Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(1,901)
- Faculty Publications (245)
- 2018
- Working Paper
Platform Competition: Betfair and the U.K. Market for Sports Betting
By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Neil Campbell
We examine two episodes of strategic interaction in the U.K. betting industry: (i) Betfair (an entrant multi-sided platform or MSP) vs. Flutter (also an MSP), and (ii) Betfair vs. traditional bookmakers. We find that although Betfair was an underfunded second mover in... View Details
- 2018
- Working Paper
Design Rules, Volume 2: How Technology Shapes Organizations: Chapter 5 Complementarity
The purpose of this chapter is to relate the theory of task networks and technology set forth in previous chapters to theories of firm boundaries from economics and management. Complementary goods have more value when used together than separately. Complementarity may... View Details
Keywords: Complementarity
- 2018
- Chapter
Behavioral Household Finance
By: John Beshears, James J. Choi, David Laibson and Brigitte C. Madrian
This chapter provides an overview of household finance. The first part summarizes key facts regarding household financial behavior, emphasizing empirical regularities that are inconsistent with the standard classical economic model and discussing extensions of the... View Details
- September 26, 2018
- Article
Ownership and Power Structure: Together at Last
By: Laura Alfaro, Nicholas Bloom, Paola Conconi, Harald Fadinger, Patrick Legros, Andrew Newman, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen
Economists have largely ignored the deep interdependency between integration and delegation. This column describes a new theory of integration and delegation choices aimed at shedding light on how these distinct elements of organizational design interact. Contrary to... View Details
- September 2018 (Revised November 2018)
- Case
From Beirut With Love (A)
By: Christina R. Wing, Esel Y. Cekin and Samer Al-Rachedy
This case describes how Robert Fadel, CEO and chairman of ABC, one of Lebanon’s leading retail and real estate groups, professionalized the family business. Robert was the second son of the company’s founder, Maurice Fadel, who had run it single-handedly. Concerned... View Details
Keywords: Family Conflicts; Sibling Rivalry; Second-generation; Foundation; Trust; Work-life Balance; Succession Planning; Corporate Culture; Shareholders; Board Of Directors; Retail; Department Store; Shopping Mall; Real Estate; Growth; Non-executive Chairman; Sustainability; Family Business; Conflict Management; Management Succession; Governance; Leadership; Transformation; Leading Change; Organizational Structure; Management; Growth and Development; Retail Industry; Real Estate Industry; Lebanon; Middle East
- 2018
- Working Paper
Full Substitutability
By: John William Hatfield, Scott Duke Kominers, Alexandru Nichifor, Michael Ostrovsky and Alexander Westkamp
Various forms of substitutability are essential for establishing the existence of equilibria and other useful properties in diverse settings such as matching, auctions, and exchange economies with indivisible goods. We extend earlier models’ definitions of... View Details
- August 2018
- Case
Christine Lagarde
By: Julie Battilana, Carin-Isabel Knoop, Vanessa Ampelas and Noemie Assenat
For a modular presentation of the same material, please see “Christine Lagarde (A): A French Prime Minister Calls” (HBS No. 419-017), “Christine Lagarde (B): Being a Public Servant” (HBS No. 419-018), and “Christine Lagarde (C): Managing the IMF” (HBS No. 419-019).... View Details
- July 2018
- Article
Marketplaces, Markets, and Market Design
By: Alvin E. Roth
Marketplaces are often small parts of large markets, and both markets and marketplaces come in many varieties. Market design seeks to understand what marketplaces must accomplish to enable different kinds of markets. Marketplaces can have varying degrees of success,... View Details
- Article
Good Markets (Really Do) Make Good Neighbors
This article gives a (very) brief exposition of what market design is, along with four examples of market design in action. Loosely themed after Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Wall,” the examples demonstrate ways in which market design can break barriers—physical,... View Details
- 2018
- Chapter
New Prospects for Organizational Democracy?: How the Joint Pursuit of Social and Financial Goals Challenges Traditional Organizational Designs
By: Julie Battilana, Michael Fuerstein and Michael Lee
For an extended period during the first half of the 20th century, industrial democracy was a vibrant movement, with ideological and organizational ties to a thriving unionism. In 2015, however, things look different. While there are instances of democracy in the... View Details
- February 2018
- Article
Laboratory Evidence on the Effects of Sponsorship on the Competitive Preferences of Men and Women
By: Nancy R. Baldiga and Katherine Baldiga Coffman
Sponsorship programs have been proposed as one way to promote female advancement in competitive career fields. A sponsor is someone who advocates for a protégé, and in doing so, takes a stake in her success. We use a laboratory experiment to explore two channels... View Details
- Article
(Mis)perceptions of Inequality
By: Oliver P. Hauser and Michael I. Norton
Inequality is arguably the defining societal issue of the 21st century. The debate over “who gets what’ underlies policy debates ranging from taxation to health care to wages and permeates society at all levels, attracting increasing interest from policymakers,... View Details
- Article
An Invitation to Market Design
By: Scott Duke Kominers, Alexander Teytelboym and Vincent P. Crawford
Market design seeks to translate economic theory and analysis into practical solutions to real-world problems. By redesigning both the rules that guide market transactions and the infrastructure that enables those transactions to take place, market designers can... View Details
Keywords: Matching; Trading; Scrip; Liquidity; Efficiency; Equity; Allocation Rules; Marketplaces; Market Design; Marketplace Matching; Auctions
- October 2017
- Case
Shift Technologies, Inc.
By: Thomas Eisenmann and Nicole Tempest Keller
In 2017, management at Shift, an online marketplace that uses a “high touch,” concierge approach to buy and sell used cars, was formulating plans for the San Francisco–based startup’s next phase of expansion. One option was to preserve Shift’s current business model... View Details
- 2017
- Working Paper
Biased Beliefs About Random Samples: Evidence from Two Integrated Experiments
By: Daniel J. Benjamin, Don A. Moore and Matthew Rabin
This paper describes results of a pair of incentivized experiments on biases in judgments about random samples. Consistent with the Law of Small Numbers (LSN), participants exaggerated the likelihood that short sequences and random subsets of coin flips would be... View Details
- July 2017 (Revised November 2017)
- Case
Propel
By: Mitchell Weiss and Sarah McAra
In 2014, Jimmy Chen, a former product manager at Facebook, founded the start-up Propel to build software for low-income Americans. After conducting in-depth behavioral research, Chen and his small team in New York City began to develop technology to address the... View Details
Keywords: Public Entrepreneurship; Govtech; Food Stamps; EBT; Mobile App; User Research; Financial Services Referrals; Grocery Marketing; Customer Discovery; Social Entrepreneurship; Entrepreneurship; Public Sector; Business Model; Research; Social Enterprise; Poverty; Welfare; Mobile and Wireless Technology; Applications and Software; Technology Industry; United States
- July 2017 (Revised July 2024)
- Course Overview Note
Public Entrepreneurship
By: Mitchell Weiss
This course is rooted in the belief that there is a large opportunity for creating value and solving large public problems if there are more inventors and builders inside government and more inventors and builders outside government, building for it. The course was... View Details
- 2017
- Working Paper
Business History, the Great Divergence and the Great Convergence
By: Geoffrey Jones
This working paper provides a business history perspective on debates about the Great Divergence, the rise of the income gap between the West and the Rest, and the more recent Great Convergence, which has seen a narrowing of that gap. The literature on the timing and... View Details
- May 2017 (Revised July 2017)
- Supplement
Aadhaar: From Voluntary to Mandatory
By: Tarun Khanna, Anjali Raina and Rachna Chawla
Approximately 1.1 billion residents of India (99% of the population) had a unique biometric identity—Aadhaar—by 2017. In six years, the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) had achieved an unprecedented milestone in emerging and developed markets. The... View Details
Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Business and Government Relations; Emerging Markets; Information; Information Technology; Organizational Design; Infrastructure; Identity; Projects; Information Management; Government and Politics; Digital Platforms; Internet and the Web; Transformation; Society; Welfare; Social Issues; Private Sector; Public Sector; Information Technology Industry; Asia; India; New Delhi
- 2017
- Working Paper
Explaining the Vertical-to-Horizontal Transition in the Computer Industry
This paper seeks to explain the technological forces that led to the rise of vertically integrated corporations in the late 19th century and the opposing forces that led to a vertical-to-horizontal transition in the computer industry 100 years later. I first model the... View Details