide to Conversation Research: How to Study What People Say to Each Other
By: Michael Yeomans, Katelynn Boland, Hanne K. Collins, Nicole Abi-Esber and Alison Wood Brooks
Conversation—a verbal interaction between two or more people—is a complex, pervasive, and consequential human behavior. Conversations have been studied across many academic disciplines. However, advances in recording and analysis techniques over the last decade have... 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
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
- September 2023 (Revised January 2024)
- Case
AB InBev: Brewing Up Forecasts during COVID-19
By: Mark Egan, C. Fritz Foley, Esel Cekin and Emilie Billaud
In July 2021, the CEO of AB InBev's European operations and his team strategized to position the company for success post-pandemic. As the world's largest beer company, boasting over 500 brands, revenue of $46 billion, and a workforce of 160,000 in 2020, AB InBev... View Details
Keywords: Beer; Forecasting; COVID-19; Decision; Forecasting and Prediction; Analytics and Data Science; Crisis Management; Decisions; Financing and Loans; Investment Return; Resource Allocation; Distribution; Production; Business Processes; Strategic Planning; Health Pandemics; Digital Transformation; Markets; Food and Beverage Industry; Belgium; Europe; Latin America; North and Central America
- September 2023 (Revised December 2023)
- Case
TetraScience: Noise and Signal
By: Thomas R. Eisenmann and Tom Quinn
In 2019, TetraScience CEO “Spin” Wang needed advice. Five years earlier, he had cofounded a startup that saw early success with a hardware product designed to help laboratory scientists in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical spaces more easily collect data from... View Details
Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Business Growth and Maturation; Business Organization; Restructuring; Forecasting and Prediction; Digital Platforms; Analytics and Data Science; AI and Machine Learning; Organizational Structure; Network Effects; Competitive Strategy; Biotechnology Industry; Pharmaceutical Industry; United States; Boston
- September 13, 2023
- Article
How the Best Chief Data Officers Create Value
By: Suraj Srinivasan and Robin Seibert
Despite the rapidly increasing prominence of data and analytics functions, the majority of chief data officers (CDOs) fail to value and price the business outcomes created by their data and analytics capabilities. It comes as no surprise then that many CDOs fall behind... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Global Harms, Local Profits: How the Uneven Costs of Natural Disasters Affect Support for Green Political Platforms
By: Silvia Pianta and Paula Rettl
Large-scale fires are becoming increasingly common due to climate change. While conventional
wisdom suggests that firsthand experiences with natural disasters foster green coalitions
by raising awareness of environmental degradation, we propose an alternative... View Details
Keywords: Climate Impact; Politics; Environmental Issues; Environmental Protection; Economic Analysis; Economic Behavior; Economic Geography; Economy; Economics; Climate Change; Environmental Management; Political Elections; Natural Disasters; Green Technology; Environmental Sustainability; Latin America; Brazil
- 2023
- Article
On Minimizing the Impact of Dataset Shifts on Actionable Explanations
By: Anna P. Meyer, Dan Ley, Suraj Srinivas and Himabindu Lakkaraju
The Right to Explanation is an important regulatory principle that allows individuals to request actionable explanations for algorithmic decisions. However, several technical challenges arise when providing such actionable explanations in practice. For instance, models... View Details
- August 2023 (Revised March 2024)
- Case
Arla Foods: Data-Driven Decarbonization (A)
By: Michael Parzen, Michael W. Toffel, Susan Pinckney and Amram Migdal
The case describes Arla’s history, in particular its climate change mitigation efforts, and how it implemented a price incentive system to motivate individual farms to implement scope 1 greenhouse gas emissions mitigation measures and receive a higher milk price. The... View Details
Keywords: Dairy Industry; Business Earnings; Agribusiness; Animal-Based Agribusiness; Acquisition; Mergers and Acquisitions; Decision Making; Decisions; Voting; Environmental Management; Climate Change; Environmental Regulation; Environmental Sustainability; Green Technology; Pollution; Moral Sensibility; Values and Beliefs; Financial Strategy; Price; Profit; Revenue; Food; Geopolitical Units; Global Strategy; Ownership Type; Cooperative Ownership; Performance Efficiency; Performance Evaluation; Problems and Challenges; Natural Environment; Science-Based Business; Business Strategy; Commercialization; Cooperation; Corporate Strategy; Food and Beverage Industry; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Europe; United Kingdom; European Union; Germany; Denmark; Sweden; Luxembourg; Belgium
- August 2023 (Revised January 2024)
- Supplement
Arla Foods: Data-Driven Decarbonization (B)
By: Michael Parzen, Michael W. Toffel, Susan Pinckney and Amram Migdal
The case describes Arla’s history, in particular its climate change mitigation efforts, and how it implemented a price incentive system to motivate individual farms to implement scope 1 greenhouse gas emissions mitigation measures and receive a higher milk price. The... View Details
Keywords: Dairy Industry; Earnings Management; Environmental Accounting; Animal-Based Agribusiness; Mergers and Acquisitions; Decisions; Voting; Climate Change; Environmental Regulation; Environmental Sustainability; Green Technology; Pollution; Moral Sensibility; Values and Beliefs; Financial Strategy; Price; Profit; Revenue; Food; Geopolitical Units; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues; Global Strategy; Cooperative Ownership; Performance Efficiency; Performance Evaluation; Problems and Challenges; Natural Environment; Science-Based Business; Business Strategy; Commercial Banking; Cooperation; Corporate Strategy; Motivation and Incentives; Food and Beverage Industry; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Europe; United Kingdom; European Union; Denmark; Sweden; Luxembourg; Belgium