Publications

August 2006 (Revised February 2009)
Case

Medco Energi Internasional

In late 2004, Hilmi Panigoro, CEO of the publicly traded Indonesian oil company Medco Energi Internasional, is striving to regain majority control of the company his brother Arifin founded in 1980. The Asian financial crisis of 1999 led to a major restructuring that... View Details

Keywords: Leveraged Buyouts; Family Business; Restructuring; Financing and Loans; Ownership Stake; Business and Shareholder Relations; Indonesia; Singapore

19 May 2015
First Look

First Look: May 19

according to different local strategies for economic prosperity and political stability. In particular, the author links fiscal relations and economic bases to property rights regimes, finding that more "open" cities are subject... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

09 Apr 2001
Research & Ideas

Marketing a Country: Promotion as a Tool for Attracting Foreign Investment.

strategies, and to develop integrated management control systems that tied the activities of marketers to particular investments. These management control systems provided sufficient, timely information with... View Details

Keywords: by Louis T. Wells & Alvin G. Wint

December 2022
Case

Taylor Farms: Adding Value to Fresh Produce

By: José B. Alvarez, Forest L. Reinhardt, Jenyfeer Martinez Buitrago and Pedro Levindo

In October 2022, Bruce Taylor (HBS MBA, 1981), Chairman and CEO of Taylor Farms, the leading producer of salads and healthy fresh foods in the United States, wondered whether this was the right time for Taylor Farms to venture into the Controlled Environment... View Details

Keywords: Technology Adoption; Cost vs Benefits; Logistics; Environmental Sustainability; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry

01 May 2017
Research & Ideas

Bad At Your Job? Maybe It's the Job’s Fault

not intuitive for managers. So Simons created a solution: a free online job design optimization tool that allows companies to plug in information about a particular job to test whether the person in that role is getting the right mix of... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

26 Jun 2017
Research & Ideas

How Cellophane Changed the Way We Shop for Food

development of self-service merchandising systems in American grocery stores, but also revealing how cellophane manufacturers tried to control the narrative of how women buy food. “Cellophane changed how people shopped,” says Ai Hisano,... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Food & Beverage; Retail; Advertising

November 2018 (Revised April 2019)
Case

Zespri Grows

By: David E. Bell and Natalie Kindred

Controlling about a third of global kiwifruit exports by volume and nearly half by value in 2018, Zespri was a grower-owned “corporatized cooperative” with the exclusive right to export New Zealand-grown kiwifruit (except to Australia). Zespri did not grow fruit but... View Details

Research Summary

The Corporate Governance Role of Taxes

Dyck introduces evidence that private benefits of control are higher in countries with poor tax enforcement and in ongoing work explores further this correlation using both theory and empirical work from the United States and Russia. This work illustrates that the... View Details

01 Feb 2016
Research & Ideas

CEOs and Coaches: How Important is Organizational 'Fit?'

laboratory to study coach-team matching effects. Clear-cut measures of team performance and precise employment records are publicly available, and the set of teams vying for coaches’ services is comparatively small. Controlling for coach... View Details

Keywords: by Boris Groysberg & Abhijit Naik; Sports

August 2022
Case

Rocket Learning: Evidence in Action

By: Brian Trelstad, Tomas Rosales and Malini Sen

Founders of Rocket Learning, an India-based nonprofit which focused on early childhood education (ECE), received an invitation from MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (JPAL), a development research organization, to test its intervention for ECE with a... View Details

Keywords: Social Entrepreneurship; Early Childhood Education; Nonprofit Organizations; Literacy; Values and Beliefs; Social and Collaborative Networks; Education Industry; India; Asia

April 2017
Case

Planetary Resources Inc., Property Rights, and the Regulation of the Space Economy

By: Matthew Weinzierl and Angela Acocella

Planetary Resources, Inc. (PRI) had a bold, some said crazy, vision: to mine asteroids. One might have assumed that developing the right technology would be the greatest challenge facing PRI. But even if the fledgling company could develop and deploy the sophisticated... View Details

Keywords: Property; Rights; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Aerospace Industry; Mining Industry

March 2016 (Revised May 2017)
Case

Emaar: The Center of Tomorrow, Today

By: Sid Yog, Esel Cekin and Marc Homsy

Starting in 1997, Mohammad Alabbar, Chairman of Emaar, has been largely associated with Dubai's most renowned real estate projects: the world's tallest building, largest mall and biggest fountain show. Emaar's pioneering success attracted a large number of private... View Details

Keywords: Middle East; Market Entry and Exit; Competitive Strategy; Entrepreneurship; Global Strategy; Real Estate Industry; Middle East; Dubai

December 2010 (Revised March 2015)
Case

The Wright Brothers and Their Flying Machines

By: Tom Nicholas and David Chen

Wilbur (1867-1912) and Orville (1871-1948) Wright were fascinated by the mystery of flight and they built on the ideas of prominent earlier figures such as Octave Chanute (1832-1910) the French-born American who was influential in fostering the free exchange of ideas... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Business History; Technological Innovation; Patents; Knowledge Sharing; Air Transportation; Air Transportation Industry; Europe; United States

2021
Article

Fundraising for Stigmatized Groups: A Text Message Donation Experiment

By: Katerina Linos, Laura Jakli and Melissa Carlson

As government welfare programming contracts and NGOs increasingly assume core aid functions, they must address a long-standing challenge—that people in need often belong to stigmatized groups. To study other-regarding behavior, we fielded an experiment through a... View Details

Keywords: Demographics; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; Communication Strategy; Civil Society or Community; Non-Governmental Organizations; Welfare; Greece

Article

Toward Resource Independence—Why State-Owned Entities Become Multinationals: An Empirical Study of India's Public R&D Laboratories

By: Prithwiraj Choudhury and Tarun Khanna

In this paper, we build on the standard resource dependence theory and its departure suggested by Vernon to offer a novel explanation for why state-owned entities (SOEs) might seek a global footprint and global cash flows: to achieve resource independence from... View Details

Keywords: Multinational Firms and Management; Resource Allocation; Supply Chain; State Ownership; Growth and Development Strategy; India

Find at Harvard

2008
Working Paper

Opening Platforms: How, When and Why?

By: Thomas R. Eisenmann, Geoffrey Parker and Marshall Van Alstyne

Platform-mediated networks encompass several distinct types of participants, including end users, complementors, platform providers who facilitate users' access to complements, and sponsors who develop platform technologies. Each of these roles can be opened-that... View Details

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Governance Controls; Market Participation; Digital Platforms

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March 2016
Teaching Plan

Emaar: The Center of Tomorrow, Today

By: Sid Yog, Esel Cekin and Marc Homsy

Starting in 1997, Mohammad Alabbar, Chairman of Emaar, has been largely associated with Dubai's most renowned real estate projects: the world's tallest building, largest mall and biggest fountain show. Emaar's pioneering success attracted a large number of private... View Details

Keywords: Middle East; United Arab Emirates; Egypt; Dubai; Real Estate; Finance; Emaar; Public Real Estate Company; Market Entry and Exit; Competitive Strategy; Financial Condition; Entrepreneurship; Global Strategy; Real Estate Industry; Dubai

2009
Chapter

Opening Platforms: When, How and Why?

By: Thomas R. Eisenmann, Geoffrey Parker and Marshall Van Alstyne

Platform-mediated networks encompass several distinct types of participants, including end users, complementors, platform providers who facilitate users' access to complements, and sponsors who develop platform technologies. Each of these roles can be opened-that... View Details

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Governance Controls; Market Participation; Digital Platforms

Article

The Learning Effects of Monitoring

By: Dennis Campbell, Marc Epstein and F. Asis Martinez-Jerez

This paper investigates the relationship between monitoring, decision making, and learning among lower-level employees. We exploit a field-research setting in which business units vary in the "tightness" with which they monitor employee decisions. We find that tighter... View Details

Keywords: Learning; Business or Company Management; Decision Making; Employees; Research; Resignation and Termination; Rights; Business Units; Governance Controls; Performance; Motivation and Incentives