Publications

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June 1994 (Revised August 1994)
Case

Cunard Line Ltd.: Managing Integrated Marketing Communications

By: Stephen A. Greyser

Cunard, the world's oldest luxury line company, is confronted with several key issues involving its marketing and marketing communications strategy. One concerns the balance between image/positioning advertising and short-term-oriented promotional... View Details

Keywords: Advertising Campaigns; Marketing Communications; Marketing Strategy; Product Positioning; Consumer Behavior; Organizational Structure; Identity; Balance and Stability; Shipping Industry

Educators

Purchase

November 2021
Article

A Salient Sugar Tax Decreases Sugary Drink Buying

By: Grant E. Donnelly, Paige Guge, Ryan Howell and Leslie John

Many governments have introduced sugary drink excise taxes to reduce purchasing and consumption of such drinks; however, they do not typically stipulate how such taxes should be communicated at point-of-purchase. Historical, field, and experimental data entailing over... View Details

Keywords: Decision-making; Open Data; Open Materials; Preregistered; Health; Policy; Taxation; Consumer Behavior; Decision Making

June 2019
Article

Debt Traps? Market Vendors and Moneylender Debt in India and the Philippines

By: Dean Karlan, Sendhil Mullainathan and Benjamin Roth

A debt trap occurs when someone takes on a high-interest rate loan and is barely able to pay back the interest, and thus perpetually finds themselves in debt (often by refinancing). Studying such practices is important for understanding financial decision-making of... View Details

Keywords: Borrowing and Debt; Household; Personal Finance; Decision Making; Behavior; India; Philippines

SSRN

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05 Jul 2006
Working Paper Summaries

A Survey-Based Procedure for Measuring Uncertainty or Heterogeneous Preferences in Markets

Keywords: by Pai-Ling Yin; Technology; Web Services

03 Mar 2023
Research & Ideas

When Showing Know-How Backfires for Women Managers

slicing meat, baking bread—they show that they’re willing to roll up their sleeves, but this behavior could be costly to their businesses’ bottom lines. By looking at the everyday activities of women managers, Feldberg’s research offers... View Details

Keywords: by Kara Baskin; Consumer Products; Consumer Products

Article

A 680,000-Person Megastudy of Nudges to Encourage Vaccination in Pharmacies

By: Katherine L. Milkman, Linnea Gandhi, Mitesh S. Patel, Heather N. Graci, Dena M. Gromet, Hung Ho, Joseph S. Kay, Timothy W. Lee, Jake Rothschild, Jonathan E. Bogard, Ilana Brody, Christopher F. Chabris, Edward Chang, Gretchen B. Chapman, Jennifer E. Dannals, Noah J. Goldstein, Amir Goren, Hal Hershfield, Alex Hirsch, Jillian Hmurovic, Samantha Horn, Dean Karlan, Ariella S. Kristal, Cait Lamberton, Michael N. Meyer, Allison H. Oakes, Maurice E. Schweitzer, Maheen Shermohammed, Jaochim H. Talloen, Caleb Warren, Ashley V. Whillans, Kuldeep N. Yadav, Julian J. Zlatev, Ron Berman, Chalanda N. Evans, Rahul Ladhania, Jens Ludwig, Nina Mazar, Sendhil Mullainathan, Christopher K. Snider, Jann Spiess, Eli Tsukayama, Lyle Ungar, Christophe Van den Bulte, Kevin G. Volpp and Angela L. Duckworth

Encouraging vaccination is a pressing policy problem. To assess whether text-based reminders can encourage pharmacy vaccination and what kinds of messages work best, we conducted a megastudy. We randomly assigned 689,693 Walmart pharmacy patients to receive one of 22... View Details

Keywords: Vaccination; Vaccines; Nudges; Communication Strategy; Communication Technology; Consumer Behavior; Health Care and Treatment

29 May 2007
First Look

First Look: May 29, 2007

to extreme, alternative in a choice set. The term extremeness avoidance has been used to describe the reason underlying this phenomenon. In this research, we argue that extremeness avoidance behavior depends on assortment type, with View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

Ray A. Goldberg

A native of North Dakota, Dr. Goldberg received his A.B. from Harvard University in 1948, his MBA from the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration in 1950 and his Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics from the University of Minnesota in 1952.

... View Details

Keywords: agribusiness; agriculture; fast food; food; food processing; forest products; grocery; high technology; information; restaurant; retailing; soft drink; textiles; tobacco; transportation; wholesale; wine

August 2018
Article

The Effect of Graphic Warnings on Sugary-Drink Purchasing

By: Grant Donnelly, Laura Y. Zatz, Daniel Svirsky and Leslie John

Governments have proposed text warning labels to decrease consumption of sugary drinks – a contributor to chronic diseases like diabetes. However, they may be less effective than more evocative, graphic warning labels. We field-tested the effectiveness of graphic... View Details

Keywords: Policy Making; Preferences; Food; Health; Policy; Information; Labels; Consumer Behavior; Decision Making; Performance Effectiveness

18 Jun 2020
Research & Ideas

What Is an "Essential" Purchase for a Low-Income Family?

causes. In 11 experiments, they found that—relative to higher-income earners—people with lower incomes were judged more harshly for what they chose to buy, even when the two groups made identical consumer choices. It's a concept Hagerty... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne

30 May 2018
Research & Ideas

Should Retailers Match Their Own Prices Online and in Stores?

study is the first to look at whether self-matching pays off as a pricing strategy. “When you talk to millennials in particular, you find out they accept that prices don’t have to be the same across channels” The researchers surveyed nearly 500 View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman; Retail

Web

Strategy - Faculty & Research

long-term memberships, but the equilibrium profits are higher when firms offer short-term memberships. Moreover, short-term membership is a Nash equilibrium. Keywords: Competitive Price Discrimination ; Membership ; Dynamic Competition ; Competition ; Price ; View Details

04 Oct 2022
What Do You Think?

Have Managers Underestimated the Need for Face-to-Face Contact?

remotely We can get the job done, but it’s tough to flourish.” Similarly, there is growing evidence that changes in some consumer behaviors occasioned by the pandemic are not all that permanent. While Amazon... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

19 Apr 2016
First Look

April 19, 2016

is “liking” simply a symptom of being fond of a brand? We disentangle these possibilities and find evidence for the latter: brand attitudes and purchasing are predicted by consumers’ preexisting fondness for brands and are the same regardless of when and whether View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

03 Apr 2007
First Look

First Look: April 3, 2007

http://www.hbsp.harvard.edu/b01/en/common/item_detail.jhtml?id=707511 Update: The Music Industry in 2006 Harvard Business School Case 707-531 The global recorded music industry was undergoing a major transition in 2006. Sales had been declining for a decade, and View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

November 2005 (Revised September 2007)
Case

Beijing Hualian

By: David E. Bell and Mary L. Shelman

China's fifth largest domestic retailer faced intensifying competition from Wal-Mart and Carrefour with the opening of China's fast-growing retail market in January 2005. In response, Beijing Hualian developed a new "Family Store" format targeted at the nation's... View Details

Keywords: Marketing Strategy; Product Positioning; Consumer Behavior; Competition; Corporate Strategy; Retail Industry; China

18 Mar 2008
Working Paper Summaries

Modeling Expert Opinions on Food Healthiness: A Nutrition Metric

Keywords: by Jolie Mae Martin, John Leonard Beshears, Katherine Lyford Milkman, Max H. Bazerman & Lisa Sutherland; Retail

June 2017 (Revised May 2019)
Supplement

Kjell and Company: Motivating Salespeople with Incentive Compensation (B)

By: Doug J. Chung

Kjell & Company was a Swedish retail electronics chain founded in 1988 by brothers Marcus, Mikael and Fredrik Dahnelius. The company operated 84 stores, all company-owned, located mainly in the metropolitan areas of Sweden’s most popular cities: Stockholm, Gothemburg... View Details

Keywords: Salesforce Management; Compensation and Benefits; Motivation and Incentives; Change Management; Behavior; Electronics Industry; Sweden

Purchase

2013
Working Paper

Separating Homophily and Peer Influence with Latent Space

By: Joseph P. Davin, Sunil Gupta and Mikolaj Jan Piskorski

We study the impact of peer behavior on the adoption of mobile apps in a social network. To identify social influence properly, we introduce latent space as an approach to control for latent homophily, the idea that "birds of a feather flock together." In a series of... View Details

Keywords: Social Influence; Social Network; Mobile App; Peer Effects; Latent Homophily; Latent Space; Proxy Variables; Familiarity; Behavior; Consumer Behavior; Applications and Software; Social and Collaborative Networks; Mobile and Wireless Technology; Power and Influence; Social Media