Publications

November 2017 (Revised July 2019)
Case

Project Moab at Hulu

By: C. Fritz Foley and James Weber

In 2015, Elaine Paul, CFO of Hulu, and the rest of the senior leadership team, must decide if they should offer a new, advertisement-free subscription service. At the time Hulu distributed a wide variety of content including in season current programing and earned... View Details

Keywords: Video On Demand; Subscriber Models; Media; Business Model; Decision Choices and Conditions; Media and Broadcasting Industry; Entertainment and Recreation Industry; United States

04 Dec 2017
HBS Seminar

Andrew Hoffman, University of Michigan Ross School of Business

August 2013
Article

The Timing of Pay

By: Christopher Parsons and E. Van Wesep

There exists large and persistent variation in not only how, but when employees are paid, a fact unexplained by existing theory. This paper develops a simple model of optimal pay timing for firms. When workers have self-control problems, they under-save... View Details

Keywords: Payday Lending; Hyperbolic Discounting; Self-control Problems; Pay Frequency; Payday Loan Legislation; Paycheck Frequency; Time Inconsistency; Wages; Behavior; Employee Relationship Management

April 12, 2022
Article

Evaluation of Individual and Ensemble Probabilistic Forecasts of COVID-19 Mortality in the United States

By: Estee Y. Cramer, Evan L. Ray, Velma K. Lopez, Johannes Bracher, Andrea Brennen, Alvaro J. Castro Rivadeneira, Michael Lingzhi Li and et al.

Short-term probabilistic forecasts of the trajectory of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States have served as a visible and important communication channel between the scientific modeling community and both the general public and decision-makers. Forecasting models... View Details

Keywords: COVID-19; Forecasting and Prediction; Health Pandemics; Mathematical Methods; Partners and Partnerships

Register to Read

2024
Working Paper

Climate Solutions, Transition Risk, and Stock Returns

By: Shirley Lu, Edward J. Riedl, Simon Xu and George Serafeim

Using large language models to measure firms' climate solution products and services, we find that high-climate solution firms exhibit lower stock returns and higher market valuation multiples. Their stock prices respond positively to events signaling increased demand... View Details

Keywords: Technology; Generative Ai; Large Language Models; Climate Finance; Climate Change; Innovation and Invention; Environmental Sustainability; AI and Machine Learning; Investment; Financial Markets

SSRN

January 19, 2024
Article

Value-Based Health Care Can Transform the Treatment of Patients with Substance Use Disorder

By: Robert S. Kaplan and Sarah E. Wakeman

U.S. overdose deaths currently exceed 100,000 per year. New facilities, known as bridge clinics, are broadening access to high-quality care by offering outpatient substance use disorder (SUD) treatment with few access barriers. But many of the critical services offered... View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Cost; Adoption

12 Nov 2008
Research & Ideas

The Marketing of a President

Editor's Note: Harvard Business School professor John Quelch writes a blog on marketing issues, called Marketing Know: How, for Harvard Business Online. It is reprinted on HBS Working Knowledge. When the book is written on this election, it should not be titled The... View Details

Keywords: by John Quelch

16 Nov 2015
HBS Seminar

Vish Krishnan, Professor of Innovation, Technology & Operations, University of California San Diego Rady School of Man

Article

Platform Competition: Betfair and the U.K. Market for Sports Betting

By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Neil Campbell

We examine two episodes of strategic interaction in the U.K. betting industry: (i) Betfair (an entrant multi-sided platform or MSP) vs. Flutter (also an MSP) and (ii) Betfair vs. traditional bookmakers. We find that although Betfair was an underfunded second mover in... View Details

Keywords: Platform Design; Betting; Complements; Competing Business Models; Co-opetition; Entry; Multi-Sided Platforms; Design; Network Effects; Business Model; Competition; Cooperation

Register to Read

2014
Chapter

Better Timing of Cyber Conflict

By: Elisabeth Paulson and Christopher Griffin

In this paper, we construct a model of cyber-weapon deployment and attempt to determine an optimal deployment time for cyberweapons using this model. We compare and contrast our approach to that in Axelrod and Iliev (R. Axelrod and R. Iliev. Timing of cyber conflict.... View Details

Keywords: Cyber-weapons; Cyberwarfare; Cybersecurity; National Security

July 2003
Article

Probabilistic Representation of Complexity

By: Nabil I Al-Najjar, Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Emre Ozdenoren

We study individuals' behavior in an environment that is deterministic, but too complex to permit tractable deterministic representation. Under mild conditions, behavior is represented by a unique probabilistic model in which the agent's inability to think through all... View Details

Keywords: Complexity; Behavior; Problems and Challenges; Risk and Uncertainty; Planning

September 2016 (Revised February 2017)
Case

MyTime

By: Juliane Begenau and Robin Greenwood

Ethan Anderson, the CEO of San Francisco–based e-commerce company MyTime, must decide on the company's growth strategy. MyTime’s first product was a website and mobile app that offered consumers a convenient way to book appointments with local merchants throughout the... View Details

Keywords: Customer Valuation; Discounted Cash Flow; Software; Valuation Methodologies; Subscriber Models; Financial Management; Corporate Finance; Growth and Development Strategy; Valuation; Applications and Software; Information Technology Industry; North and Central America

December 2015 (Revised February 2016)
Case

Ocado

By: José Alvarez, David E. Bell and Damien McLoughlin

In 2015, U.K.-based Ocado was the world's largest pure player in the online home-delivery grocery business and was gaining a growing share of the highly competitive U.K. grocery market. Ocado had made heavy investments in technology, including a highly automated... View Details

November 2023
Case

Team Liquid: Fueling the Business of Fandom

By: Youngme Moon and Kerry Herman

In 2023, the co-CEOs of Team Liquid, one of the world's most prominent Esports organizations, are deciding whether and how to evolve their business model to include (1) a greater focus on enterprise revenue; and (2) more direct-to-consumer activity. Team Liquid has one... View Details

Keywords: Business Model; Customer Focus and Relationships; Games, Gaming, and Gambling; Revenue; Organizational Culture; Business and Community Relations; Video Game Industry

2023
Working Paper

Causal Interpretation of Structural IV Estimands

By: Isaiah Andrews, Nano Barahona, Matthew Gentzkow, Ashesh Rambachan and Jesse M. Shapiro

We study the causal interpretation of instrumental variables (IV) estimands of nonlinear, multivariate structural models with respect to rich forms of model misspecification. We focus on guaranteeing that the researcher's estimator is sharp zero consistent, meaning... View Details

Keywords: Mathematical Methods

08 Dec 2016
HBS Seminar

Joel Waldfogel, University of Minnesota, Carlson School of Management

16 Jun 2021
News

From Permanent Work-from-Home Models to Full-Scale Returns, Companies like Amazon, Twitter, and Goldman Sachs Are Pursuing Different Office Policies as Restrictions Ease

December 2010
Article

An Exploration of Technology Diffusion

By: Diego Comin and Bart Hobijn

We develop a model that, at the aggregate level, is similar to the one sector neoclassical growth model, while, at the disaggregate level, has implications for the path of observable measures of technology adoption. We estimate our model using data on the diffusion of... View Details

Keywords: Business Model; Income; Technology Adoption; Macroeconomics; Innovation and Invention