Consumer Finance - Publications - Faculty & Research

01 Dec 2008
News

No Easy Fix for the Financial Crisis

apart, put in little subsets, and sold as a whole variety of different securities. And no one knew what they had. At that point government had stepped aside, had genuflected at the altar of the market as it relates to our housing View Details

Keywords: Roger Thompson;Martha Lagace; deregulation; moral hazard; the middle class; Finance

01 Mar 2014
News

Innovation: Crowdfunding College Costs

years, including health care and consumer goods," he says. "If we don't think of new ways to finance and save for school today, we're going to be in a world of hurt 15 years from now." —Julia Hanna View Details

Keywords: Hanna, Julia; Gradsave; crowdfunding; Finance; Finance; Finance

11 Dec 2006
Research & Ideas

Fixing Price Tag Confusion

The price tag is evolving. It wasn't long ago that potential buyers had only to contemplate a single figure on a price tag—Mattress $799. But increasingly consumers are being presented with "partitioned" prices. Look at your monthly cable... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Retail

22 Feb 2022
News

Savings and Loam

Illustration by James Steinberg Illustration by James Steinberg Picture today’s conscious consumer pulling on a fresh organic cotton tee shirt, then driving their hybrid or electric vehicle to the grocery store to pack reusable shopping... View Details

Keywords: Jen McFarland Flint; Finance; Finance

Article

Households' Willingness to Pay for 'Green' Goods: Evidence from Patagonia's Introduction of Organic Cotton Sportswear

By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell, Michael Crooke, Forest L. Reinhardt and Vishal Vasishth

To shed light on individuals' willingness to pay for "green" goods (i.e., goods that are supposed to have lower adverse environmental impacts either in production or in use), we study data from the introduction by Patagonia, Inc., of organic cotton sportswear in the... View Details

Keywords: Spending; Consumer Behavior; Environmental Sustainability; Consumer Products Industry

Citation

Find at Harvard

12 Apr 2023
News

Step Change

Subscribe on iTunes Subscribe on Spotify More Skydeck episodes Hi, my name is Julia Hanna. I'm a writer and editor for the HBS Alumni Bulletin. In 2019, I met Egyptian alumna Amal Enan (MBA 2014) when she was on campus for her 5th reunion. Enan had already held a... View Details

Keywords: Julia Hanna; entrepreneurship; women; venture capital; Egypt; developing economies; Finance

15 Dec 2014
Research & Ideas

Deconstructing the Price Tag

When a company sets a price for a product, shoppers typically have no idea what it costs to produce that item. But it turns out that consumers reward efforts to lay out these figures—to deconstruct the price tag. In fact, new research... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman; Retail

09 Dec 2015
Research Event

How Do You Predict Demand and Set Prices For Products Never Sold Before?

in a digitally-transformed economy. “All of these decisions would be easy to make if I knew what consumer demand will be. The problem is that I have a lot of uncertainty in demand” All retailers face tricky tactical decisions related to... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Retail; Apparel & Accessories

01 Jun 2011
News

Alumni Books

Alchemists of Loss: How Modern Finance and Government Intervention Crashed the Financial System by Kevin Dowd and Martin Hutchinson (MBA ’73) (Wiley) The authors discuss modern finance as a U.S. invention,... View Details

Keywords: Finance; Finance; Finance; Finance; Finance

Philip Lehman

Lehman was responsible for forming a profitable alliance with Goldman, Sachs that marked the beginning of a new type of investment house. Together they managed 114 negotiated offerings for 56 issuers. Their premiere interest was on the View Details

Keywords: Finance

Amadeo Peter Giannini

Giannini set up a holding company called Transamerica and purchased banks throughout New York, Washington, Arizona, Oregon and Nevada. Giannini was a pioneer in offering consumer installment loans on real estate, used cars, and home... View Details

Keywords: Finance

01 Sep 2005
News

Making History, Starting Over

the time the go-go ’90s rolled around, Apax was poised for spectacular growth. The firm’s European funds, which focused on telecommunications, IT, retail and consumer goods, media, health care, and financial/business services, returned an... View Details

Keywords: Roger Thompson; Finance

01 Jun 2018
News

The Evolution of Modern Pricing Models

models—we need to go back to when consumers started paying attention to pricing online. The internet becomes widespread starting in 1994, and suddenly you can know the price of something with very minimal effort. And so companies needed... View Details

07 May 2018
Research & Ideas

Why Online Retailers Should Hide Their Best Discounts

to adapt it to an online environment,” says Ngwe. Their study gauges the effect of so-called search frictions that make it harder to find discounted items or require additional clicks by consumers to find bargains. “We want to see how... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Retail

01 Sep 2020
News

We Rise

What Barna wasn’t fully prepared for, though, was the additional obstacles that came from fundraising while female. “Trying to explain the needs and consumer behavior of women buying beauty products to investors who are predominantly... View Details

Keywords: April White; Finance

30 Sep 2013
Research & Ideas

Do Mergers Hurt Product Quality?

There's a lot of worry afoot whenever companies merge. Wall Street worries about the stock price. Employees worry about potential job cuts. And consumers worry about the fate of their favorite products: Whither the price and the quality?... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Consumer Products

01 Sep 2006
News

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