Publications

November 2023
Case

Gabon Special Economic Zone

By: John Macomber and Wale Lawal

Tropical rain forest covers about 80% of the West African nation of Gabon, part of the Congo Basin and the "lungs of the world." Gabon is one of the first nations to earn revenue from carbon sequestration...as long as the rain forest remains intact. There are... View Details

Keywords: Economic Development; Forestry; Wood; Carbon Credits; Supply Chain; Economic Growth; Developing Countries and Economies; Climate Change; Environmental Sustainability; Government Administration; Business and Government Relations; Strategy; Forest Products Industry; Africa; Gabon

Educators

February 1992 (Revised July 1993)
Case

Telefonica de Argentina S.A.

Deals with the privatization of the Argentine telephone industry. Focuses on the restructuring aspect. Commercial banks owned sovereign debt of Argentina trading at a deep discount to par. The question is whether the banks should exchange their sovereign debt... View Details

Keywords: Financial Instruments; Restructuring; Privatization; Commercial Banking; Telecommunications Industry; Argentina

14 Jun 2017
Working Paper Summaries

Minimizing Justified Envy in School Choice: The Design of New Orleans' OneApp

Keywords: by Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Yeon-Koo Che, Parag A. Pathak, Alvin E. Roth, and Oliver Tercieux; Education

November 2009
Article

Fast or Fair? A Study of Response Times

This paper uses a modified dictator game to investigate the relationship between response times and social preferences. We find that faster subjects more often chose the option with the highest payoff for themselves. Moreover, our within-analysis reveals that, for a... View Details

Keywords: Relationships; Time Management; Social Issues; Decision Choices and Conditions; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques; Profit

January 2010
Article

The Role of Experience in the Gambler's Fallacy

By: Greg Barron and Stephen Leider

Recent papers have demonstrated that the way people acquire information about a decision problem, by experience or by abstract description, can affect their behavior. We examined the role of experience over time in the emergence of the Gambler's Fallacy in binary... View Details

Keywords: Experience and Expertise; Decision Making; Forecasting and Prediction; Knowledge Acquisition; Outcome or Result; Game Theory; Prejudice and Bias

April 2017
Teaching Note

DoubleDutch

By: Frank Cespedes

This Teaching Note accompanies HBS No. 815-044 “DoubleDutch” in which the co-founders of the event management start-up, DoubleDutch, have to make a significant decision about their young company's sales function. The teaching note covers: Opportunity analysis,... View Details

Keywords: Sales Management; Selling; Marketing Management; Strategy Implementation; Business Marketing; Salesforce Management; Marketing; Sales; Marketing Strategy; Strategy; Entrepreneurship; Business Startups; Technology Industry; United States; Europe; Asia

Article

Learning by Thinking: The Role of Reflection in Individual Learning

By: Giada Di Stefano, Francesca Gino, Gary P. Pisano and Bradley R. Staats

It is common wisdom that practice makes perfect. And, in fact, we find evidence that when given a choice between practicing a task and reflecting on their previously accumulated practice, most people opt for the former. We argue in this paper that this preference is... View Details

Keywords: Learning; Cognition and Thinking; Practice; Experience and Expertise

12 Oct 2022
Video

Mike Luca: The Role Experiments Play in Addressing Discrimination

Summer 2014
Article

Delegation in Multi‐Establishment Firms: Adaptation vs. Coordination in I.T. Purchasing Authority

By: Kristina Steffenson McElheran

This paper conducts one of the first large-scale, establishment-level empirical studies of delegation within firms. Recent contributions to a rapidly growing theory literature have focused on the tradeoff between adaptation and coordination in determining... View Details

Keywords: Integration; Leadership; Management Practices and Processes; Information Technology; Organizational Structure; Adaptation

Article

Ethical Blind Spots: Explaining Unintentional Unethical Behavior

By: Ovul Sezer, F. Gino and Max H. Bazerman

People view themselves as more ethical, fair, and objective than others, yet often act against their moral compass. This paper reviews recent research on unintentional unethical behavior and provides an overview of the conditions under which ethical blind spots lead... View Details

Keywords: Behavior; Ethics; Decision Choices and Conditions

July 2002 (Revised April 2003)
Case

QuickMedx Inc.

By: Richard M.J. Bohmer and Jonathan P Groberg

QuickMedx has created a chain of small kiosks, located in drugstores and shopping malls in the Minneapolis area, that cater to patients with a limited range of very simple primary care conditions. Service is rapid and cheap and patients wait only a few minutes to be... View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Decision Making; Disruptive Innovation; Expansion; Service Delivery; Business Processes; Design; Management; Health Industry

Educators

March 2022 (Revised April 2022)
Teaching Note

Spotify's Audio-First Strategy: Leading the Podcasting Market

By: Hong Luo and Carol Lin

Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 721-439. Within 15 years, CEO Daniel Ek had led Spotify from an ambitious startup to a multi-billion dollar company that had transformed the music industry. As part of Spotify’s next phase of growth, the platform would invest heavily in... View Details

Keywords: Business Startups; Growth and Development Strategy; Business Divisions; Customer Relationship Management; Revenue; Music Industry

13 Jan 2003
Research & Ideas

The Subconscious Mind of the Consumer (And How To Reach It)

the product is gripped in the hand and in the choice of finish in the device's housing material. In the case of a personal care product, colors and scents known to be evocative... View Details

Keywords: by Manda Mahoney

01 Apr 1996
News

Stewards of the Seventh Generation

Resources for the Future, a Washington, D.C., think tank dedicated to providing research and policy analysis for environmental decision makers. "And even if returns on environmental investments were always... View Details

Keywords: Marguerite Rigoglioso, Garry Emmons, Linda Goodspeed, and Elaine Gottlieb

2011
Working Paper

Price Competition under Multinomial Logit Demand Functions with Random Coefficients

In this paper, we postulate a general class of price competition models with Mixed Multinomial Logit demand functions under affine cost functions. We first characterize the equilibrium behavior of this class of models in the case where each product in the market is... View Details

Keywords: Customers; Income Characteristics; Price; Product Marketing; Mathematical Methods; Competition; Segmentation

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

Keywords: Adherence; Antiretroviral Therapy; Behavioral Economics; Commitment Contract; Financial Incentives; HIV-1 Virologic Suppression; Health Disorders; Motivation and Incentives

September 1991 (Revised January 1997)
Case

Manzana Insurance: Fruitvale Branch (Abridged)

By: Steven C. Wheelwright

Deals with performance assessment and improvement of a service operation in the insurance industry, a market that is highly sensitive to response time. Two branch offices in direct competition are described, and the impact of response time on performance is suggested.... View Details

Keywords: Business Offices; Decision Choices and Conditions; Time Management; Service Operations; Performance Evaluation; Competition; Insurance Industry

Educators