Publications

Read Now

TeachingInterests

Founders' Dilemmas

Founders' Dilemmas examines the early, often difficult, decisions that have important long-term consequences for founders and their ventures. Potential consequences include losing control of their ventures, breaking up of the founding team due to tensions between... View Details

2020
Working Paper

Targeting for Long-Term Outcomes

By: Jeremy Yang, Dean Eckles, Paramveer Dhillon and Sinan Aral

Decision makers often want to target interventions so as to maximize an outcome that is observed only in the long term. This typically requires delaying decisions until the outcome is observed or relying on simple short-term proxies for the long-term outcome. Here we... View Details

Keywords: Targeted Marketing; Optimization; Churn Management; Marketing; Customer Relationship Management; Policy; Learning; Outcome or Result

Read Now

20 Oct 2011
Research & Ideas

Getting the Marketing Mix Right

retaliation happens and that companies worry about that," Steenburgh says. "But nobody benefits when both companies are retaliating. One effort just offsets the other." Measuring the different effects of these marketing... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

06 Dec 2020
Working Paper Summaries

'Repayment-by-Purchase' Helps Consumers to Reduce Credit Card Debt

Keywords: by Grant E. Donnelly, Cait Lamberton, Stephen Bush, Zoe Chance, and Michael I. Norton

November 2006 (Revised May 2025)
Case

Eli Lilly: Developing Cymbalta

By: Elie Ofek and Ron Laufer

Anticipating the expiration of its Prozac patent, Eli Lilly has to make tough decisions regarding the development of its next-generation antidepressant drug. In particular, the company needs to decide whether to first establish that once-a-day dosing for Cymbalta... View Details

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Marketing Strategy; Product Launch; Product Development; Research and Development; Pharmaceutical Industry

January 2003 (Revised May 2003)
Case

Heineken NV: Workplace HIV/AIDS Programs in Africa (A)

This case is the first in a three-part series that explores the multifaceted organizational and strategic choices that companies now face as a result of the global AIDS epidemic. Heineken is considering becoming one of the first companies to offer AIDS drugs... View Details

Keywords: Health Disorders; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Employees; Food and Beverage Industry; Africa

28 Aug 2020
Video

Sanjay Bansal

Sanjay Bansal, former head of Ambootia tea estates in Darjeeling, India, discusses the near-feudal conditions which prevailed in the tea industry in this region, and the acute social problems faced by the Nepalese-speaking labor force, which was predominately female.... View Details

15 Apr 2025
HBS Seminar

Hal Hershfield, University of California, Los Angeles

25 Jul 2005
Research & Ideas

Fool vs. Jerk: Whom Would You Hire?

jerk. Things got a lot more interesting, though, when people faced the choice between competent jerks and lovable fools. Ask managers about this choice—and we've asked many of them, both as part of our... View Details

Keywords: by Tiziana Casciaro & Miguel Sousa Lobo

Article

Strategic Orientations in a Competitive Context: The Role of Strategic Orientation Differentiation

By: Rohit Deshpandé, Amir Grinstein and Elie Ofek

Strategic orientation studies often provide 'best practice prescriptions' for firms in a given context—matching orientations to environmental conditions. While this perspective has value, empirical results are equivocal, and an important reality has been overlooked:... View Details

Keywords: Competition; Change Management; Situation or Environment; Decision Choices and Conditions

Article

The Strategy in Competitive Interactions

By: Eric J. Van den Steen

This paper reviews, discusses, and expands the “core guidance” definition of strategy as “the smallest set of choices to optimally guide (or force) other choices.” It first discusses what this definition contributes to the existing proposed definitions. It then... View Details

Keywords: Strategy Formulation; Strategy Definition; Strategy; Competition; Analysis; Competitive Strategy; Decision Making

Web

Rewiring the Workplace: Behavioral Economics and the Future of Inclusive Organizations - Blog: RGE Report

belong to dominant groups (white, male, heterosexual, etc.) . If an organization can steer managers, employees, and even senior leaders toward active choices, this makes it hard for defaults to determine View Details

16 Oct 2008
Working Paper Summaries

Making the Gambler’s Fallacy Disappear: The Role of Experience

Keywords: by Gregory M. Barron & Stephen Leider

December 1996 (Revised July 1997)
Case

Parker's Biscuits, Inc.: Venturing into China

Carol Wittenberg's first major task as president of the Asia/Pacific business for Parker's Biscuits is to set up a joint venture to manufacture biscuits in China. The team that Wittenberg has put together to find a joint venture partner has narrowed the choice down to... View Details

Keywords: Joint Ventures; Decision Choices and Conditions; Food and Beverage Industry; Food and Beverage Industry; China

August 1996 (Revised June 2007)
Case

Nicholson File Company Takeover (B), The

By: Thomas R. Piper

Management of a small hand tool company must decide on the terms and conditions of its sale to a "friendly" acquirer. View Details

Keywords: Decisions; Negotiation Preparation; Negotiation Participants; Acquisition; Manufacturing Industry

February 2003 (Revised October 2003)
Case

Cable Data Systems

By: Paul W. Marshall and Todd H Thedinga

Describes the operating challenges of Cable Data Systems (CDS), a minority-owned cable installation company with a dual mission of maximizing profits and providing employment opportunities to minorities in urban markets. Following the merger of two cable installation... View Details

Keywords: Selection and Staffing; Employment; Forecasting and Prediction; Urban Scope; Cost Management; Infrastructure; Labor Unions; Demand and Consumers; Demographics; Media and Broadcasting Industry; Media and Broadcasting Industry; Boston

July 2002 (Revised October 2002)
Case

Taj Hotel Group

By: Thomas J. DeLong and Vineeta Vijayaraghavan

R.K. Krishna Kumar, managing director and head of Taj Hotel Group, has to decide whether to reexamine a promotion decision. In an attempt to deliver a level of service quality that met global standards at the Indian hotel chain, Kumar had introduced new personnel... View Details

Keywords: Decision Making; Human Resources; Leadership Development; Management Teams; Organizational Culture; Alignment; India

13 Oct 2015
First Look

October 13, 2015

Shiv, and Rebecca M.C. Spencer Abstract—Conventional wisdom and studies of unconscious processing suggest that sleeping on a choice may improve View Details

2009
Other Unpublished Work

Choice-based Measures of Conflict in Preferences

By: Katherine Baldiga and Jerry R. Green

We propose a family of measures of difference between ordinal preference relations. The difference between two preferences is the probability that they would disagree about the optimal choice from a random available set. It is in this sense that these measures are... View Details

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Measurement and Metrics; Mathematical Methods; Conflict of Interests; Welfare