Publications

21 Jun 2010
Research & Ideas

Strategy and Execution for Emerging Markets

embedded in societal norms and political realities. Palepu: Yes, Chile—just like Israel, South Africa, and South Korea—is crossing over from an emerging market to a more mature market. Learning about Chile... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

April 5, 2021
Article

Defining a Post-Pandemic Channel Strategy

By: Frank V. Cespedes

Companies have experienced a surge of online orders during the pandemic. As the crisis eases, leaders need to decide whether the shift to e-commerce is a permanent “new normal” or a temporary increase. Across sectors, forecasts aimed at answering this question form the... View Details

Keywords: Health Pandemics; Marketing Channels; Strategy; Resource Allocation; E-commerce

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July 2017 (Revised December 2018)
Case

Populism in America: Fake News, Alternative Facts and Elite Betrayal in the Trump Era

By: Rafael Di Tella and Sarah McAra

During the 2016 U.S. election, long-time politician Hillary Clinton, a Democrat, and celebrity billionaire Donald Trump, a Republican, faced off in a contentious race for president. In the primaries, candidates from both major political parties used anti-establishment... View Details

Keywords: Populism; Elites; Income Inequality; Government and Politics; Globalization; Political Elections; News; Media; Labor; Prejudice and Bias; Public Opinion; Social Issues; Wealth and Poverty; Social Media

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September 2019
Article

Technology Reemergence: Creating New Value for Old Technologies in Swiss Mechanical Watchmaking, 1970-2008

By: Ryan Raffaelli

In 1983, 14 years after the introduction of the battery-powered quartz watch, mechanical watches and the Swiss watchmakers who built them were predicted to be obsolete (Landes, 1983). Unexpectedly, however, by 2008 the Swiss mechanical watchmaking industry had... View Details

Keywords: Technology Reemergence; Technology Cycles; Cognition And Market Redefinition; Legacy Technology Trajectories; Information Technology; Demand and Consumers; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Identity; Change; Consumer Products Industry; Switzerland

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

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Siyu Zhang is a second-year doctoral student at HBS. Zhang joined Harvard Business School in 2020 as a Research Associate and has been working on macroeconomic forecasting projects. Prior to joining HBS, he was a Data Scientist at John Hancock, where he utilized... View Details

16 Oct 2018
First Look

New Research and Ideas, October 16, 2018

methods, such as multiple-case inductive studies and traditional methods of causal inference. Download working paper: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=55043 Quantile Forecasts of Product Life... View Details

Keywords: Dina Gerdeman

September 2019
Article

The Persistence of Broadband User Behavior: Implications for Universal Service and Competition Policy

By: Andre Boik, Shane Greenstein and Jeffrey Prince

In several markets, firms compete not for consumer expenditure but consumer attention. We examine user priorities over the allocation of their time, and interpret that behavior in light of salient tensions in policy discussions over universal service, data caps, and... View Details

Keywords: Broadband Service; Attention Allocation; Consumer Behavior; Household; Internet and the Web; Competition; Policy

Article

Do Strict Capital Requirements Raise the Cost of Capital? Bank Regulation, Capital Structure and the Low Risk Anomaly

By: Malcolm Baker and Jeffrey Wurgler

Traditional capital structure theory predicts that reducing banks' leverage reduces the risk and cost of equity but does not change the weighted average cost of capital, and thus the rates for borrowers. We confirm that the equity of better-capitalized banks has lower... View Details

Keywords: Capital Structure; Banks and Banking; Banking Industry

2024
Working Paper

Corporate Culture Homogeneity and Top Executive Incentive Design: Evidence from CEO Compensation Contracts

By: Dennis Campbell, Ruidi Shang and Zhifang Zhang

We examine how corporate cultures characterized by high degrees of homogeneity in the underlying values and beliefs of organizational members are related to the design of CEO incentive compensation contracts. We argue that culture homogeneity within firms lowers... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Culture; Compensation Design; Accounting; Management Control; Incentive Systems; Organizational Culture; Job Design and Levels; Governance; Executive Compensation; Motivation and Incentives

11 Jun 2013
Working Paper Summaries

Measurement Errors of Expected Returns Proxies and the Implied Cost of Capital

Keywords: by Charles C.Y. Wang

2012
Working Paper

With Us or Against Us? Networks, Identity and Order in a Virtual World

By: Magnus Thor Torfason

Social networks and social groups have both been seen as important to discouraging malfeasance and supporting the global pro-social norms that underlie social order, but have typically been treated either as pure substitutes or as having completely independent effects.... View Details

Keywords: Social Norms; Social Networks; Triadic Closure; Social Groups; Group Identity; Groups and Teams; Boundaries; Organizations; Identity; Social and Collaborative Networks; Societal Protocols

Article

Power Imbalance, Mutual Dependence and Constraint Absorption: A Closer Look at Resource Dependence Theory

By: Tiziana Casciaro and Mikolaj Jan Piskorski

Despite ubiquitous references to Pfeffer and Salancik's classic volume, The External Control of Organizations, resource dependence theory is more of an appealing metaphor than a foundation for testable empirical research. We argue that several ambiguities in the... View Details

Keywords: Power and Influence; Theory

09 Nov 2016
News

Blindsided by Trump’s Victory? Behavioral Science Explains

07 Feb 2022
Research & Ideas

Digital Transformation: A New Roadmap for Success

backgrounds. One media executive predicted that in five years, engineers would comprise a third of his company’s workforce. Today, digital transformation requires upskilling all employees so they can harness digital tools View Details

Keywords: by Linda A. Hill, Ann Le Cam, Sunand Menon, and Emily Tedards

February 2014 (Revised August 2016)
Case

Strava

By: Joseph B. Lassiter III, William A. Sahlman and Sid Misra

Strava is a new fast-growing social network for the avid cyclist and runner. The Strava case traces the entrepreneurial journey of two serial entrepreneurs who have been co-founders in a prior venture, and who have co-founded Strava 3 years ago. The protagonists must... View Details

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Research Summary

Workforce Change

By: Sandra J. Sucher

This research encompasses layoffs, furloughs and restructuring, global practices that affect millions of employees and thousands of companies every year. In this work I aim to replace bad practice that damages trust with good (or at least better) practice through... View Details

Keywords: Layoffs; Leadership And Change Management; Global Innovation; Strategic Decision Making; Multinational Corporations; Organizational Change and Adaptation; United States; France; Germany; Hungary; Finland; United Kingdom; Netherlands; China; Japan; Brazil

October 2021
Article

Judgment Aggregation in Creative Production: Evidence from the Movie Industry

By: Hong Luo, Jeffrey T. Macher and Michael Wahlen

We study a novel, low-cost approach to aggregating judgment from a large number of industry experts on ideas that they encounter in their normal course of business. Our context is the movie industry, in which customer appeal is difficult to predict and investment costs... View Details

Keywords: Judgment Aggregation; Quality Uncertainty; Creative Industry; Project Evaluation And Selection; Creativity; Film Entertainment; Judgments; Motion Pictures and Video Industry

Article

Maimonides' Ladder: States of Mutual Knowledge and the Perception of Charitability

By: Julian De Freitas, Peter DiScioli, Kyle A. Thomas and Steven Pinker

Why do people esteem anonymous charitable giving? We connect normative theories of charitability (captured in Maimonides’ Ladder of Charity) with evolutionary theories of partner choice to test predictions on how attributions of charitability are affected by states of... View Details

Keywords: Charity; Reciprocity; Partner Choice; Common Knowledge; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; Knowledge; Perception