Publications
Publications
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(5,243)
- Faculty Publications (989)
- September 2023
- Module Note
Live Case Exercise for Financial Reporting
By: Tatiana Sandino and Marshal Herrmann
Harvard Business School employs the case method as a cornerstone of its pedagogy, providing students with opportunities to engage in discussions related to difficult or contentious decisions confronted by real-world organizations. In this “live case,” we depart from... View Details
- September 2023 (Revised January 2024)
- Case
RightHand Robotics: Choosing the First Market
By: Thomas R. Eisenmann and Stacy Straaberg
In early 2015, RightHand Robotics’s (RHR) leadership faced a set of decisions in commercializing the startup’s robotic picking solution. RHR’s central product was the RightPick integrated robotic picking system which featured a robotic arm, a three-fingered robotic... View Details
- September 2023
- Article
A Pull versus Push Framework for Reputation
Reputation is a powerful driver of human behavior. Reputation systems incentivize 'actors' to take reputation-enhancing actions, and 'evaluators' to reward actors with positive reputations by preferentially cooperating with them. This article proposes a reputation... View Details
- September–October 2023
- Article
Interpretable Matrix Completion: A Discrete Optimization Approach
By: Dimitris Bertsimas and Michael Lingzhi Li
We consider the problem of matrix completion on an n × m matrix. We introduce the problem of interpretable matrix completion that aims to provide meaningful insights for the low-rank matrix using side information. We show that the problem can be... View Details
Keywords: Mathematical Methods
- 2023
- Article
On the Impact of Actionable Explanations on Social Segregation
By: Ruijiang Gao and Himabindu Lakkaraju
As predictive models seep into several real-world applications, it has become critical to ensure that individuals who are negatively impacted by the outcomes of these models are provided with a means for recourse. To this end, there has been a growing body of research... View Details
- August 2023
- Case
Constellation Pharmaceuticals: Corporate Development at a Novel Therapeutic Company
By: Satish Tadikonda and Brad Prosek
Constellation Pharmaceuticals was a company focused on epigenetic therapies for cancer patients. Despite a promising start and an early deal with a leading biopharma company, the company weathered twin setbacks in the end of a major research collaboration and the... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
How People Use Statistics
By: Pedro Bordalo, John J. Conlon, Nicola Gennaioli, Spencer Yongwook Kwon and Andrei Shleifer
We document two new facts about the distributions of answers in famous statistical problems: they are i) multi-modal and ii) unstable with respect to irrelevant changes in the problem. We offer a model in which, when solving a problem, people represent each hypothesis... View Details
- August 2023
- Case
Reimagining Hindustan Unilever (A)
By: Sunil Gupta and Rachna Tahilyani
In the fall of 2019, the CEO and MD of Hindustan Unilever (HUL), India’s largest fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) firm, is wondering what to do about their experiments to digitize distribution. Despite three years of intense efforts, their apps to empower retailers... View Details
- August 2023
- Supplement
Reimagining Hindustan Unilever (B)
By: Sunil Gupta and Rachna Tahilyani
In April 2023, as the CEO and MD of Hindustan Unilever (HUL), India’s largest fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) firm, prepared to hand over the firm’s reins to his successor, he proudly reflected on the last decade. His quest to digitally transform HUL into an... View Details
- August 2023 (Revised August 2023)
- Case
Sky Therapeutics: Innovating in Digital Therapeutics
By: Satish Tadikonda, Olivia Reszczynski and William Marks
Shad Faraz and Alex Youssef were intrigued by the opportunities in the relatively new area of Digital Therapeutics. Despite initial successes, early entrants had struggled with reimbursement and revenue-predictability challenges. However, venture investors still... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Algorithm Failures and Consumers' Response: Evidence from Zillow
By: Isamar Troncoso, Runshan Fu, Nikhil Malik and Davide Proserpio
In November 2021, Zillow announced the closure of its iBuyer business. Popular media largely attributed this to a failure of its proprietary forecasting algorithm. We study the response of consumers to Zillow’s iBuyer business closure. We show that after the iBuyer... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Anti-Political-Establishment Citizens: An In-Depth Study from Two Latin American Countries
By: Loreto Cox and Natalia Garbiras-Diaz
Building on citizens’ animosity towards politicians, anti-establishment parties and
candidates have achieved significant electoral success. While recent studies examine
the supply-side, we know little about what drives citizens’ anti-establishment sentiments and how... View Details
- July 2023
- Article
Before or After? The Effects of Payment Decision Timing in Pay-What-You-Want Contexts
By: Raghabendra P. KC, Vincent Mak and Elie Ofek
We study how payment decision timing—before versus after product delivery—influences consumer payment under pay-what-you-want pricing. We focus on situations where there is minimal change in consumer uncertainty regarding the product before versus after receiving it.... View Details
- July 11, 2023
- Article
How Reputation Does (and Does Not) Drive People to Punish Without Looking
By: Jillian J. Jordan and Nour S. Kteily
Punishing wrongdoers can confer reputational benefits, and people sometimes punish without careful consideration. But are these observations related? Does reputation drive people to people to “punish without looking”? And if so, is this because unquestioning... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
The Complexity of Economic Decisions
By: Xavier Gabaix and Thomas Graeber
We propose a theory of the complexity of economic decisions. Leveraging a macroeconomic framework of production functions, we conceptualize the mind as a cognitive economy, where a task’s complexity is determined by its composition of cognitive operations. Complexity... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Evaluation and Learning in R&D Investment
By: Alexander P. Frankel, Joshua L. Krieger, Danielle Li and Dimitris Papanikolaou
We examine the role of spillover learning in shaping the value of exploratory versus incremental
R&D. Using data from drug development, we show that novel drug candidates generate more
knowledge spillovers than incremental ones. Despite being less likely to reach... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Design-Based Confidence Sequences: A General Approach to Risk Mitigation in Online Experimentation
By: Dae Woong Ham, Michael Lindon, Martin Tingley and Iavor Bojinov
Randomized experiments have become the standard method for companies to evaluate the performance of new products or services. In addition to augmenting managers’ decision-making, experimentation mitigates risk by limiting the proportion of customers exposed to... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Setting Gendered Expectations? Recruiter Outreach Bias in Online Tech Training Programs
By: Jacqueline N. Lane, Karim R. Lakhani and Roberto Fernandez
Competence development in digital technologies, analytics, and artificial intelligence is increasingly important to all types of organizations and their workforce. Universities and corporations are investing heavily in developing training programs, at all tenure... View Details
- May–June 2023
- Article
Need for Speed: The Impact of In-Process Delays on Customer Behavior in Online Retail
By: Santiago Gallino, Nil Karacaoglu and Antonio Moreno
The impact of delays has been widely studied in various offline services. The focus of this study is online services, and we explore the impact of in-process delays—measured by website speed—on customer behavior. We leverage novel retail and website speed data to... View Details
- May 2023
- Article
Political Ideology and International Capital Allocation
By: Elisabeth Kempf, Mancy Luo, Larissa Schäfer and Margarita Tsoutsoura
Does investors' political ideology shape international capital allocation? We provide evidence from two settings—syndicated corporate loans and equity mutual funds—to show ideological alignment with foreign governments affects the cross-border capital allocation by... View Details