Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(5,123)
- Faculty Publications (849)
- November–December 2023
- Article
Look the Part? The Role of Profile Pictures in Online Labor Markets
By: Isamar Troncoso and Lan Luo
Profile pictures are a key component of many freelancing platforms, a design choice that can impact hiring and matching outcomes. In this paper, we examine how appearance-based perceptions of a freelancer’s fit for the job (i.e., whether a freelancer "looks the part"... View Details
- October 2023 (Revised March 2024)
- Case
KOKO Networks: Bridging Energy Transition and Affordability with Carbon Financing
By: George Serafeim, Siko Sikochi and Namrata Arora
The problem was massive: two million hectares of African forests were lost annually to charcoal production for cooking, an area equivalent to 13 times Greater London, resulting in one billion tons of carbon emissions yearly. At the same time, an estimated 700,000... View Details
Keywords: Clean Tech; Digital; Carbon Credits; Carbon Offsetting; Africa; Emerging Markets; Energy; Climate Change; Entrepreneurship; Energy Sources; Environmental Sustainability; Health; Market Design; Business Startups; Transition; Environmental Regulation; Policy; Energy Industry; Consumer Products Industry; Africa; Kenya; Rwanda
- 2022
- Working Paper
Why Do Index Funds Have Market Power? Quantifying Frictions in the Index Fund Market
By: Zach Y. Brown, Mark Egan, Jihye Jeon, Chuqing Jin and Alex A. Wu
Index funds are one of the most common ways investors access financial markets and are perceived to be a transparent and low-cost alternative to active investment management. Despite these purported virtues of index fund investing and the introduction of new products... View Details
- October 2023 (Revised April 2024)
- Case
TetraScience: Unlocking the Power of Scientific Data
By: Satish Tadikonda and William Marks
After pivoting from a focus on hardware to a focus on scientific data, TetraScience, led by veteran SaaS executive, Patrick Grady and Founder Spin Wang, has embarked on a journey from nearly cash-out to a player in the scientific data management space. This case... View Details
- October 2023 (Revised February 2024)
- Technical Note
Design and Evaluation of Targeted Interventions
By: Eva Ascarza and Ta-Wei (David) Huang
Targeted interventions serve as a pivotal tool in business strategy, streamlining decisions for enhanced efficiency and effectiveness. This note delves into two central facets of such interventions: first, the design of potent decision guidelines, or targeting... View Details
- October 2023
- Case
Vida Health: Transforming Chronic Disease Treatment
By: William Sahlman and Nicole Tempest Keller
San Francisco based Vida Health, founded by Stephanie Tilenius, former vice president of Commerce and Payments at Google, was a B2B digital health startup focused on the treatment of cardiometabolic conditions, such as diabetes and obesity. Its innovative digital... View Details
- October 2023
- Case
Kevin O'Leary: Building a Brand in Shark-infested Waters
By: Reza Satchu and Patrick Sanguineti
For more than fifteen years, successful Canadian entrepreneur and investor Kevin O’Leary had developed his brand into a global powerhouse. Since his first appearance on the Canadian television program Dragons’ Den in 2006 and his meteoric rise to stardom through the... View Details
- October 2023 (Revised November 2023)
- Case
Sprout Solutions
By: Jeffrey J. Bussgang, Bonnie Yining Cao and Dawn H. Lau
Husband-and-wife co-founders Patrick and Alexandria Gentry had built Sprout Solutions to be one of the biggest Software-as-a-Service human resources management platforms in the Philippines, guided by the mission to "impact the life of every Filipino by improving... View Details
- October 2023 (Revised February 2024)
- Case
Loris
By: Shunyuan Zhang, Das Narayandas, Stacy Straaberg and David Lane
In December 2022, Loris’s executive team considered their go-to-market strategy. Loris was an artificial intelligence (AI) software startup for the customer service industry with two products on the market: 1) Agent Assist which provided customer service agents (CSAs)... View Details
- October 2023 (Revised April 2024)
- Case
FARM Rio: Bringing a Brazilian Fashion Brand to the World
By: Isamar Troncoso and Jill Avery
FARM Rio, a twenty-six year old Brazilian fashion brand, had recently put down roots in the U.S. The brand, known for its bold, colorful, nature-inspired tropical prints, was testing the waters in Europe to assess if and how the brand should further expand globally.... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Bringing Science to Market: Knowledge Foundations, Inventor-Founders, and Performance
By: Justine Boudou and Maria Roche
In this paper, we examine how a startup’s knowledge foundations—embedded in its
core technology—influence its performance in the exit market. Using a dataset of 1,006
biomedicine startups founded between 2005 and 2015, we focus on two key factors: (1)
the degree of... View Details
- October 2023
- Article
Matching Mechanisms for Refugee Resettlement
By: David Delacrétaz, Scott Duke Kominers and Alexander Teytelboym
Current refugee resettlement processes account for neither the preferences of refugees nor the priorities of hosting communities. We introduce a new framework for matching with multidimensional knapsack constraints that captures the (possibly multidimensional) sizes of... View Details
- October 2023
- Article
Stock Market Stimulus
By: Robin Greenwood, Toomas Laarits and Jeffrey Wurgler
We study the stock market effects of the arrival of the three rounds of “stimulus checks” to U.S. taxpayers and the single round of direct payments to Hong Kong citizens. The first two rounds of U.S. checks appear to have increased retail buying and share prices of... View Details
- September 2023
- Supplement
Design and Evaluation of Targeted Interventions
By: Eva Ascarza
Targeted interventions serve as a pivotal tool in business strategy, streamlining decisions for enhanced efficiency and effectiveness. This note delves into two central facets of such interventions: first, the design of potent decision guidelines, or targeting... View Details
- September 2023 (Revised October 2023)
- Case
Mohamed Salah
By: Anita Elberse and Taher El Moataz Bellah
In June 2022, Mohamed Salah, one of the world’s best soccer players, and his lawyer and advisor Ramy Abbas Issa were in ongoing discussions with top English Premier League club Liverpool FC about a new playing contract for Salah. Arguably the Arab world’s biggest... View Details
- Summer 2023
- Article
(Un)principled Agents: Monitoring Loyalty after the End of the Royal African Company Monopoly
By: Anne Ruderman and Marlous van Waijenburg
The revocation of the Royal African Company's monopoly in 1698 inaugurated a transformation of the transatlantic slave trade. While the RAC’s exit from the slave trade has received scholarly attention, little is known about the company’s response to the loss of its... View Details
- August 2023
- Case
BYD, China, and Global Electric Vehicle Rivalry
By: Cynthia A. Montgomery and Max Hancock
In 2023, BYD, a Chinese electric vehicle (EV) maker, surpassed Tesla to become the world's best-selling EV brand. BYD began selling mobile phone batteries in 1995, acquired a license to sell vehicles in 2002, and spent two decades building its EV brand, growing its... View Details
- August 2023
- Case
Kariyer.net: Recruiting AI
By: Shunyuan Zhang, Fares Khrais and Namrata Arora
In 2017, Fatih Uysal (AMP 2021) became CEO of Kariyer.net. By then, the business was already the industry leading online job board in Turkey. However, faced with stalling growth, a turbulent macroenvironment, and growing competition from international players, Uysal... View Details
Keywords: Online Technology; Marketing; Websites; Artificial Intelligence; Innovation; Two-sided Platforms; Internet and the Web; Product Launch; Product Positioning; Job Search; Employment; Transformation; Volatility; Innovation and Invention; Disruptive Innovation; Management Practices and Processes; Business Growth and Maturation; Competitive Strategy; Business Startups; Talent and Talent Management; Cost vs Benefits; Macroeconomics; Corporate Entrepreneurship; Emerging Markets; Digital Platforms; Employment Industry; Information Technology Industry; Technology Industry; Middle East; Turkey
- 2023
- Other Unpublished Work
If 3 Was 9
One determinant of where economies and markets are headed is how well we handle the climate crisis. Headlines on the climate tend to emphasize two points. First, average global temps are rising, with it being the hottest summer in 1,000 centuries per some estimates.... View Details
- 2023
- Book
Precarious Ties: Business and the State in Authoritarian Asia
By: Meg Rithmire
Developing Asia has been the site of some of the last century's fastest growing economies as well as some of the world's most durable authoritarian regimes. Many accounts of rapid growth alongside monopolies on political power have focused on crony relationships... View Details