Publications

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September 1992 (Revised July 1994)
Case

MEM Company, Inc.: English Leather

By: Frank V. Cespedes and Laura Goode

In 1992, the president of MEM (a producer of personal care products, including men's fragrances) considered a redeployment of field sales efforts and changes in sales compensation policies. Any changes, moreover, must consider the context of strategic decisions... View Details

Keywords: Change Management; Decision Choices and Conditions; Brands and Branding; Product Positioning; Consumer Behavior; Distribution Channels; Business Strategy; Consumer Products Industry

05 Jul 2006
Working Paper Summaries

A Survey-Based Procedure for Measuring Uncertainty or Heterogeneous Preferences in Markets

Keywords: by Pai-Ling Yin; Technology; Web Services

16 Mar 2023
Research & Ideas

Why Business Travel Still Matters in a Zoom World

work-from-anywhere, we still need to occasionally meet colleagues in person for social purposes.” Marrying flight and patent data Choudhury and colleagues examined flights from every airport worldwide—5,015... View Details

Keywords: by Kara Baskin; Air Transportation

09 Dec 2019
Research & Ideas

Identify Great Customers from Their First Purchase

“You pick up cues from the person’s behavior, including what the person is wearing, how they treat the other people in the place, how the person treats you, what comments they make, etc. Similarly, the View Details

Keywords: by Kristen Senz; Retail; Service

15 Sep 2022
Research & Ideas

Looking For a Job? Some LinkedIn Connections Matter More Than Others

strength impacted the likelihood of finding a job at a connection's employer. They then examined a larger experiment from 2019 on 16 million members, creating 2 billion new connections and observing 70 million job applications. “We used this experimental View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

2014
Working Paper

Digital Discrimination: The Case of Airbnb.com

By: Benjamin Edelman and Michael Luca

Online marketplaces often contain information not only about products, but also about the people selling the products. In an effort to facilitate trust, many platforms encourage sellers to provide personal profiles and even to post pictures of themselves. However,... View Details

Keywords: Prejudice and Bias; Internet and the Web; Race; Trust; Renting or Rental; Accommodations Industry; Real Estate Industry

SSRN

January 2004 (Revised July 2007)
Case

Lumen and Absorb Teams at Crutchfield Chemical Engineering, The

By: Teresa M. Amabile and Elizabeth Schatzel

Large discrepancies have developed between two elite technology development teams at Crutchfield Chemical Engineering in terms of motivation and creativity. To investigate, Paul Burke, director of corporate technology development, commissioned a study of the day-by-day... View Details

Keywords: Leadership; Managerial Roles; Projects; Groups and Teams; Behavior; Creativity; Motivation and Incentives

September 2017
Case

Sensing (and Monetizing) Happiness at Hitachi

By: Ethan Bernstein and Stephanie Marton

Inspired by research linking happiness and productivity, Hitachi had invested in developing new “people analytics” technologies to help companies increase employee happiness. Hitachi had begun manufacturing high-tech badges that quantify a wearer’s activity patterns.... View Details

Keywords: People Analytics; Japan; Sociometers; Wearables; Interpersonal Communication; Human Resources; Happiness; Technology Industry; Japan

November 1978 (Revised December 1979)
Case

Federal Express (C)

The Marketing Director for Federal Express, a fast growing freight airline specializing in small packages, must select a strategy to achieve a big sales increase for one of the company's services. First he must decide on the relative emphasis to place between... View Details

Keywords: Product Marketing; Sales; Air Transportation Industry; Service Industry; United States

Article

Conversational Receptiveness: Expressing Engagement with Opposing Views

By: M. Yeomans, J. Minson, H. Collins, H. Chen and F. Gino

We examine “conversational receptiveness”—the use of language to communicate one’s willingness to thoughtfully engage with opposing views. We develop an interpretable machine-learning algorithm to identify the linguistic profile of receptiveness (Studies 1A-B). We then... View Details

Keywords: Receptiveness; Natural Language Processing; Disagreement; Interpersonal Communication; Relationships; Conflict Management

January 2014
Article

Networks and Productivity: Causal Evidence from Editor Rotations

By: J. Brogaard, J. Engelberg and Christopher Parsons

Using detailed publication and citation data for over 50,000 articles from 30 major economics and finance journals, we investigate whether network proximity to an editor influences research productivity. During an editor's tenure, his current university colleagues... View Details

Keywords: Networks; Performance Productivity; Education Industry; Journalism and News Industry; Publishing Industry

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June 2013
Article

What Is Privacy Worth?

By: Alessandro Acquisti, Leslie K. John and George Loewenstein

Understanding the value that individuals assign to the protection of their personal data is of great importance for business, law, and public policy. We use a field experiment informed by behavioral economics and decision research to investigate individual privacy... View Details

Keywords: Safety; Rights; Valuation; Ethics; Identity

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18 May 2007
Working Paper Summaries

An Empirical Approach to Understanding Privacy Valuation

Keywords: by Luc Wathieu & Allan Friedman

March–April 2023
Article

Market Segmentation Trees

By: Ali Aouad, Adam Elmachtoub, Kris J. Ferreira and Ryan McNellis

Problem definition: We seek to provide an interpretable framework for segmenting users in a population for personalized decision making. Methodology/results: We propose a general methodology, market segmentation trees (MSTs), for learning market... View Details

Keywords: Decision Trees; Computational Advertising; Market Segmentation; Analytics and Data Science; E-commerce; Consumer Behavior; Marketplace Matching; Marketing Channels; Digital Marketing

2023
Working Paper

Who Invests in Crypto? Wealth, Financial Constraints, and Risk Attitudes

By: Darren Aiello, Scott R. Baker, Tetyana Balyuk, Marco Di Maggio, Mark J. Johnson and Jason Kotter

We provide a first look into the drivers of household cryptocurrency investing. Analyzing consumer transaction data for millions of U.S. households, we find that, except for high income early adopters, cryptocurrency investors resemble the general population. These... View Details

Keywords: Consumer Finance; Cryptocurrency; Fintech; Inflation; Portfolio Choice; Stimulus; Consumer Behavior; Risk and Uncertainty; Investment

SSRN

02 Aug 2022
Research & Ideas

6 Strategies for Building Socially Responsible—and Profitable—Companies

A dozen years ago, Harvard Business School Professor George Serafeim wondered why some companies operated with an eye toward the greater good, while most did not. Back then, he always got the same response: Corporate leaders thought social and environmental practices... View Details

Keywords: by Lane Lambert

July 1991 (Revised September 1995)
Case

Eastman Kodak Co.: Managing Information Systems Through Strategic Alliances

By: Lynda M. Applegate

In January 1988, Colby Chandler, Kodak CEO, created the Corporate Information Systems (CIS) and appointed Katherine Hudson head. She at once became the first head of IT and first woman corporate vice president in the company. Throughout 1989, Hudson inaugurated a... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Strategy; Information Technology; Partners and Partnerships; Organizational Structure; Success; Trends; Information Management; Service Operations; Manufacturing Industry