Publications

November–December 2021
Article

Does Gender Matter? The Effect of Management Responses on Reviewing Behavior

By: Davide Proserpio, Isamar Troncoso and Francesca Valsesia

We study the effect of management responses on the reviewing behavior of self-identified female and male reviewers. Using data from Tripadvisor, we show that after hotels begin to respond to reviews, the probability that a negative review comes from a self-identified... View Details

Keywords: Word Of Mouth; Online Reviews; Management Responses; E-commerce; Gender; Prejudice and Bias; Digital Platforms; Customers

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February 2019
Case

Halliday's OASIS

By: Scott Duke Kominers and Nicole Tempest Keller

Wade Watts has won control of the OASIS – a futuristic, immersive virtual reality game world. He must decide on rules, rights, and marketplace design, balancing the founding principles of the OASIS with the platform’s potentially negative externalities. View Details

Keywords: Managing Markets; Corporate Responsibility; Virtual Reality; Digital Platforms; Management; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Social Media; United States

01 Sep 2017
News

Read All About It: Journalism Can Be Profitable

(above: photo by Mary Rajkumar/Mint/Getty Images) When the New York Times introduced its paywall in 2011, few people believed that readers would pay for the news online. Today, the newspaper has more than 1.6 million digital subscribers—a... View Details

Keywords: April White; New York Times; newspapers; Google; Wirecutter; social media; Facebook; News, Library, Internet, and Other Services; Information

January 2018 (Revised February 2018)
Technical Note

Making Markets

By: Thomas R. Eisenmann and Scott Duke Kominers

Explains how to identify and capitalize on marketplace design opportunities. Defines markets and marketplaces and describes the basic functions of each. Discusses attributes (e.g., heterogeneity of participants' preferences and asymmetry in available information) that... View Details

Keywords: Marketplaces; Two-Sided Markets; Entrepreneurship; Market Design; Digital Platforms; Marketplace Matching; Market Participation; Market Transactions; Market Entry and Exit; Digital Platforms; Auctions

2016
Working Paper

Controlling Versus Enabling

By: Andrei Hagiu and Julian Wright

Revenue sharing between principals and agents is commonly used to balance double-sided moral hazard. We provide a theory of how, when such revenue-sharing is optimal, a principal allocates control rights over decisions that either party could make. We show that the... View Details

Keywords: Control Rights; Decision Authority; Employment; Independent Contractors; Organizational Theory; Digital Platforms; Governance Controls; Ethics; Vertical Integration

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February 2018 (Revised December 2019)
Case

Rise of the Drones: Identified Technologies

By: Andy Wu and George Gonzalez

The founder and CEO of Identified Technologies, a Pittsburgh-based drone software and services company, faces a dilemma when San Francisco–based DroneDeploy begins to disrupt the industry with its drone software platform. Identified Technologies needs to consider... View Details

Keywords: Applications and Software; Digital Platforms; Disruption; Network Effects; Computer Industry; Web Services Industry; Pittsburgh; San Francisco

January 2011 (Revised June 2011)
Case

Intellectual Property Intermediaries

By: Andrei Hagiu

During the past 5 to 10 years, several different intermediation business models have emerged for the intellectual property (IP) market. This note describes the most prominent ones: non-practicing entities (or patent trolls), defensive patent aggregators, online IP... View Details

Keywords: Business Model; Intellectual Property; Auctions; Digital Platforms; Information Technology; Service Industry

14 Aug 2019
Sharpening Your Skills

The Manager's Guide to Leveraging Disruption

one of the forces that threatens established companies can also be a source of salvation: disruptive change. How to Be a Digital Platform Leader The most valuable companies in the world have one thing in... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

Web

Catherine Yeo | MBA

a mobile game to learn new vocabulary, a task they struggled with in English classes. From that moment on, I recognized the power of technology in solving community problems. My experience organizing ten hackathons for 6,000+ young innovators globally and co-founding a... View Details

06 Dec 2021
News

Digitalization: The Key to the Future of HBS

“In the century ahead, our capabilities in digital are going to be critical for all aspects of what the School does.” —Professor Karim Lakhani Digital Task Force Chair “In the century ahead, our capabilities... View Details

Keywords: April White

September 2000 (Revised October 2006)
Teaching Note

Wildfire Communications, Inc. (A) and (B) (TN)

By: Joseph B. Lassiter III and John T. Gourville

Teaching Note for (9-396-305) and (9-396-306). View Details

Keywords: Business Startups; Performance Effectiveness; Business Processes; Digital Platforms; Business Strategy; Markets

01 Mar 2024
News

What is Web3?

over their own digital assets typically secured and facilitated by blockchain technology in a decentralized manner. Unlike in traditional centralized systems where ownership is often determined and managed by intermediaries such as large... View Details

20 Apr 2020
News

To Build Connection in Quarantine, Clubs Go Virtual

organizations face in designing and implementing effective digital platforms that support a range of functions and stakeholders. “We talked about what it really means to transition to View Details

Keywords: Margie Kelley

25 Aug 2022
News

Labs Enable Large-scale Research

HARVARD RESEARCH LABS LAUNCHED IN 2022 Research Labs Topical Focus Principal Investigators Blackbox Lab How do we ensure that Black entrepreneurs and creative professionals leverage digital technologies and View Details

01 Dec 2014
News

@Soldiers Field

arm might lift a barbell.” The 229 RCs who signed up for lunch roulette were connected with three perfectly randomized HBS classmates. Hosted by the Student Association and the Digital Initiative, the project used an open source computer... View Details

Keywords: John Shad (MBA 1949); Educational Services

March 2018 (Revised July 2018)
Case

Cadre

By: Thomas R. Eisenmann, Scott Duke Kominers and David Lane

Late in 2017, CEO Ryan Williams and his team debated whether Cadre should become not only a technology-enabled investment manager, but also an online trading exchange providing high levels of liquidity for investors in commercial real estate (CRE) equity. Cadre was a... View Details

Keywords: ＂Cadre,＂; Entrepreneurship; Market Design; Digital Platforms; Strategy; Internet and the Web; Private Equity; Financial Services Industry; Real Estate Industry; United States

August 2013
Technical Note

Raising the Level of Abstraction

By: Willy Shih

This technical note discusses abstraction as a way of generalizing a process or component for wider application. By hiding complexity inside a module, abstraction enables system designers to think at a higher level. This lowers entry barriers to using (and reusing) a... View Details

Keywords: Abstraction; Modularity; Commercialization; Information Technology; Information Infrastructure; Information Technology; Applications and Software; Digital Platforms; United States; Asia; Europe

November 1999 (Revised June 2000)
Case

VerticalNet (www.verticalnet.com)

By: Das Narayandas

VerticalNet, a leading creator of targeted business-to-business vertical trade communities on the Internet, is trying to expand its model to facilitate e-commerce. Mark Walsh, the CEO of VerticalNet, has to decide how far he can extend the firm's business model without... View Details

Keywords: Business Model; Decisions; Digital Platforms; Expansion; Internet and the Web