Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(6,477)
- Faculty Publications (1,249)
- January 2024 (Revised February 2024)
- Exercise
Travelogo: Understanding Customer Journeys
By: Eva Ascarza, Nicolas Padilla and Oded Netzer
In late May 2023, Sarah Merino, the newly appointed manager of the Customer Insights group at Travelogo—an online travel booking platform—initiates a comprehensive analysis of clickstream data to understand the varied behaviors and needs of their users. In preparation... View Details
- January 2024
- Technical Note
The ICARUS Principles: What It Takes to Tackle the World
By: Debora L. Spar and Julia M. Comeau
Over the course of the 20th century, most of the world’s major multinational corporations framed their mission around Milton Friedman’s famous mantra: that the sole purpose of the firm is to maximize its shareholders’ profits. Recently, however, growing numbers of... View Details
- September 2023
- Article
Customer Churn and Intangible Capital
By: Scott R. Baker, Brian Baugh and Marco Sammon
Intangible capital is a crucial and growing piece of firms’ capital structure, but many of its distinct components are difficult to measure. We develop and make available several new firm-level metrics regarding a key component of intangible capital – firms’ customer... View Details
- 2023
- Article
M4: A Unified XAI Benchmark for Faithfulness Evaluation of Feature Attribution Methods across Metrics, Modalities, and Models
By: Himabindu Lakkaraju, Xuhong Li, Mengnan Du, Jiamin Chen, Yekun Chai and Haoyi Xiong
While Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) techniques have been widely studied to explain predictions made by deep neural networks, the way to evaluate the faithfulness of explanation results remains challenging, due to the heterogeneity of explanations for... View Details
Keywords: AI and Machine Learning
- December 2023
- Article
Self-Orienting in Human and Machine Learning
By: Julian De Freitas, Ahmet Uğuralp, Zeliha Uğuralp, Laurie Paul, Joshua B. Tenenbaum and T. Ullman
A current proposal for a computational notion of self is a representation of one’s body in a specific time and place, which includes the recognition of that representation as the agent. This turns self-representation into a process of self-orientation, a challenging... View Details
- 2023
- Article
Which Models Have Perceptually-Aligned Gradients? An Explanation via Off-Manifold Robustness
By: Suraj Srinivas, Sebastian Bordt and Himabindu Lakkaraju
One of the remarkable properties of robust computer vision models is that their input-gradients are often aligned with human perception, referred to in the literature as perceptually-aligned gradients (PAGs). Despite only being trained for classification, PAGs cause... View Details
- November 2023
- Case
From Imitation to Innovation: Zongshen Industrial Group (Abridged)
By: Willy Shih and Nancy Dai
Like other small shops based in Chongqing, China, Zongshen Industrial Group started by assembling motorcycles from "standard" parts. The quality of its early products was good enough for rural Chinese buyers, though wealthier consumers usually purchased premium... View Details
- October 2023 (Revised May 2024)
- Case
Governance and Growth at GenUnity
By: Brian Trelstad, Paul Healy and Annelena Lobb
Jerren Chang, CEO and co-founder of GenUnity, had to choose a strategy to scale his civic engagement-focused nonprofit. Based in Boston, Chang could grow the organization there or begin to expand to other cities. He also had to select candidates for a board of... View Details
- October 2023
- Case
Fixie and Conversational AI Sidekicks
By: Jeffrey J. Bussgang and Carin-Isabel Knoop
In March 2023, Fixie Co-Founder and Chief Architect Matt Welsh and co-founders had the kind of meeting no founders want to have. The president of leading artificial intelligence (AI) research and deployment firm OpenAI, which had catapulted into fame with its ChatGPT... 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 (Revised April 2024)
- Case
ghSMART & Co: Building and Scaling a Time Smart Firm
By: Ashley Whillans and Sara Coronel Rodriguez
"For ghSMART, freedom is the first principle from which all good things flow”—Geoff Smart, Chairman and Founder, ghSMART. ghSMART was a leadership advisory firm that was grounded in the principle of freedom. Talented Consultants and Partners could work remotely from... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Black-box Training Data Identification in GANs via Detector Networks
By: Lukman Olagoke, Salil Vadhan and Seth Neel
Since their inception Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have been popular generative models across images, audio, video, and tabular data. In this paper we study whether given access to a trained GAN, as well as fresh samples from the underlying distribution, if... View Details
- 2023
- Book
Move Fast and Fix Things: The Trusted Leader's Guide to Solving Hard Problems
By: Frances X. Frei and Anne Morriss
Speed has gotten a bad name in business, much of it deserved. When Facebook made "Move fast and break things" an informal company motto, it fueled a widely held belief that we can either make progress or take care of people, one or the other. That a certain amount of... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
The Effect of Childhood Environment on Political Behavior: Evidence from Young U.S. Movers, 1992–2021
By: Jacob R. Brown, Enrico Cantoni, Sahil Chinoy, Martin Koenen and Vincent Pons
We ask how childhood environment shapes political behavior. We measure young voters’ participation and party affiliation in nationally comprehensive voter files and reconstruct their childhood location histories based on their parents’ addresses. We compare outcomes of... View Details
- September 13, 2023
- Article
How the Best Chief Data Officers Create Value
By: Suraj Srinivasan and Robin Seibert
Despite the rapidly increasing prominence of data and analytics functions, the majority of chief data officers (CDOs) fail to value and price the business outcomes created by their data and analytics capabilities. It comes as no surprise then that many CDOs fall behind... View Details
- September 2023
- Technical Note
Work Arrangements in the Post-Pandemic World
By: Leslie A. Perlow and Salvatore J. Affinito
Whether you are choosing your job based on geographic location, work arrangements (i.e., fully in-person, hybrid, fully virtual), or other unrelated factors (e.g., career, family, partner, hobbies), in the post-pandemic world you will likely be surrounded by people... View Details
- September 2023
- Article
(Not) Paying for Diversity: Repugnant Market Concerns Associated with Transactional Approaches to Diversity Recruitment
In a 20-month ethnographic study, I examine how a technology firm, ShopCo (a pseudonym), considered 13 different recruitment platforms to attract racial minority engineering candidates. I find that when choosing whether to adopt recruitment platforms focused on racial... View Details
- September 2023
- Article
Addressing Vaccine Hesitancy: Experimental Evidence from Nine Countries during the COVID-19 Pandemic
By: Vincenzo Galasso, Vincent Pons, Paola Profeta, Martin McKee, David Stuckler, Michael Becher, Sylvain Brouard and Martial Foucault
We study the impact of public health messages on intentions to vaccinate and vaccination uptakes, especially among hesitant groups. We performed an experiment comparing the effects of egoistic and altruistic messages on COVID-19 vaccine intentions and behaviour. We... View Details
- September–October 2023
- Article
Interpretable Matrix Completion: A Discrete Optimization Approach
By: Dimitris Bertsimas and Michael Lingzhi Li
We consider the problem of matrix completion on an n × m matrix. We introduce the problem of interpretable matrix completion that aims to provide meaningful insights for the low-rank matrix using side information. We show that the problem can be... View Details
Keywords: Mathematical Methods
- Article
Update on E-liability Accounting
By: Robert Kaplan, Karthik Ramanna and Piyush Jha
Since publication of the original E-liability carbon accounting paper (HBR, Nov 2021), we created the E-liability Institute to help companies, governments, and nonprofits implement the method. The Institute’s mission is to test and validate the method, and develop... View Details