Publications
Publications
Show Results For
- All HBS Web
(1,955)
- Faculty Publications (340)
lighting
→
- December 2022
- Article
When and How Should Firms Differentiate? Quality and Advertising Decisions in a Duopoly
By: Dominique Olié Lauga, Elie Ofek and Zsolt Katona
A prominent hallmark of competitive interaction is the desire to differentiate from rivals. In this article, the authors examine under what conditions firms will differentiate through product quality versus advertising intensity. Firms select quality in a first stage,... View Details
- November 2022
- Case
Wendy Estrella: Scaling Multiple Businesses
By: Jeffrey J. Bussgang and Sarah Mehta
Entrepreneur Wendy Estrella, a self-made, Latina millionaire based in Lawrence, Massachusetts, is attempting to simultaneously scale her law practice as well as her property management and development company. What path should she take for each and can she do it all,... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Sharing Models to Interpret Data
By: Joshua Schwartzstein and Adi Sunderam
To understand new data, we share models or interpretations with others. This paper studies such exchanges of models in a community. The key assumption is that people adopt the interpretation in their community that best explains the data, given their prior beliefs. An... View Details
- October 2022
- Case
Ethena: A Go-to-Market Dilemma
By: Rembrand Koning and Stacy Straaberg
In November 2021, Roxanne Petraeus and Anne Solmssen, founders of Brooklyn-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup Ethena, were looking to expand their compliance training business. The founders hired Arnie Gullov-Singh, an outside revenue consultant, to advise on... View Details
- September 2022
- Technical Note
Addressing Social Determinants of Health in the American Landscape
By: Susanna Gallani and Jacob Riegler
Social determinants of health (SDOH) have gained significant attention in recent years. A growing body of research shows that a person’s health is influenced by a large number of non-genetic factors, most of which operate outside the realm of health care and are... View Details
- August 2022 (Revised November 2024)
- Case
Boston Impact Initiative: Investing in Local Change
By: Emily R. McComb, Amy Klopfenstein and Mel Martin
In fall 2021, Aliana Piñeiro, impact director at Boston Impact Initiative (BII) discovered that an entrepreneur the organization was considering for an investment had failed to disclose pre-existing debt with another lender. Although the business scored highly on BII’s... View Details
Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Social Entrepreneurship; Finance; Investment; Investment Funds; Investment Portfolio; Relationships; Business and Community Relations; Society; Social Issues; Wealth and Poverty; Wealth; Poverty; Risk Management; Financial Services Industry; North and Central America; United States; Massachusetts; Boston
- 2023
- Working Paper
Scoring and Funding Breakthrough Ideas: Evidence from a Global Pharmaceutical Company
By: Joshua Krieger, Ramana Nanda, Ian Hunt, Aimee Reynolds and Peter Tarsa
We study resource allocation to early-stage ideas at an internal startup program of
one the largest pharmaceutical firms in the world. Our research design enables us to
elicit every evaluator’s scores across five different attributes, before seeing how they
would... View Details
- August 2022
- Case
Negotiating Peace in Colombia
By: Deepak Malhotra and Cody Smith
This case follows the protracted armed conflict between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), tracing it from its origins over 50 years ago, through the private and public negotiations that ultimately resulted in the 2016... View Details
- 2022
- Article
Fairness via Explanation Quality: Evaluating Disparities in the Quality of Post hoc Explanations
By: Jessica Dai, Sohini Upadhyay, Ulrich Aivodji, Stephen Bach and Himabindu Lakkaraju
As post hoc explanation methods are increasingly being leveraged to explain complex models in high-stakes settings, it becomes critical to ensure that the quality of the resulting explanations is consistently high across all subgroups of a population. For instance, it... View Details
- July 2022 (Revised August 2022)
- Case
Athletic Brewing Company: Crafting the U.S. Non-Alcoholic Beer Category
By: Ayelet Israeli and Anne V. Wilson
Athletic Brewing Company (“Athletic,” for short) was founded by Bill Shufelt and John Walker in 2017. In creating Athletic, Shufelt and Walker opened the first U.S. brewery and taproom fully devoted to the production of non-alcoholic (NA) craft beer. By 2021, Athletic... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
Are Experts Blinded by Feasibility?: Experimental Evidence from a NASA Robotics Challenge
By: Jacqueline N. Lane, Zoe Szajnfarber, Jason Crusan, Michael Menietti and Karim R. Lakhani
Resource allocation decisions play a dominant role in shaping a firm’s technological trajectory and competitive advantage. Recent work indicates that innovative firms and scientific institutions tend to exhibit an anti-novelty bias when evaluating new projects and... View Details
- May 2022
- Case
Deborah Quazzo at GSV Ventures
By: William A. Sahlman, Michael D. Smith and Nicole Tempest Keller
As COVID-19 swept across the globe in 2020, the education sector faced unprecedented disruption. Schools and colleges worldwide shut down, forcing over a billion students and teachers to move to online learning. Investor interest in the EdTech space exploded as... View Details
- May 2022
- Article
The Impact of COVID-19 on Digital Communication Patterns
By: Evan DeFilippis, Stephen Michael Impink, Madison Singell, Jeff Polzer and Raffaella Sadun
We explore the impact of COVID-19 on employees’ digital communication patterns through an event study of lockdowns in 16 large metropolitan areas in North America, Europe, and the Middle East. Using de-identified, aggregated meeting and email meta-data from 3,143,270... View Details
- May 2022
- Case
TikTok and National Security: Investment in an Age of Data Sovereignty?
By: Jeremy Friedman, Sarah Bauerle Danzman and David Lane
This case covers TikTok’s purchase of Musical.ly and the reaction of the United States government, including the review of the purchase by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) and the reaction of the presidential administration of Donald... View Details
- 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
- March–April 2022
- Article
Uncovering the Mitigating Psychological Response to Monitoring Technologies: Police Body Cameras Not Only Constrain but Also Depolarize
By: Shefali V. Patil and Ethan Bernstein
Despite organizational psychologists’ long-standing caution against monitoring (citing its reduction in employee autonomy and thus effectiveness), many organizations continue to use it, often with no detriment to performance and with strong support, not protest, from... View Details
- 2022
- White Paper
Census II of Free and Open Source Software - Application Libraries
By: Frank Nagle, James Dana, Jennifer Hoffman, Steven Randazzo and Yanuo Zhou
Produced in partnership with Harvard Laboratory for Innovation Science (LISH) and the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF), Census II is the second investigation into the widespread use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). The Census II effort utilizes data... View Details
- 2022
- Book
Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire
Sprawling across a quarter of the world’s land mass and claiming nearly seven hundred million people, Britain’s twentieth-century empire was the largest empire in human history. For many Britons, it epitomized their nation’s cultural superiority, but what legacy did... View Details
Keywords: Imperialism; Violence; Colonialism; History; Government and Politics; Power and Influence; Race; Policy; United Kingdom
- February 2022
- Case
US Foods: Driving Post-Pandemic Success?
By: David E. Bell, Olivia Hull and Amy Klopfenstein
In November 2021, US Foods CEO Pietro Satriano must decide his company’s trajectory following the COVID-19 pandemic. US Foods suffered due to business closures and social distancing during the height of the pandemic. While the situation improved following the return of... View Details
Keywords: COVID-19 Pandemic; Agribusiness; Food; Goods and Commodities; Jobs and Positions; Job Design and Levels; Job Offer; Labor; Employment; Human Capital; Wages; Working Conditions; Operations; Distribution Channels; Order Taking and Fulfillment; Infrastructure; Logistics; Product Development; Diversification; Product Design; Service Delivery; Service Operations; Supply Chain Management; Social Psychology; Motivation and Incentives; Transportation; Truck Transportation; Transportation Networks; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Distribution Industry; Food and Beverage Industry; Transportation Industry; United States
- January 10, 2022
- Article
The Link Between Income, Income Inequality, and Prosocial Behavior Around the World: A Multiverse Approach
By: Lucia Macchia and Ashley V. Whillans
The questions of whether high-income individuals are more prosocial than low-income individuals and whether income inequality moderates this effect have received extensive attention. We shed new light on this topic by analyzing a large-scale dataset with a... View Details