Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web (438)
- Faculty Publications (122)
- 2024
- Working Paper
Human-Computer Interactions in Demand Forecasting and Labor Scheduling Decisions
By: Caleb Kwon, Ananth Raman and Jorge Tamayo
We investigate whether corporate officers should grant managers discretion to override AI-driven demand forecasts and labor scheduling tools. Analyzing five years of administrative data from a large grocery retailer using such an AI tool, encompassing over 500 stores,... View Details
V.G. Narayanan
Professor Narayanan is the Thomas D. Casserly, Jr. Professor of Business Administration, and Senior Associate Dean of Executive Education and HBS Online. His research focuses on management accounting with an interest in performance evaluation and incentives... View Details
- 2017
- Working Paper
Economic Uncertainty and Earnings Management
By: Luke C.D. Stein and Charles C.Y. Wang
In the presence of managerial short-termism and asymmetric information about skill and effort provision, firms may opportunistically shift earnings from uncertain to more certain times. We document empirically that when financial markets are less certain about a firm's... View Details
- November 2006
- Article
The Flattening Firm: Evidence from Panel Data on the Changing Nature of Corporate Hierarchies
By: Raghuram G. Rajan and Julie Wulf
Using a detailed database of managerial job descriptions, reporting relationships, and compensation structures in over 300 large U.S. firms, we find that firm hierarchies are becoming flatter. The number of positions reporting directly to the CEO has gone up... View Details
- June 2012 (Revised August 2012)
- Case
MF Global: Where's the Money?
By: Clayton S. Rose, Pamela Chan and Raghav Chopra
When MF Global failed in October of 2011, it was discovered that $1.6 billion of segregated customer assets was missing. Safeguarding these assets was the firm's responsibility, and in the words of one SEC official, its "sacred obligation." What is known about the... View Details
- 14 Oct 2002
- Research & Ideas
The Widening Rift Between Corporations and Society
field questions from HBS Working Knowledge senior editor Martha Lagace in an e-mail interview.Lagace: In The Support Economy, you make the case that managerial capitalism, invented a hundred years ago, desperately needs an overhaul. How... View Details
Keywords: by Martha Lagace
- 2007
- Casebook
Managing School Districts for High Performance: Cases in Public Education Leadership
By: Stacey Childress, Richard F. Elmore, Allen S. Grossman and Susan Moore Johnson
Managing School Districts for High Performance brings together more than twenty case studies and other readings that offer a powerful and transformative approach to advancing and sustaining the work of school improvement. At the center of this work is the... View Details
Managing School Districts for High Performance
Managing School Districts for High Performance brings together more than twenty case studies and other readings that offer a powerful and... View Details- December 2012
- Article
On the Efficiency-Fairness Trade-Off
By: Dimitris Bertsimas, Vivek F. Farias and Nikolaos Trichakis
This paper deals with a basic issue: How does one approach the problem of designing the "right" objective for a given resource allocation problem? The notion of what is right can be fairly nebulous; we consider two issues that we see as key: efficiency and fairness. We... View Details
- 28 Jan 2010
- Working Paper Summaries
Does Product Market Competition Lead Firms To Decentralize?
- August 2010
- Supplement
Batson International, S.A. (C)
By: David F. Hawkins
Senior management must sign a management letter. An internal audit reveals a number of questionable accounting practices (B case). How should senior management respond? View Details
Max H. Bazerman
Max H. Bazerman is Jesse Isidor Straus Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. His recent books... View Details
- Research Summary
Overview
Pushing decision authority downward and increasing employee autonomy have become watchwords for the modern organization. Leaders of contemporary organizations view efforts to replace “command and control” systems with less-hierarchical approaches to organizing as... View Details
- 2011
- Article
Organizational Errors: Directions for Future Research
By: Paul S. Goodman, Rangaraj Ramanujam, John S. Carroll and Amy C. Edmondson
The goal of this paper is to promote research about organizational errors—i.e., the actions of multiple organizational participants that deviate from organizationally specified rules and can potentially result in adverse organizational outcomes. To that end, we advance... View Details
- 2010
- Working Paper
Reversing the Queue: Performance, Legitimacy, and Minority Hiring
By: Andrew Hill and David A. Thomas
Studies of minority hiring have found that poor-performing firms or firms in highly competitive contexts are more likely to hire minority candidates. However, most work has examined hiring for entry and mid-level positions, not senior management. Management positions... View Details
- September–October 2020
- Article
Managing Churn to Maximize Profits
By: Aurelie Lemmens and Sunil Gupta
Customer defection threatens many industries, prompting companies to deploy targeted, proactive customer retention programs and offers. A conventional approach has been to target customers either based on their predicted churn probability or their responsiveness to a... View Details
- June 1992 (Revised March 2006)
- Case
Concordia Casting Company
Describes five years of development in a centralized data processing activity serving a highly decentralized corporation. Data processing manager discovers that a major software system conversion is a full year behind schedule, and subsequently makes several managerial... View Details
- 2019
- Working Paper
Managing Churn to Maximize Profits
By: Aurelie Lemmens and Sunil Gupta
Customer defection threatens many industries, prompting companies to deploy targeted, proactive customer retention programs and offers. A conventional approach has been to target customers either based on their predicted churn probability, or their responsiveness to a... View Details
- 27 Jan 2009
- First Look
First Look: January 27, 2009
automatically consider the potentially dubious motives of agents who cause harm indirectly. Experiment 4 demonstrates an effect of indirect agency on purchase intentions. Download the paper: http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/09-012.pdf Product-Market Competition and... View Details
Keywords: Martha Lagace
- May 2022
- Article
Variance Analysis: New Insights from Health Care Applications
By: Robert S. Kaplan and Susanna Gallani
We use a health care application to illustrate how variance analysis can be used to benchmark costs across similar service delivery sites. Variances for personnel costs, typically the largest cost component in service organizations, are calculated for price, quantity,... View Details