Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(1,400)
- Faculty Publications (293)
- February 2020
- Article
Being 'Good' or 'Good Enough': Prosocial Risk and the Structure of Moral Self-regard
By: Julian Zlatev, Daniella M. Kupor, Kristin Laurin and Dale T. Miller
The motivation to feel moral powerfully guides people’s prosocial behavior. We propose that people’s efforts to preserve their moral self-regard conform to a moral threshold model. This model predicts that people are primarily concerned with whether their... View Details
- 2021
- Working Paper
Impact Investing: A Theory of Financing Social Enterprises
By: Benjamin N. Roth
I present a model of financing social enterprises to delineate the role of impact investors relative to “pure” philanthropists. I characterize the optimal scale and structure of a social enterprise when financed by grants, and when financed by investments. Impact... View Details
- January 2020 (Revised December 2024)
- Case
Governing PG&E
By: Lynn S. Paine and Will Hurwitz
The five commissioners of the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) listened intently at a public forum in April 2019 as PG&E Corporation’s out-going chairman Richard Kelly described the company’s proposed new board. PG&E, which provided electricity and natural... View Details
Keywords: Bankruptcy; Board Of Directors; Board Dynamics; Business Ethics; Business Model Innovation; Corporate Boards; Energy Efficiency; Environmental And Social Sustainability; Government And Business; Hedge Funds; Institutional Investors; Legal Aspects Of Business; Regulated Monopolies; Regulation; Shareholders; Stakeholder Management; Strategy And Execution; Utilities; Insolvency and Bankruptcy; Governing and Advisory Boards; Ethics; Capital Structure; Climate Change; Corporate Accountability; Corporate Governance; Environmental Sustainability; Executive Compensation; Leadership; Management; Safety; Business and Government Relations; Energy Industry; Utilities Industry; California; United States
- 2020
- Book
Competing in the Age of AI: Strategy and Leadership When Algorithms and Networks Run the World
By: Marco Iansiti and Karim R. Lakhani
In industry after industry, data, analytics, and AI-driven processes are transforming the nature of work. While we often still treat AI as the domain of a specific skill, business function, or sector, we have entered a new era in which AI is challenging the very... View Details
- December 2019
- Article
Costly Concessions: An Empirical Framework for Matching with Imperfectly Transferable Utility
By: Alfred Galichon, Scott Duke Kominers and Simon Weber
We introduce an empirical framework for models of matching with imperfectly transferable utility and unobserved heterogeneity in tastes. Our framework allows us to characterize matching equilibrium in a flexible way that includes as special cases the classic fully- and... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Cutting the Gordian Knot of Employee Health Care Benefits and Costs: A Corporate Model Built on Employee Choice
By: Regina E. Herzlinger and Barak D. Richman
The U.S. employer-based health insurance tax exclusion created a system of employer-sponsored insurance (ESI) with limited insurance choices and transparency that may lock employed households into health plans that are costlier or different from those they prefer to... View Details
- December 16, 2019
- Article
Why Your Startup Won't Last
By: Ranjay Gulati and Vasundhara Sawhney
Why do some startups that have crossed the threshold of “product-market fit” and have a viable business model still fail? This article begins by exploring the argument that most startups need more professionalization to thrive. Founders resist putting in place... View Details
- 2019
- Working Paper
Design Rules, Volume 2: How Technology Shapes Organizations: Chapter 8 Rationalizing Flow Processes
The purpose of this chapter is to examine the value structure of flow production processes and to explain why it is necessary to rationalize flow processes using the tools of systematic management. I first explain the problems facing managers of multi-step flow... View Details
- 2021
- Working Paper
The Value of Intermediation in the Stock Market
By: Marco Di Maggio, Mark Egan and Francesco Franzoni
We estimate a structural model of broker choice to quantitatively decompose the value that institutional investors attach to broker services. Studying over 300 million institutional equity trades, we find that investors are sensitive to both explicit and implicit... View Details
- August 2019 (Revised March 2022)
- Case
Family Matters: Governance at the Zamil Group
By: Christina R. Wing, Suraj Srinivasan and Esel Çekin
This case focuses on a large Saudi Arabian industrial conglomerate and family business Zamil Group’s corporate and family governance journey. The 12 sons of the founder led and grew the group successfully after taking over from their father in 1961. The secret to their... View Details
- August 2019
- Case
Twiggle: E-commerce with Semantic Search
By: Shane Greenstein and Danielle Golan
Four years after being founded, in 2014, by former Google executives Amir Konigsberg (CEO) and Adi Avidor (CTO), Twiggle had developed a search enhancement that plugged into an online merchant’s existing framework. The company utilized advanced structuring and... View Details
- July 2019
- Article
Optimal Capital Structure and Bankruptcy Choice: Dynamic Bargaining vs Liquidation
By: Samuel Antill and Steven R. Grenadier
We model a firm’s optimal capital structure decision in a framework in which it may later choose to enter either Chapter 11 reorganization or Chapter 7 liquidation. Creditors anticipate equityholders’ ex-post reorganization incentives and price them into the ex-ante... View Details
- Article
'Matter Battles': Cognitive Representations, Boundary Objects, and the Failure of Collaboration in Two Smart Cities
By: Tiona Zuzul
In this paper, I present a longitudinal study of two smart city projects that brought together experts from diverse knowledge domains. Both projects structured collaboration around the development of boundary objects that could integrate actors’ expertise. In both... View Details
- June 2019
- Article
Brokers vs. Retail Investors: Conflicting Interests and Dominated Products
By: Mark Egan
I study how brokers distort household investment decisions. Using a novel convertible bond dataset, I find that consumers often purchase dominated bonds—cheap and expensive versions of otherwise identical bonds coexist in the market. The empirical evidence suggests... View Details
- April 2019 (Revised July 2019)
- Case
Aperture Investors
By: Krishna G. Palepu, George Serafeim and David Lane
Aperture Investors is a startup investment firm that seeks to disrupt the asset management industry through competitive differentiation by charging investors primarily when its portfolio managers outperform the marketplace. Headed by Wall Street veteran Peter Kraus and... View Details
- March 2019 (Revised March 2020)
- Case
Choosing the Right Esports Business Model
By: David Collis and Alexander MacKay
Two esports entrepreneurs must choose on which business model to focus their time and money. After successfully launching an online esports coaching platform, a number of new opportunities emerge in the rapidly growing esports space that now has close to one billion... View Details
Keywords: Entrepreneurial Ecosystems; Business Development; Esports; Business Ventures; Entrepreneurship; Business Model; Management; Strategy; Sports; Entertainment and Recreation Industry; Information Technology Industry; Media and Broadcasting Industry; Sports Industry; Video Game Industry; North and Central America; Europe; Asia
- March 2019
- Article
A Structural Analysis of the Role of Superstars in Crowdsourcing Contests
By: Shunyuan Zhang, Param Singh and Anindya Ghose
We investigate the long-term impact of competing against superstars in crowdsourcing contests. Using a unique 50-month longitudinal panel data set on 1677 software design crowdsourcing contests, we illustrate a learning effect where participants are able to improve... View Details
- March–April 2019
- Article
The Dual-Purpose Playbook
By: Julie Battilana, Anne-Claire Pache, Metin Sengul and Marissa Kimsey
Corporations are being pushed to dial down their single-minded pursuit of financial gain and pay closer attention to their impact on employees, customers, communities, and the environment. But changing an organization’s DNA may require upending the existing business... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Overcoming the Cold Start Problem of CRM Using a Probabilistic Machine Learning Approach
By: Eva Ascarza
The success of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) programs ultimately depends on the firm's ability to understand consumers' preferences and precisely capture how these preferences may differ across customers. Only by understanding customer heterogeneity, firms can... View Details
- February 2019
- Teaching Note
Haier in the U.S.: Transforming GE Appliances
By: Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Jonathan Cohen
Chinese appliance company Haier's 2016 acquisition of iconic GE Appliances ushered in strategic and structural changes to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship at the U.S. company, and to help it grow. Haier, which had a model designed to bring the company closer... View Details