Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(1,683)
- Faculty Publications (304)
- July 2016
- Article
Do Prices Determine Vertical Integration?
By: Laura Alfaro, Paola Conconi, Harald Fadinger and Andrew F. Newman
What is the relationship between product prices and vertical integration? While the literature has focused on how integration affects prices, this paper provides evidence that prices can affect integration. Many theories in organizational economics and industrial... View Details
- 2016
- Working Paper
Entrepreneurs and the Co-Creation of Ecotourism in Costa Rica
By: Geoffrey Jones and Andrew Spadafora
Between the 1970s and the 2000s, Costa Rica became established as the world’s leading ecotourism destination. This working paper suggests that although Costa Rica benefited from biodiversity and a pleasant climate, the country’s preeminence in ecotourism requires more... View Details
- June 2016
- Case
Suominen Wipes the Slate Clean
By: Boris Groysberg, Kalle Heikkinen and Michael Norris
In 2016, after successfully turning around Finnish nonwovens manufacturer Suominen, CEO Nina Kopola faces a decision on the company’s strategy moving forward. View Details
- 2016
- Chapter
Navigating Natural Monopolies: Market Strategy and Nonmarket Challenges in Radio and Television Audience Measurement Markets
By: Hillary Greene and Dennis Yao
This paper explores how firms within the audience measurement industry, specifically its radio and television markets, have navigated myriad market and nonmarket challenges. The market strategies and the nonmarket forces that constrain those strategies are largely... View Details
- 2016
- Working Paper
The Mirroring Hypothesis: Theory, Evidence and Exceptions
By: Lyra J. Colfer and Carliss Y. Baldwin
The mirroring hypothesis predicts that organizational ties within a project, firm, or group of firms (e.g., communication, collocation, employment) will correspond to the technical patterns of dependency in the work being performed. A thorough understanding of the... View Details
Keywords: Modularity; Innovation; Product And Process Development; Organization Design; Design Structure; Organizational Ties; Mirroring Hypothesis; Industry Architecture; Product Architecture; Complex Technical Systems; Information Technology; Organizational Design; Organizational Structure; Relationships; Innovation and Invention; Product Development
- 2019
- Working Paper
The Customer May Not Always Be Right: Customer Compatibility and Service Performance
This paper investigates the impact of customer compatibility – the degree of fit between the needs of customers and the capabilities of the operations serving them – on customer experiences and firm performance. We use a variance decomposition analysis to quantify the... View Details
- February 2016
- Article
Bridging Science and Technology Through Academic-Industry Partnerships
By: Sen Chai and Willy C. Shih
Partnerships that foster the translation of scientific advances emerging from academic research organizations into commercialized products at private firms are a policy tool that has attracted increased interest. This paper examines empirical data from the Danish... View Details
- 2016
- Article
Do External Labor Market Job Switches Affect the Gender Compensation Gap?
By: Boris Groysberg, Paul M. Healy and Eric Lin
This paper investigates how external mobility influences the gender compensation gap for job switching executives. Using proprietary data for 2,034 executive placements from a global search firm, we find job switching narrows the gender gap by 45%, from 11% to 6%. We... View Details
- 2015
- Working Paper
Business Groups Exist in Developed Markets Also: Britain Since 1850
By: Geoffrey Jones
Diversified business groups are well-known phenomena in emerging markets, both today and historically. This is often explained by the prevalence of institutional voids or the nature of government-business relations. It is typically assumed that such groups were much... View Details
- 2015
- Working Paper
The Integrity of Private Third-party Compliance Monitoring
By: Jodi L. Short and Michael W. Toffel
Government agencies are increasingly turning to private, third-party monitors to inspect and assess regulated entities’ compliance with law. The integrity of these regulatory regimes rests on the validity of the information third-party monitors provide to regulators.... View Details
Keywords: Regulation; Compliance; Compliance Policies; Conflict Of Interest; Independent Third Party; Inspection; Audit Quality; Auditor; Audit; Environment; Production; Supply Chain; Quality; Government Administration; Working Conditions; Safety; Labor; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Governance Compliance; Manufacturing Industry; Manufacturing Industry; Manufacturing Industry; Manufacturing Industry; United States
- October 22, 2015
- Article
The Mayo Clinic Model for Running a Value-Improvement Program
By: Robert S. Kaplan, Derek A. Haas, Richard A. Helmers, March Rucci and Meredith Brady
Applying time-driven activity-based costing (TDABC) in health care cannot be delegated to the finance function. The most successful implementations have had strong executive support, exceptional clinical leaders, and dedicated, multi-disciplinary project teams. The... View Details
- Article
Reaching for Yield in the Bond Market
By: Bo Becker and Victoria Ivashina
Reaching for yield—the propensity to buy riskier assets in order to achieve higher yields—is believed to be an important factor contributing to the credit cycle. This paper analyzes this phenomenon in the corporate bond market. Specifically, we show evidence for... View Details
- Fall 2015
- Article
Doing Well by Doing Good? Community Development Venture Capital
By: Josh Lerner and Anna Kovner
This paper examines the investments and performance of community development venture capital (CDVC). We find substantial differences between CDVC and traditional venture capital (VC) investments: CDVC investments are far more likely to be in nonmetropolitan regions and... View Details
- Article
The Economy of Fear: H.P. Lovecraft on Eugenics, Economics and the Great Depression
The early twentieth-century weird writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft is today best remembered for his genre defining style of academic noir pulp fiction. Yet in focusing on certain tropes of his work, such as the many memorable monsters he created to populate his... View Details
- April 2015
- Article
Incentivizing Calculated Risk-Taking: Evidence from an Experiment with Commercial Bank Loan Officers
By: Shawn Cole, Martin Kanz and Leora Klapper
This paper uses a series of experiments with commercial bank loan officers to test the effect of performance incentives on risk assessment and lending decisions. We first show that while high-powered incentives lead to greater screening effort and more profitable... View Details
- 2015
- Working Paper
Can Marshall's Clusters Survive Globalization?
By: Giulio Buciuni and Gary P. Pisano
It is widely presumed that in today's globalized economy, the value of geographic clustering of manufacturing industries is no longer valuable. Manufacturing is represented as a highly mobile "commodity" that can be sourced from anywhere in the world where factor costs... View Details
- 2015
- Working Paper
Informal Tradables and the Employment Growth of Indian Manufacturing
By: Ejaz Ghani, William R. Kerr and Alexander Segura
India's manufacturing growth from 1989 to 2010 displays two intriguing properties: 1) a substantial fraction of absolute and net employment growth is concentrated in informal tradable industries, and 2) much of this growth is connected to the development of one-person... View Details
- February 2015
- Article
Location Choices under Strategic Interactions
By: Juan Alcacer, Cristian Dezso and Minyuan Zhao
The literature on location choices has mostly emphasized the impact of location and firm characteristics. However, most industries with a significant presence of multi-location firms are oligopolistic in nature, which suggests that strategic interaction among firms... View Details
- 2015
- Working Paper
Client Service, Compensation, and the Sell-Side Analyst Objective Function: An Empirical Analysis of Relational Incentives in the Investment-Research Industry
By: David A. Maber, Boris Groysberg and Paul M. Healy
This paper investigates how sell-side analysts build and sustain their client networks; the economic gains to successfully managing this challenge; and the metrics through which these incentives are delivered. In a typical semiannual period, the average analyst... View Details
- December 2014
- Article
Clusters, Convergence, and Economic Performance
By: Mercedes Delgado, Michael E. Porter and Scott Stern
This paper evaluates the role of regional cluster composition in regional industry performance. On the one hand, diminishing returns to specialization in a location can result in a convergence effect: the growth rate of an industry within a region may be declining in... View Details