Publications

April 1996 (Revised June 2001)
Case

Partners HealthCare System, Inc. (B): Cardiac Care Improvement

By: Gary P. Pisano and Maryam Golnaraghi

Explores the challenges confronting the CEO at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in the wake of radical changes in the health care environment. As pressures have risen for cost containment in health care, the hospital has embarked on a series of reengineering efforts to... View Details

Keywords: Consolidation; Health Care and Treatment; Mergers and Acquisitions; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Change Management; Management Teams; Operations; Innovation and Invention; Cost Management; Health Industry; Massachusetts

Educators

Spring 2013
Article

Salience in Quality Disclosure: Evidence from the U.S. News College Rankings

By: Michael Luca and Jonathan Smith

How do rankings affect demand? This paper investigates the impact of college rankings, and the visibility of those rankings, on students' application decisions. Using natural experiments from U.S. News and World Report College Rankings, we present two main... View Details

Keywords: Rank and Position; Demand and Consumers; Quality; Decisions; Newspapers; United States

29 Mar 2022
Book

5 Qualities That Help Companies Thrive for Decades—Even Centuries

use business to improve society comes from “some moral compass and a calling of, ‘I really have to do this,’” says Khanna. “This translates into leaving money on the table in the short term. But that money on the table turns out to buy an... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

2012
Discussion Paper

Labor Productivity and Quality Change in Singapore: Achievements in 1974-2011 and Prospects for the Next Two Decades

By: Koji Nomura and Tomomichi Amano

Labor productivity growth in Singapore that has grown at a rate of over 3.0 percent per year since 1970s considerably slowed down to 0.5 percent on average per annum in the latter half of the 2000s. The purpose of this paper is to ask, first, to what extent Singapore’s... View Details

Keywords: Labor; Performance Productivity; Quality; Economic Growth; Singapore

November 1989 (Revised January 1990)
Case

Paul Revere Insurance Co. (C): Competing For the Baldrige Award--The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award Exercise

The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award requires firms to submit applications that conform to a rigorous quality-assessment system. This case consists of several parts of a service company's 1988 Baldrige application together with material from the Malcolm Baldrige... View Details

Keywords: Quality; Performance Improvement; Performance Evaluation

Educators

14 Dec 2011
Research & Ideas

The New Measures for Improving Nonprofit Performance

Development, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, and their counterparts in other OECD countries are all involved. Several years ago the various ministries of developed and developing countries got together to identify how to improve the... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Hanna

01 Nov 2021
What Do You Think?

How Long Does It Take to Improve an Organization’s Culture?

University (completed before the outset of the pandemic) concluded that a strong corporate culture fosters better execution, reduction in agency cost, and therefore, higher productivity and creativity. Of the many executives surveyed, 92 percent thought that View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

October 2008
Article

The Effect of Macro Information Environment Change on the Quality of Management Earnings Forecasts

The 1990s were characterized by substantial increases in the performance of and investor reliance on financial analysts. Because managers possess superior private information and issue forecasts to align investors' expectations with their own, we predict that... View Details

Keywords: Information; Performance Expectations; Earnings Management; Financial Reporting; Forecasting and Prediction

31 Aug 2009
Research & Ideas

Why Competition May Not Improve Credit Rating Agencies

competition is really the right medicine. "Competition in the ratings industry has been increasing, and there have been calls for yet more competition. Whether competition is likely to reduce quality or View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Financial Services

27 Sep 2011
Working Paper Summaries

Salience in Quality Disclosure: Evidence from the U.S. News College Rankings

Keywords: by Michael Luca & Jonathan Smith; Education; Information; Publishing

Article

Manage the Suppliers That Could Harm Your Brand: Know When to Avoid, Engage, or Drop Them

By: Jodi L Short and Michael W. Toffel

The pandemic has placed a new spotlight on working conditions in factories that supply global companies. To avert problems, firms often impose codes of conduct on their suppliers and perform audits to assess compliance. Do these measures help identify unethical... View Details

Register to Read

September 2016 (Revised July 2018)
Case

United Airlines: More Out-and-Back Flying?

By: Ryan W. Buell, Willy Shih and Mike Toffel

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

Educators

January 2018
Article

Big Data and Big Cities: The Promises and Limitations of Improved Measures of Urban Life

By: Edward L. Glaeser, Scott Duke Kominers, Michael Luca and Nikhil Naik

New, "big" data sources allow measurement of city characteristics and outcome variables at higher frequencies and finer geographic scales than ever before. However, big data will not solve large urban social science questions on its own. Big data has the most value for... View Details

Keywords: Analytics and Data Science; Urban Scope; City

February 2012
Article

CEO Relational Leadership and Strategic Decision Quality in Top Management Teams: The Role of Team Trust and Learning from Failure

By: Abraham Carmeli, Asher Tishler and Amy C. Edmondson

In this study, we examine a complex pathway through which CEOs, who exhibit relational leadership, may improve the quality of strategic decisions of their top management teams (TMTs) by creating psychological conditions of trust and facilitating learning from failures... View Details

Keywords: Leadership Development; Decisions; Management Teams; Trust; Learning; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques; Managerial Roles; Failure

26 May 2003
Research & Ideas

Corporate Transparency Improves For Foreign Firms in U.S. Markets

define corporate transparency as the quantity and quality of information a company provides its various constituents including shareholders and other capital providers, suppliers, customers, employees, etc. In this paper, we measure this... View Details

Keywords: by Cynthia Churchwell

2020
Working Paper

Improving Regulatory Effectiveness Through Better Targeting: Evidence from OSHA

By: Matthew S. Johnson, David I. Levine and Michael W. Toffel

We study how a regulator can best target inspections. Our case study is a US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) program that randomly allocated some inspections. On average, each inspection averted 2.4 serious injuries (9%) over the next five years.... View Details

Keywords: Government Administration; Working Conditions; Safety; Quality; Production; Analysis; Resource Allocation; Manufacturing Industry; United States

SSRN

September 2009
Article

A Detailed Analysis of the Reduction Mammaplasty Learning Curve: A Statistical Process Model for Approaching Surgical Performance Improvement

By: Matthew Carty MD, Rodney Chan, Robert S. Huckman, Daniel C. Snow and Dennis Orgill

Background: The increased focus on quality and efficiency improvement within academic surgery has met with variable success among plastic surgeons. Traditional surgical performance metrics, such as morbidity and mortality, are insufficient to improve the... View Details

Keywords: Experience and Expertise; Health Care and Treatment; Medical Specialties; Outcome or Result; Performance Efficiency; Performance Improvement

2023
Working Paper

Navigating the Jagged Technological Frontier: Field Experimental Evidence of the Effects of AI on Knowledge Worker Productivity and Quality

By: Fabrizio Dell'Acqua, Edward McFowland III, Ethan Mollick, Hila Lifshitz-Assaf, Katherine C. Kellogg, Saran Rajendran, Lisa Krayer, François Candelon and Karim R. Lakhani

The public release of Large Language Models (LLMs) has sparked tremendous interest in how humans will use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to accomplish a variety of tasks. In our study conducted with Boston Consulting Group, a global management consulting firm, we examine... View Details

Keywords: Large Language Model; AI and Machine Learning; Performance Efficiency; Performance Improvement

SSRN

August 2020
Article

Do Physician Incentives Increase Patient Medication Adherence?

By: Edward Kong, John Beshears, David Laibson, Brigitte Madrian, Kevin Volpp, George Loewenstein, Jonathan Kolstad and James J. Choi

We conducted a randomized experiment (911 primary care practices and 8,935 nonadherent patients) to test the effect of paying physicians for increasing patient medication adherence in three drug classes: diabetes medication, antihypertensives, and statins. We measured... View Details

Keywords: Health Economics; Medication Adherence; Physician Payment Incentives; Primary Care; Quality Improvement; Health Care and Treatment; Motivation and Incentives; Behavior