Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(1,422)
- Faculty Publications (101)
- 2019
- Working Paper
Understanding and Overcoming Roadblocks to Environmental Sustainability. Past Roads and Future Prospects
By: Ann-Kristin Bergquist, Shawn A. Cole, John Ehrenfeld, Andrew A. King and Auden Schendler
This working paper examines key barriers to business sustainability discussed at a multidisciplinary conference held at the Harvard Business School in 2018. Drawing on perspectives from both the historical and business literatures, speakers debated the historical... View Details
- December 2018
- Article
Improving Resilience Among Employees High in Depression, Anxiety, and Workplace Distress
By: Allison L. Williams, Acacia C. Parks, Grace Cormier, Julia Stafford and A.V. Whillans
Depression and anxiety are costly for both employees and employers, in terms of direct medical costs as well as costs stemming from lost productive time and missed days at work. Resilience training has been shown to improve workplace functioning for employees, which... View Details
- Article
Applying Random Coefficient Models to Strategy Research: Identifying and Exploring Firm Heterogeneous Effects
By: Juan Alcácer, Wilbur Chung, Ashton Hawk and Gonçalo Pacheco-de-Almeida
Strategy aims at understanding the differential effects of firms’ actions on performance. However, standard regression models estimate only the average effects of these actions across firms. Our paper discusses how random coefficient models (RCMs) may generate new... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Machine Learning for Pattern Discovery in Management Research
Supervised machine learning (ML) methods are a powerful toolkit for discovering robust patterns in quantitative data. The patterns identified by ML could be used as an observation for further inductive or abductive research, but should not be treated as the result of a... View Details
- June 2018
- Case
Verona Group
By: Robert L. Simons and Sarah Abbott
Are a salesperson's struggles her own fault or the result of a problematic job design? Anna George works as a salesperson at Verona Group, a company that designs and wholesales high-end women's apparel. She had spent nearly 20 years in sales with another fashion label... View Details
- June 2018
- Article
Will a Five-Minute Discussion Change Your Mind? A Countrywide Experiment on Voter Choice in France
By: Vincent Pons
This paper provides the first estimate of the effect of door-to-door canvassing on actual electoral outcomes, via a countrywide experiment embedded in François Hollande's campaign in the 2012 French presidential election. While existing experiments randomized... View Details
- February 2018
- Article
Retention Futility: Targeting High-Risk Customers Might Be Ineffective.
By: Eva Ascarza
Companies in a variety of sectors are increasingly managing customer churn proactively, generally by detecting customers at the highest risk of churning and targeting retention efforts towards them. While there is a vast literature on developing churn prediction models... View Details
- September 12, 2017
- Article
What's the Right Kind of Bonus to Motivate Your Sales Force?
By: Doug J. Chung and Das Narayandas
Companies typically compensate their sales force by using some combination of salary, commission, and bonuses, but executives are often unsure which incentives provide the best motivation. Should bonuses be tied to quotas or should they be given unconditionally? Is it... View Details
- August 2017
- Article
Voter Registration Costs and Disenfranchisement: Experimental Evidence from France
By: Céline Braconnier, Jean-Yves Dormagen and Vincent Pons
A large-scale randomized experiment conducted during the 2012 French presidential and parliamentary elections shows that voter registration requirements have significant effects on turnout, resulting in unequal participation. We assigned 20,500 apartments to one... View Details
- July 31, 2017
- Article
A Commitment Contract to Achieve Virologic Suppression in Poorly Adherent Patients with HIV/AIDS
By: Marcella Alsan, John Beshears, Wendy S. Armstrong, James J. Choi, Brigitte C. Madrian, Minh Ly T. Nguyen, Carlos Del Rio, David Laibson and Vincent C. Marconi
Objective: Assess whether a commitment contract informed by behavioral economics leads to persistent virologic suppression among HIV-positive patients with poor antiretroviral therapy (ART) adherence.
Design: Single-center pilot randomized clinical trial and a... View Details
- Article
Beyond the Target Customer: Social Effects in CRM Campaigns
By: Eva Ascarza, Peter Ebbes, Oded Netzer and Matthew Danielson
Customer relationship management (CRM) campaigns have traditionally focused on maximizing the profitability of the targeted customers. The authors demonstrate that in business settings characterized by network externalities, a CRM campaign that is aimed at changing the... View Details
- October 2016
- Article
Looking Across and Looking Beyond the Knowledge Frontier: Intellectual Distance and Resource Allocation in Science
By: Kevin J. Boudreau, Eva Guinan, Karim R. Lakhani and Christoph Riedl
Selecting among alternative innovative projects is a core management task in all innovating organizations. In this paper, we focus on the evaluation of frontier scientific research projects. We argue that the "intellectual distance" between the knowledge embodied in... View Details
- 2017
- Article
The Impact of Training Informal Healthcare Providers in India: A Randomized Controlled Trial
By: Jishnu Das, Abhijit Chowdhury, Reshmaan Hussam and Abhijit Banerjee
Health care providers without formal medical qualifications provide more than 70% of all primary care in rural India. Training these informal providers may be one way to improve the quality of care where few alternatives exist. We report on a randomized controlled... View Details
- September 2016 (Revised July 2018)
- Case
United Airlines: More Out-and-Back Flying?
This case looks at United Airlines when it is facing a decision on whether to shift its aircraft routing to more "out-and-back" routing in order to try to improve its on-time performance. As one of the world's largest airlines, United had a very large fleet and... View Details
Keywords: Service Excellence; Service Management; Service Quality; Service Quality Competition; Services; Airline Industry; Airlines; Operational Complexity; Operational Disruptions; Operational Effectiveness; Operations Improvement; Operations Management; Operations Strategy; Air Transportation; Operations; Service Operations; Service Delivery; Performance Effectiveness; Performance Improvement; Complexity; Air Transportation Industry; United States
- March 2016 (Revised March 2022)
- Teaching Note
Evive Health and Workplace Influenza Vaccinations
By: John Beshears
Evive Health is a company that manages communication campaigns on behalf of health insurance plans and large employers. Using big data techniques and insights from behavioral economics, Evive deploys targeted and effective messages that improve individuals' health... View Details
Keywords: Vaccination; Influenza; Flu Shot; Preventive Care; Health Care; Behavioral Economics; Choice Architecture; Nudge; Experimental Design; Randomized Controlled Trial; RCT; Causal Inference; Health Care and Treatment; Insurance; Health; Consumer Behavior; Health Testing and Trials; Communication Strategy; Insurance Industry; Health Industry
- March 2016
- Case
Evive Health and Workplace Influenza Vaccinations
By: John Beshears
Evive Health is a company that manages communication campaigns on behalf of health insurance plans and large employers. Using big data techniques and insights from behavioral economics, Evive deploys targeted and effective messages that improve individuals' health... View Details
Keywords: Vaccination; Influenza; Flu Shot; Preventive Care; Health Care; Behavioral Economics; Choice Architecture; Nudge; Experimental Design; Randomized Controlled Trial; RCT; Causal Inference; Consumer Behavior; Health Care and Treatment; Health Testing and Trials; Communication Strategy; Health Industry
- 2017
- Working Paper
Will a Five-Minute Discussion Change Your Mind? A Countrywide Experiment on Voter Choice in France
By: Vincent Pons
This paper provides the first estimate of the effect of door-to-door canvassing on actual electoral outcomes, via a countrywide experiment embedded in François Hollande's campaign in the 2012 French presidential election. While existing experiments randomized... View Details
- Article
The Effect of Providing Peer Information on Retirement Savings Decisions
By: John Beshears, James J. Choi, David Laibson, Brigitte C. Madrian and Katherine L. Milkman
Using a field experiment in a 401(k) plan, we measure the effect of disseminating information about peer behavior on savings. Low-saving employees received simplified plan enrollment or contribution increase forms. A randomized subset of forms stated the fraction of... View Details
- 2014
- Article
Delaware's Choice
This article first documents the shift to annual elections of all directors at most U.S. corporations and argues that the alternative of "ineffective" staggered boards would have been more desirable, as a policy matter, but is now a missed opportunity. Using this... View Details
- Article
The (Perceived) Meaning of Spontaneous Thoughts
By: Carey K. Morewedge, Colleen Giblin and Michael I. Norton
Spontaneous thoughts, the output of a broad category of uncontrolled and inaccessible higher-order mental processes, arise frequently in everyday life. The seeming randomness by which spontaneous thoughts arise might give people good reason to dismiss them as... View Details