Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(5,161)
- Faculty Publications (1,388)
- 2024
- Working Paper
Who Clears the Market When Passive Investors Trade?
By: Marco Sammon and John J. Shim
We find that firms are the primary sellers of shares when index funds are net buyers, providing shares at a nearly one-for-one rate. Rather than provide liquidity, most demand-side institutions trade in the same direction as index funds, especially over long horizons.... View Details
- July 2024 (Revised January 2025)
- Case
Dynamic Pricing at Wendy's: Where's the Beef?
By: Elie Ofek, Alicia Dadlani and Martha Hostetter
In early 2024, Wendy’s new CEO announced on an earnings call that the company would install digital menus in its US locations so it could begin testing dynamic pricing—changing prices up or down in response to shifts in supply and demand – as well as allow engaging in... View Details
- July 2024
- Case
ZEISS: Commercializing Science
By: Maria P. Roche, Carlota Moniz and Daniela Beyersdorfer
Karl Lamprecht, President and CEO of the ZEISS AG Group, mused on how far ZEISS had come in 175 years of being a pioneer in optics, and how the course he had charted since taking the helm of the company could keep it on track. In his role, he oversaw the four core... View Details
Keywords: Business Model; Business Organization; Decisions; Business Strategy; Competition; Business History; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Independent Innovation and Invention; Disruptive Innovation; Innovation and Management; Innovation Strategy; Technological Innovation; Growth and Development Strategy; Knowledge Sharing; Industry Growth; Monopoly; Organizational Culture; Supply Chain Management; Partners and Partnerships; Risk and Uncertainty; Adaptation; Commercialization; Resource Allocation; Corporate Strategy; Semiconductor Industry; Technology Industry; Germany; Europe
- July 2024
- Article
Acceptance of Automated Vehicles Is Lower for Self than Others
By: Stuti Agarwal, Julian De Freitas, Anya Ragnhildstveit and Carey K. Morewedge
Road traffic accidents are the leading cause of death worldwide for people aged 2–59. Nearly all deaths are due to human error. Automated vehicles could reduce mortality risks, traffic congestion, and air pollution of human-driven vehicles. However, their adoption... View Details
- July, 2024
- Article
Consumer Protection in an Online World: An Analysis of Occupational Licensing
By: Chiara Farronato, Andrey Fradkin, Bradley Larsen and Erik Brynjolfsson
We study the demand and supply implications of occupational licensing using transaction-level data from a large online platform for home improvement services. We find that demand is more responsive to a professional's reviews than to the professional's... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Digital Platforms 2.0: Learnings, Opportunities, and Challenges
By: Shrabastee Banerjee, Ishita Chakraborty, Hana Choi, Hannes Datta, Remi Daviet, Chiara Farronato, Minkyung Kim, Anja Lambrecht, Puneet Manchanda, Aniko Oery, Ananya Sen, Marshall W Van Alstyne, Prasad Vana, Kenneth C Wilbur, Xu Zhang and Bobby Zhou
Platform-based digital ecosystems form the backbone of our interactions with the Internet. Over the past decade, digital ecosystems have witnessed significant growth, both in terms of industry footprint and academic research. Yet, the challenges associated with their... View Details
- July–August 2024
- Article
Doing More with Less: Overcoming Ineffective Long-Term Targeting Using Short-Term Signals
By: Ta-Wei Huang and Eva Ascarza
Firms are increasingly interested in developing targeted interventions for customers with the best response,
which requires identifying differences in customer sensitivity, typically through the conditional average treatment
effect (CATE) estimation. In theory, to... View Details
- July 2024
- Article
How Artificial Intelligence Constrains Human Experience
By: A. Valenzuela, S. Puntoni, D. Hoffman, N. Castelo, J. De Freitas, B. Dietvorst, C. Hildebrand, Y.E. Huh, R. Meyer, M. Sweeney, S. Talaifar, G. Tomaino and K. Wertenbroch
Many consumption decisions and experiences are digitally mediated. As a consequence, consumer behavior is increasingly the joint product of human psychology and ubiquitous algorithms (Braun et al. 2024; cf. Melumad et al. 2020). The coming of age of Large Language... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Navigating Software Vulnerabilities: Eighteen Years of Evidence from Medium and Large U.S. Organizations
By: Raviv Murciano-Goroff, Ran Zhuo and Shane Greenstein
How prevalent are severe software vulnerabilities, how fast do software users respond to the availability of secure versions, and what determines the variance in the installation distribution? Using the largest dataset ever assembled on user updates, tracking server... View Details
- July 2024
- Article
The Passive-Ownership Share Is Double What You Think It Is
By: Alex Chinco and Marco Sammon
Each time a stock gets added to or dropped from a benchmark index, we ask: “How much money would have to be tracking that index to explain the huge spike in rebalancing volume we observe on reconstitution day?” While index funds held 16% of the US stock market in 2021,... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Webmunk: A New Tool for Studying Online Behavior and Digital Platforms
By: Chiara Farronato, Andrey Fradkin and Chris Karr
Understanding the behavior of users online is important for researchers, policymakers, and private companies alike. But observing online behavior and conducting experiments is difficult without direct access to the user base and software of technology companies. We... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
What Makes Players Pay? An Empirical Investigation of In-Game Lotteries
By: Tomomichi Amano and Andrey Simonov
In 2020, gamers spent more than $15 billion on loot boxes, lotteries of virtual items in video
games. Paid loot boxes are contentious. Game producers argue that loot boxes complement
the gameplay and expenditures on loot boxes reflect players’ enjoyment of the game.... View Details
- June 2024
- Case
SnapTravel: Betting on 'Super.com'
By: Reza Satchu and Tom Quinn
This case explores SnapTravel, a travel startup offering discounted hotel rooms, and its founders’ desire to pivot to a “super app” that saved customers money across many different purchase types. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Hussein Fazal and Henry Shi saw SnapTravel... View Details
Keywords: Business Growth and Maturation; Business Plan; Business Startups; Change Management; Disruption; Transformation; Volatility; Customer Focus and Relationships; Customer Value and Value Chain; Decisions; Income; Entrepreneurship; Geographic Scope; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues; Health Pandemics; Surveys; Knowledge Acquisition; Knowledge Use and Leverage; Leading Change; Crisis Management; Goals and Objectives; Risk Management; Consumer Behavior; Game Theory; Risk and Uncertainty; Adaptation; Diversification; Expansion; System Shocks; Accommodations Industry; Technology Industry; Canada; United States; Las Vegas
- June 2024 (Revised August 2024)
- Case
Revlon India's Turnaround: Navigating Online-Offline Decisions Using a Balanced Scorecard
By: Tatiana Sandino and Samuel Grad
Revlon India was founded as a joint venture in 1995, pairing the industrial conglomerate UMG with the global beauty brand Revlon, Inc. to bring international color cosmetics to India. After growing rapidly and pioneering the Beauty Advisor (BA) model in India, the... View Details
Keywords: Balanced Scorecard; Restructuring; Training; Supply Chain Management; Distribution; E-commerce; Business Model; Business Plan; Decision Choices and Conditions; Marketing Strategy; Alignment; Brands and Branding; Negotiation; Joint Ventures; Strategic Planning; Salesforce Management; Competition; Consumer Products Industry; Consumer Products Industry; Consumer Products Industry; India
- June 2024 (Revised September 2024)
- Case
Major League Baseball: Changing the Rules of America's Pastime
By: Stephen A. Greyser, Mac Levin and Brent Schwarz
This case describes the efforts of Major League Baseball (MLB) to make meaningful changes in the rules affecting the ways the game is played. These changes are intended to speed the pace of the game and make it more appealing to younger fans. The principal changes... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Incrementality Representation Learning: Synergizing Past Experiments for Intervention Personalization
This paper introduces Incrementality Representation Learning (IRL), a novel multitask representation learning framework that predicts heterogeneous causal effects of marketing interventions. By leveraging past experiments, IRL efficiently designs and targets... View Details
- June 2024 (Revised June 2025)
- Case
Dylan Mulvaney and Bud Light
By: Jill Avery and Celine Chammas
On April 1, 2023, social media content creator and influencer Dylan Mulvaney recorded a promotional post. It featured a video of herself drinking from a can of Bud Light beer, offering a virtual toast to her followers. Alongside the video, she posted a photograph of a... View Details
- June 2024
- Article
Inflation with COVID Consumption Baskets
By: Alberto Cavallo
The Covid-19 pandemic led to changes in expenditure patterns that introduced significant bias in the measurement of Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation. Using publicly-available data on card transactions, I updated the official CPI weights and re-calculated inflation... View Details
- May 2024
- Case
Naked Wines: The Profit vs. Growth Decision
By: Benjamin C. Esty and Edward A. Meyer
Nick Devlin faced a difficult strategic decision in October 2022. As the CEO of a UK-based subscription business connecting wine drinkers in the US, UK, and Australia with winemakers from around the world (which one journalist called the “Netflix of Wine”), he had to... View Details
Keywords: Profit Vs. Growth; Platform Business; Economies Of Scale; Subscription Business; Wine; Scaling; Racing; Value Creation; Network Effects; Business Startups; Small Business; Financial Management; Financial Strategy; Growth Management; Business Strategy; Competitive Advantage; Expansion; Profit; E-commerce; Growth and Development Strategy; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Food and Beverage Industry; United States; Australia; United Kingdom
- May 20, 2024
- Article
Porter’s Five Forces and Competitive Advantage in Web3
By: Scott Duke Kominers and Liang Wu
Competitive strategy — the art of crafting and executing plans to achieve an advantageous position in the market — is integral to any business, and especially relevant for platforms because it determines their ability to achieve network effects and scale. But web3... View Details