Publications

2010
Working Paper

The Unbundling of Advertising Agency Services: An Economic Analysis

By: Mohammad Arzaghi, Ernst R. Berndt, James C. Davis and Alvin J. Silk

We address a longstanding puzzle surrounding the unbundling of services occurring over several decades in the U.S. advertising agency industry: What accounts for the shift from bundling to unbundling of services and the slow pace of change? Using Evans and Salinger's... View Details

Keywords: Advertising; Change; Forecasting and Prediction; Cost; Price; Analytics and Data Science; Surveys; Marketing Strategy; Media; Service Operations; Agency Theory; Mathematical Methods; Advertising Industry; United States

March 1978 (Revised October 1978)
Case

Rosemont Hill Health Center

An administrator of a neighborhood health center is considering changing his cost accounting system from a single cost per visit to a cost per visit for each department in the center. Used to illustrate several issues related to cost accounting in health care:... View Details

Keywords: Cost Accounting; Health Care and Treatment; Health Industry

June 2018
Article

Personal and Social Usage: The Origins of Active Customers and Ways to Keep Them Engaged

By: Clarence Lee, Elie Ofek and Thomas Steenburgh

We study how digital service firms can develop an active customer base, focusing on two questions. First, how does the way that customers use the service postadoption to meet their own needs (personal usage) and to interact with one another (social usage) vary across... View Details

Keywords: Customer Engagement; Adoption Routes; Word-of-Mouth; Digital Marketing; Bayesian Estimation; Customers; Communication; Consumer Behavior; Marketing; Internet and the Web; Analytics and Data Science

October 2015
Case

BandPage (A)

By: Karim R. Lakhani, Colin Maclay and Greta Friar

BandPage CEO James "J" Sider is about to receive results from BandPage's targeted advertising campaign on music streaming service Rhapsody and learn whether BandPage's strategy to improve ad click through rates and generate revenue has succeeded. BandPage, which began... View Details

Keywords: Digital Innovation; Digital Music; Digital Marketing; Mobile Marketing; Technological Innovation; Marketing Communications; Music Entertainment; Mobile Technology; Music Industry

Article

Employee Selection as a Control System

By: Dennis Campbell

Theories from the economics, management control, and organizational behavior literatures predict that when it is difficult to align incentives by contracting on output, aligning preferences via employee selection may provide a useful alternative. This study... View Details

Keywords: Management Systems; Governance Controls; Employees; Selection and Staffing; Motivation and Incentives; Decision Making; Business Model

13 Sep 2010
Research & Ideas

The Consumer Appeal of Underdog Branding

real-world challenges and anxieties faced by increasing numbers of Americans.” As HBS professor Anat Keinan explains, "Today, underdog brand biographies are being used by both large and small companies and across categories,... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

March 1990
Case

Lehrer McGovern Bovis, Inc. (Abridged)

By: Steven C. Wheelwright

Describes the growth of a construction management company and the operating problems it now encounters. Designed to introduce students to the value of competition in the construction industry, to show how the techniques of value analysis can be used to strategic... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Operations; Construction; Growth Management; Quality; Competition; Problems and Challenges; Performance Productivity; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques; Construction Industry

June 2019
Case

Athena Bancorp

By: Leonard A. Schlesinger and Sarah Abbott

Athena Bancorp was founded in 2016 by Beth Daniels, a banking professional with 15 years of experience in the industry. Daniels took advantage of what she perceived as a gap in the market caused by recent industry consolidation, a decreasing industry focus on branch... View Details

Keywords: Banks and Banking; Entrepreneurship; Growth and Development Strategy; Organizational Culture; Human Resources; Strategy; Service Delivery; Banking Industry

2020
Working Paper

Design Rules, Volume 2: How Technology Shapes Organizations: Chapter 2 Transactions in a Task Network

By: Carliss Y. Baldwin

From the 1930s through today, many economists have conceived of large technical systems for the production of goods and services as a series of transactions. This point of view has led eminent economists to assert that transactions are the fundamental unit of analysis... View Details

Keywords: Modularity; Information Technology; Organizations

SSRN

14 Oct 2020
Blog Post

Veteran Financial Aid Outlook

services have, or fulfilling a pre-assignment requirement to teach at one of the Service Academies or to be a strategist, my advice is to brace yourself for some loans. This is not unique to Harvard, though.... View Details

January 2002 (Revised April 2002)
Case

Space Data Corporation

By: Alan D. MacCormack and Jay Wynn

Space Data Corp. plans to partner with the U.S. National Weather Service to place transceivers on weather balloons and thereby create a national mobile communications network. The company is in the late development stages and is planning to launch a regional test that... View Details

Keywords: Wireless Technology; Business Startups; Business Processes; Adaptation; Partners and Partnerships; Opportunities; Telecommunications Industry; Public Administration Industry; United States

Against a backdrop of intensifying competition, rising labor costs, and ascending customer expectations, companies are actively seeking ways to do more with less – for example, compelling customers to take on new roles in the value creation process. And, when... View Details

Jeffrey F. Rayport

Jeffrey F Rayport is a faculty member in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School, where he teaches in the School’s MBA and Executive Education Programs and on HBS Online. His primary focus in teaching and research is growth-stage technology... View Details

January–February 2018
Article

Inclusive Growth: Profitable Strategies for Tackling Poverty and Inequality

By: Robert S. Kaplan, George Serafeim and Eduardo Tugendhat

More than a billion people in the developing world remain in extreme poverty and outside the formal economy. Traditional CSR programs have done little to alleviate the situation and rarely produce transformative change.
Instead of trying to fix local problems,... View Details

Keywords: Inclusive Growth; Sustainability; Social Impact; Business Strategy; Shared Value; Impact Investing; Inequality; Corporate Governance; Balanced Scorecard; Strategy Execution; Economic Growth; Developing Countries and Economies; Poverty; Equality and Inequality; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Strategy; Investment

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14 Aug 2015
Working Paper Summaries

Are ‘Better’ Ideas More Likely to Succeed? An Empirical Analysis of Startup Evaluation

Keywords: by Pian Shu; Financial Services

August 2019
Article

Cadet-Branch Matching in a Kelso-Crawford Economy

By: Ravi Jagadeesan

Sönmez (2013) and Sönmez and Switzer (2013) used matching theory with unilaterally substitutable priorities to propose mechanisms to match cadets to military branches. This paper shows that, alternatively, the Sönmez and Sönmez–Switzer mechanisms can be constructed as... View Details

Keywords: Matching With Contracts; Cadet-branch Matching; Stability; Substitutability