Publications
Publications
Show Results For
- All HBS Web
(6,384)
- Faculty Publications (1,877)
Costing
→
- March 2016 (Revised March 2022)
- Teaching Note
Express Scripts: Promoting Prescription Drug Home Delivery (A) and (B)
By: John Beshears
The pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) sector processes prescription drug claims on behalf of companies that offer a prescription drug benefit to their employees. The case associated with this teaching note follows Bob Nease, chief scientist at Express Scripts, as he... View Details
Keywords: Pharmaceuticals; Prescription Drugs; Pharmacy Benefit Manager; PBM; Healthcare; Behavioral Economics; Choice Architecture; Active Choice; Service Delivery; Decision Choices and Conditions; Consumer Behavior; Distribution Channels; Health Care and Treatment; Service Industry; Pharmaceutical Industry
- March 2016
- Article
The Cost of Friendship
By: Paul A. Gompers, Vladimir Mukharlyamov and Yuhai Xuan
We investigate how personal characteristics affect people's desire to collaborate and whether this attraction enhances or detracts from performance in venture capital. We find that venture capitalists who share the same ethnic, educational, or career background are... View Details
- Article
Value-based Healthcare: Implications for Thyroid Cancer
By: A.K. Ying, T.W. Feeley and M. E. Porter
Today's delivery of care to thyroid cancer patients is complex, and costly, with uneven outcomes that can be improved. The incidence of thyroid cancer is rising and requires coordinated, multidisciplinary care with high volume centers that is not always available in... View Details
- February 2016
- Case
Express Scripts: Promoting Prescription Drug Home Delivery (A)
By: John Beshears, Patrick Rooney and Jenny Sanford
The pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) sector processes prescription drug claims on behalf of companies that offer a prescription drug benefit to their employees. This case follows Bob Nease, Chief Scientist at Express Scripts, as he considers methods to promote home... View Details
Keywords: Pharmaceuticals; Prescription Drugs; Pharmacy Benefit Manager; PBM; Healthcare; Behavioral Economics; Choice Architecture; Active Choice; Service Delivery; Decision Choices and Conditions; Health Care and Treatment; Order Taking and Fulfillment; Compensation and Benefits; Pharmaceutical Industry
- February 2016 (Revised March 2022)
- Case
Express Scripts: Promoting Prescription Drug Home Delivery (B)
By: John Beshears, Patrick Rooney and Jenny Sanford
The pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) sector processes prescription drug claims on behalf of companies that offer a prescription drug benefit to their employees. This case follows Bob Nease, Chief Scientist at Express Scripts, as he considers methods to promote home... View Details
- 2015
- Working Paper
Staggered Boards and Shareholder Value: A Reply to Amihud and Stoyanov
By: Alma Cohen and Charles C.Y. Wang
In a paper published in the Journal of Financial Economics in 2013, we provided evidence that market participants perceive staggered boards to be on average value-reducing. In a recent response paper, Amihud and Stoyanov (2015) “contest” our results. They... View Details
- February 2016 (Revised May 2016)
- Case
Astroscale, Space Debris, and Earth's Orbital Commons
By: Matthew Weinzierl, Angela Acocella and Mayuka Yamazaki
An engineer and technology entrepreneur, Nobu Okada, had turned a mid-life crisis into a bold—some would say quixotic—quest to prevent a tragedy of the commons at the global scale. Namely, Okada believed the accumulation of debris in near-Earth orbital space posed a... View Details
- Article
Third-party Punishment as a Costly Signal of Trustworthiness
By: Jillian J. Jordan, Moshe Hoffman, Paul Bloom and David G. Rand
Third-party punishment (TPP), in which unaffected observers punish selfishness, promotes cooperation by deterring defection. But why should individuals choose to bear the costs of punishing? We present a game theoretic model of TPP as a costly signal of... View Details
- February 2016 (Revised March 2019)
- Case
Suncor and the Future of Oil Sands
Suncor, Canada's largest producer of "oil sands," faces a host of issues involving prices, costs, and the environment. The Government of Canada recently put an explicit limit on carbon emissions from oil sands and a price on carbon. Suncor, which produces more than... View Details
- February 2016 (Revised May 2016)
- Case
Blue Origin, NASA, and New Space (A)
By: Matthew Weinzierl and Angela Acocella
Jeff Bezos, six years after starting a revolution in retailing with Amazon.com, turned his life-long passion for space into a start-up, Blue Origin. Blue (as it was called) was a part of the New Space industry, a collection of startup aerospace engineering companies... View Details
- February 2016 (Revised July 2017)
- Case
Leadership and Independence at the Federal Reserve
By: David Moss and Marc Campasano
“From the Great Depression, to the stagflation of the seventies, to the current economic crisis caused by the housing bubble, every economic downturn suffered by this country over the past century can be traced to Federal Reserve policy.” Ron Paul, a Republican from... View Details
- February 2016 (Revised January 2017)
- Case
Bidding for Finansbank
By: David Scharfstein and Esel Çekin
Because of the deepening Greek crisis, in October 2015, National Bank of Greece (NBG) was required to sell one of its most valuable assets, Finansbank, the eighth largest Turkish bank. There were three potential buyers: Garanti Bank, Turkey's second largest private... View Details
- 2017
- Working Paper
Optimal Tilts: Combining Persistent Characteristic Portfolios
By: Malcolm Baker, Ryan Taliaferro and Terry Burnham
We examine the optimal weighting of four tilts in US equity markets from 1968 through 2014. We define a “tilt” as a characteristic-based portfolio strategy that requires relatively low annual turnover. This is a continuum, with small size, a very persistent... View Details
- 2016
- Working Paper
Paying (for) Attention: The Impact of Information Processing Costs on Bayesian Inference
By: Scott Duke Kominers, Xiaosheng Mu and Alexander Peysakhovich
Human information processing is often modeled as costless Bayesian inference.
However, research in psychology shows that attention is a computationally costly and potentially limited resource. We study a Bayesian individual for whom computing posterior beliefs is... View Details
- February 2016
- Article
Positive and Normative Judgments Implicit in U.S. Tax Policy, and the Costs of Unequal Growth and Recessions
By: Benjamin B. Lockwood and Matthew Weinzierl
Calculating the welfare implications of changes to economic policy or shocks to the economy requires economists to decide on a normative criterion. One way to make that decision is to elicit the relevant moral criteria from real-world policy choices, converting a... View Details
- January 2016
- Teaching Note
Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc.
By: Sunil Gupta and Margaret Rodriguez
In September 2010, Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. (T2) reported an unexpectedly high third quarter profit of $5.92 million, driven largely by the success of its video game, Red Dead Redemption (which sold over 6.9 million copies since launching in May). Red Dead... View Details
- 2016
- Chapter
Deriving an Optimally Deceptive Policy in Two-Player Iterated Games
By: Elisabeth Paulson and Christopher Griffin
We formulate the problem of determining an optimally deceptive strategy in a repeated game framework. We assume that two players are engaged in repeated play. During an initial time period, Player 1 may deceptively train his opponent to expect a specific strategy. The... View Details
- January 2016
- Article
Making Do with Less: Working Harder During Recessions
By: Edward P. Lazear, Kathryn L. Shaw and Christopher Stanton
Why did productivity rise during recent recessions? One possibility is that average worker quality increased. A second is that each incumbent worker produced more. The second effect is termed "making do with less." Using data from 2006 to 2010 on individual worker... View Details
- 2019
- Working Paper
Who Should Select New Employees, Headquarters or the Unit Manager? Consequences of Centralizing Hiring at a Retail Chain
By: Carolyn Deller and Tatiana Sandino
We examine how changing the allocation of hiring decision rights in a multiunit organization affects employee-firm match quality, contingent on a unit’s circumstances. Our research site, a US retail chain, switched from a decentralized hiring model (hiring by business... View Details
- December 2015
- Case
Nextel Peru: Emerging Market Cost of Capital
By: Luis M. Viceira and Joel L. Heilprin