Publications

March 2024 (Revised September 2024)
Case

Vineyard Wind Starts Spinning: Overcoming Onshore Challenges to Offshore Wind

By: Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Jacob A. Small

To activate the first wind turbines in the ocean off Martha’s Vineyard eventually supplying clean energy to 400,000 households, Vineyard Wind’s leaders had to navigate the permitting process, numerous delays, and objections from stakeholders in three communities:... View Details

Keywords: Climate Change; Renewable Energy; Joint Ventures; Green Technology; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Massachusetts; Martha's Vineyard; New Bedford; New England

December 2012
Article

On the Efficiency-Fairness Trade-Off

By: Dimitris Bertsimas, Vivek F. Farias and Nikolaos Trichakis

This paper deals with a basic issue: How does one approach the problem of designing the "right" objective for a given resource allocation problem? The notion of what is right can be fairly nebulous; we consider two issues that we see as key: efficiency and fairness. We... View Details

Keywords: Decision Support; Cost vs Benefits; Fairness; Resource Allocation; Performance Efficiency; Air Transportation Industry

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Agency theory, a new model of governance promulgated by academic economists in the 1970s, is behind the idea that corporate managers should make shareholder value their primary concern and that boards should ensure they do. The theory regards shareholders as... View Details

January 2001 (Revised October 2002)
Case

The American Medical Association-Sunbeam Deal (A): Serpent on the Staff Meets Chainsaw Al

By: Ashish Nanda and Kimberly A. Haddad

Facing dwindling membership and looking to increase its revenue, the American Medical Association (AMA) signed an endorsement deal with Sunbeam Corp., a leader in the small home appliance industry, in August 1997. In the deal, the AMA would receive significant... View Details

Keywords: Conflict of Interests; Organizations; Health Care and Treatment; Health Industry; United States

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June 2018
Article

The Power of Workplace Rewards: Using Self-Determination Theory to Understand Why Reward Satisfaction Matters for Workers Around the World

By: Anais Thibault Landry and A.V. Whillans

How can workplace rewards promote employee well-being and engagement? To answer these questions, we utilized self-determination theory to examine whether reward satisfaction predicted employee well-being, job satisfaction, intrinsic motivation, and affective... View Details

Keywords: Workplace; Rewards; Motivation; Employees; Satisfaction; Motivation and Incentives; Welfare

April 2017
Case

The Future of Patent Examination at the USPTO

By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Tarun Khanna and Sarah Mehta

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is the federal government agency responsible for evaluating and granting patents and trademarks. In 2015, the USPTO employed approximately 8,000 patent examiners who granted nearly 300,000 patents to inventors. As of April... View Details

Keywords: Machine Learning; Telework; Collaborating With Unions; Human Resources; Recruitment; Retention; Intellectual Property; Copyright; Patents; Trademarks; Knowledge Sharing; Technology Adoption; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Performance Productivity; Performance Improvement; District of Columbia

13 Jul 2021
Research & Ideas

Outrage Spreads Faster on Twitter: Evidence from 44 News Outlets

to negative information more readily than positive. Known as negativity bias, this has been shown empirically across a variety of contexts. But how that negative information makes people feel and behave is not as View Details

Keywords: by Kristen Senz; Media & Broadcasting

July 2021
Case

Y Combinator

By: John R. Wells

Y Combinator (YC) was a business startup accelerator based in Mountain View, California. Originally founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2005, by 2021, YC listed 2,830 companies amongst its alumni. More than 80% of these companies were still active, had been... View Details

Keywords: Venture Capital; Growth and Development; Business Startups; Decisions; Strategy

September 2012 (Revised September 2015)
Case

Doing Business in Ghana

By: Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Elena Corsi

An entrepreneur considered investing in tomato paste manufacturing in Ghana, an emerging economy, and pondered the opportunities and challenges of investing here. Ghana's economy had been growing over the last decade, reaching a peak of 14.4% growth rate in 2011. Now a... View Details

Keywords: Emergent Countries; Strategy; Opportunity Cost; Emerging Markets; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Ghana

26 Sep 2023
Research & Ideas

Unpacking That Icky Feeling of 'Shopping' for Diverse Job Candidates

the pseudonym ShopCo. Her ethnographic study of the company, which was regarded as progressive and engaged in DEI, is detailed in a new paper in the September issue of Administrative Science Quarterly. A progressive tech firm shuns a... View Details

Keywords: by Kristen Senz

21 Sep 2022
Research & Ideas

You Don’t Have to Quit Your Job to Find More Meaning in Life

It’s a philosophical debate as old as time: What is the secret to leading a meaningful life? For many, the question gained new urgency after years of social distancing and upheaval during the COVID-19 pandemic. After surviving a public... View Details

Keywords: by Shalene Gupta

13 Dec 2022
Research & Ideas

The Color of Private Equity: Quantifying the Bias Black Investors Face

as well as the majority groups.” When a Black- or Hispanic-owned fund performs above average, it is able to raise funds at the same rate as white firms. But if its performance is poor, it is punished more harshly. Lerner View Details

Keywords: by Pamela Reynolds; Financial Services

2016
Article

The Federal Reserve's Balance Sheet as a Financial-Stability Tool

By: Robin Greenwood, Samuel Gregory Hanson and Jeremy C. Stein

We argue that the Federal Reserve should use its balance sheet to help reduce a key threat to financial stability: the tendency for private-sector financial intermediaries to engage in excessive amounts of maturity transformation—i.e., to finance risky assets using... View Details

Keywords: Central Banking; Policy; Risk Management; Public Administration Industry; United States

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10 Feb 2021
Research & Ideas

Has #MeToo Changed How Hollywood Hires?

source with detailed information about movies, casts, and crews, to construct a producer’s past collaborations with Weinstein. The authors looked at 4,188 projects after excluding producers who faced allegations of sexual harassment... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne; Media & Broadcasting

Research Summary

Great Negotiator Study Initiative

By: James K. Sebenius

What can be legitimately be learned from closely studying great negotiators at work? Since 2000, the Program on Negotiation (PON)—an active inter-university consortium mainly comprised of numerous faculty from across... View Details

Research Summary

The Future of MBA Education

David Garvin, together with Srikant Datar and Patrick Cullen, is examining the future of MBA education and the evolving role of business schools. The research has several components: interviews with business school deans and business executives to identify the... View Details

2010
Chapter

Deferred Acceptance Algorithms: History, Theory, Practice

By: Alvin E. Roth

The deferred acceptance algorithm proposed by Gale and Shapley (1962) has had a profound influence on market design, both directly, by being adapted into practical matching mechanisms, and indirectly, by raising new theoretical questions. Deferred acceptance algorithms... View Details

Keywords: Labor; Market Design; Marketplace Matching; Failure; Mathematical Methods

Article

Social Technology: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Improving Care for Older Adults

By: Arthur Kleinman, Hongtu Chen, Sue E. Levkoff, Ann Forsyth, David E. Bloom, Winnie Yip, Tarun Khanna, Conor J. Walsh, David Perry, Ellen W. Seely, Anne S. Kleinman, Yan Zhang, Yuan Wang, Jun Jing, Tianshu Pan, Ning An, Zhenggang Bai, Jiexiu Wang, Qing Liu and Fawwaz Habbal

Population aging is a defining demographic reality of our era. It is associated with an increase in the societal burden of delivering care to older adults with chronic conditions or frailty. How to integrate global population aging and technology development to help... View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Age; Service Delivery; Information Technology; Collaborative Innovation and Invention