Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(1,778)
- Faculty Publications (370)
- 2022
- Working Paper
Markups to Financial Intermediation in Foreign Exchange Markets
By: Jonathan Wallen
On average from 2013 to 2020, foreign asset managers in net sold forward 1.1 trillion U.S. dollars. This forward sale of dollars hedges the currency mismatch of foreign investment in U.S. dollar assets. By accommodating this demand, U.S. and European banks earn an... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
Consumer Reviews and Regulation: Evidence from NYC Restaurants
By: Chiara Farronato and Georgios Zervas
We investigate the informativeness of hygiene signals in online reviews, and their effect on consumer choice and restaurant hygiene. We first extract signals of hygiene from Yelp. Among all dimensions that regulators monitor through mandated restaurant inspections, we... View Details
- January 2022 (Revised November 2023)
- Supplement
Uber in China (C): The Cost of Success for Didi
By: William C. Kirby and Noah B. Truwit
On June 30, 2021, ride-hailing giant Didi Chuxing (Didi) raised $4.4 billion in its initial public offering (IPO) on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), the largest IPO of a Chinese company listed on an American exchange since Alibaba raised $25 billion in 2014.... View Details
- January 2022
- Article
Pushed into a Crowd: Repositioning Costs, Resources, and Competition in the RTE Cereal Industry
By: Young Hou and Dennis Yao
This paper exploits a natural experiment involving self-regulation in the ready-to-eat (RTE) breakfast cereal industry to evaluate the performance impact of product repositioning. It then examines how a product's brand equity value declines with repositioning distance... View Details
- 2021
- Chapter
Business Continuity Insurance in the Next Disaster
By: Samuel Gregory Hanson, Adi Sunderam and Eric Zwick
This article draws lessons from the business support policies pursued in the COVID-19
pandemic to guide policy design for the next disaster. We contrast the performance
of the Paycheck Protection Program to the Main Street Lending Program to illustrate
how design... View Details
- October 2021 (Revised February 2023)
- Case
Ant Group (A)
By: Krishna G. Palepu, Feng Zhu, Susie L. Ma and Kerry Herman
In 2004, Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba created Alipay, an app to facilitate payments on its e-commerce sites. As Alibaba grew, so did Alipay, until Alipay spawned its own ecosystem of financial technology products and services under the name of Ant Group. By 2020,... View Details
- October 2021
- Article
Can Self-Regulation Save Digital Platforms?
By: Michael A. Cusumano, Annabelle Gawer and David B. Yoffie
This article explores some of the critical challenges facing self-regulation and the regulatory environment for digital platforms. We examine several historical examples of firms and industries that attempted self-regulation before the Internet. All dealt with similar... View Details
- September 2021 (Revised December 2021)
- Case
Telepass: From Tolling to Mobility Platform
By: Chiara Farronato, Stefano Denicolai and Sarah Mehta
Telepass, until very recently the sole processor of electronic toll payments on Italy’s highways, has ambitions beyond tolling. Since the mid-2010s, the company has been expanding into adjacent services. In 2017, Telepass launched TelepassPay—a mobile payment... View Details
Keywords: Mobile Payment; App; Mobility Services; Analysis; Change; Change Management; Transformation; Transition; Innovation and Invention; Strategy; Information Technology; Mobile and Wireless Technology; Transportation; Transportation Networks; Value; Value Creation; Consumer Behavior; Insurance Industry; Insurance Industry; Insurance Industry; Europe; Italy; Milan
- Article
Regulating Hospital Prices Based on Market Concentration Is Likely to Leave High-Price Hospitals Unaffected
By: Maximilian J. Pany, Michael E. Chernew and Leemore S. Dafny
Concern about high hospital prices for commercially insured patients has motivated several proposals to regulate these prices. Such proposals often limit regulations to highly concentrated hospital markets. Using a large sample of 2017 US commercial insurance claims,... View Details
- Article
Targeting Weather Insurance Markets
By: Anita Mukherjee, Shawn Cole and Jeremy Tobacman
The suitability of insurance products often depends greatly on individual circumstances. This paper examines the challenges of heterogeneity in a relatively new product, weather‐indexed insurance. This index insurance product has been launched in over a dozen... View Details
Keywords: Index Insurance; Labor Markets; Self-insurance; Self-protection; Weather; Insurance; Markets; Household; Risk Management
- August 2021 (Revised September 2022)
- Case
Patch Technology: Making It Easy to Do the Right Thing
By: Tomomichi Amano, Robert J. Dolan and Carol Zhang
In 2021, the growing threat of climate change pushed companies around the world to understand that significant behavioral change was necessary. While many recognized that decreasing emissions was critical, more sophisticated players such as Microsoft began to recognize... View Details
- July 2021 (Revised October 2021)
- Case
Allianz Customer Centricity: Is Simplicity the Way Forward?
By: Eva Ascarza and Emilie Billaud
This case explores the tradeoffs between product personalization and simplicity as companies grow. The case presents an opportunity to understand whether and how each of these approaches enables and/or limits companies’ abilities to provide customer satisfaction while... View Details
- July 2021
- Article
Redistribution through Markets
By: Piotr Dworczak, Scott Duke Kominers and Mohammad Akbarpour
Policymakers frequently use price regulations as a response to inequality in the markets they control. In this paper, we examine the optimal structure of such policies from the perspective of mechanism design. We study a buyer-seller market in which agents have private... View Details
- June 2021
- Case
uBiome
By: Thomas R. Eisenmann and Olivia Graham
uBiome provided clinical tests that sequenced the DNA of human microbiome samples, providing data on health conditions directly to consumers or to prescribing physicians. Founded in 2012, the San Francisco-based startup raised $105 million from top-tier venture capital... View Details
- 2021
- Working Paper
Regulatory Approval and Expanded Market Size
By: Benjamin Berger, Amitabh Chandra and Craig Garthwaite
Regulatory review of new medicines is often viewed as a hindrance to innovation by increasing the hurdle to bring products to market. However, a more complete accounting of regulation must also account for its potential market expanding effects through quality... View Details
- March 2021
- Supplement
Making Impact Investing Markets: IFC (B)
By: Shawn A. Cole, John Masko and T. Robert Zochowski
In 2018, Thailand’s Bank of Ayudhya (known as Krungsri), was considering whether to participate in the first issue of a new financial instrument from the International Finance Corporation (IFC), known as a gender bond. Building on the success of the Green Bond program... View Details
Keywords: Impact Investment; Development Economics; Developing Countries and Economies; Borrowing and Debt; Credit; Equity; Bonds; Financing and Loans; Growth and Development; Emerging Markets; Non-Governmental Organizations; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Financial Instruments; Gender; Financial Services Industry; Thailand
- March 2021
- Article
Active Choice, Implicit Defaults, and the Incentive to Choose
By: John Beshears, James J. Choi, David Laibson and Brigitte C. Madrian
Home-delivered prescriptions have no delivery charge and lower copayments than prescriptions picked up at a pharmacy. Nevertheless, when home delivery is offered on an opt-in basis, the take-up rate is only 6%. We study a program that makes active choice of either home... View Details
- February 2021 (Revised April 2024)
- Case
Shopify: The Conquest for Chinese E-Commerce
By: Jeffrey F. Rayport, Avani Patel, Samantha Lin and Ariel Yang
In mid-2020, Tobias Lütke, CEO of Shopify, faced a critical decision on how to time potential expansion into the China market. Over the prior 15 years, his Canadian software-as-a-service company had grown from a small e-commerce solutions provider to a full service... View Details
Keywords: Timing; Corporate Entrepreneurship; Service Operations; Business Model; Organizational Design; Change Management; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues; Global Strategy; Health Pandemics; Growth Management; Marketing Strategy; Digital Platforms; Alliances; Partners and Partnerships; Opportunities; Internet and the Web; E-commerce; United States; Canada; China
- 2021
- Working Paper
The Health Costs of Cost-Sharing
By: Amitabh Chandra, Evan Flack and Ziad Obermeyer
We use the design of Medicare’s prescription drug benefit program to demonstrate three facts about the health consequences of cost-sharing. First, we show that an as-if-random increase of 33.6% in out-of-pocket price (11.0 percentage points (p.p.) change in... View Details
- January 2021 (Revised March 2022)
- Case
Brigad: The Future of Work
By: Nien-he Hsieh, Elena Corsi and Daniela Beyersdorfer
In 2019 Florent Malbranche, CEO and co-founder of the French tech startup Brigad, pondered the next growth steps. Founded in 2015, Brigad’s objective was two-fold: to help restaurants and bars find qualified staff for punctual shifts, and to make it easier for... View Details