Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(733)
- Faculty Publications (199)
- 2017
- Chapter
Innovation Policies
By: Ramana Nanda and Matthew Rhodes-Kropf
Past work has shown that failure tolerance by principals has the potential to stimulate innovation, but has not examined how this affects which projects principals will start. We demonstrate that failure tolerance has an equilibrium price – in terms of an investor’s... View Details
- Article
Beyond the Target Customer: Social Effects in CRM Campaigns
By: Eva Ascarza, Peter Ebbes, Oded Netzer and Matthew Danielson
Customer relationship management (CRM) campaigns have traditionally focused on maximizing the profitability of the targeted customers. The authors demonstrate that in business settings characterized by network externalities, a CRM campaign that is aimed at changing the... View Details
- 2018
- Working Paper
Coordination Frictions in Venture Capital Syndicates
By: Ramana Nanda and Matthew Rhodes-Kropf
An extensive literature on venture capital has studied asymmetric information and agency problems between investors and entrepreneurs, examining how separating entrepreneurs from the investor can create frictions that might inhibit the funding of good projects. It has... View Details
- 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
- April 2017
- Article
Financing Risk and Innovation
By: Ramana Nanda and Matthew Rhodes-Kropf
We provide a model of investment into new ventures that demonstrates why some places, times, and industries should be associated with a greater degree of experimentation by investors. Investors respond to financing risk―a forecast of limited future funding―by modifying... View Details
- March 2017
- Case
Swagbucks
By: Jeffrey F. Rayport and Matthew G. Preble
In early 2016, Chuck Davis, chairman and CEO of Prodege LLC, parent company of the brand promotion business Swagbucks, and Josef Gorowitz, Prodege’s founder and president, must decide whether to acquire MyPoints, a competitor to Swagbucks, after the company’s... View Details
Keywords: Loyalty Management; Scaling; Scale; Entrepreneurship; Human Resources; Employees; Employee Relationship Management; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Culture; Organizational Design; Leading Change; Growth Management; Religion; Technology; Online Technology; Internet; Transition; Leadership; Web Services Industry; Technology Industry; United States
- Article
No Unique Effect of Intergroup Competition on Cooperation: Non-competitive Thresholds Are as Effective as Competitions between Groups for Increasing Human Cooperative Behavior
By: Matthew R. Jordan, Jillian J. Jordan and David G. Rand
Explaining cooperation remains a central topic for evolutionary theorists. Many have argued that group selection provides such an explanation: theoretical models show that intergroup competition could have given rise to cooperation that is costly for the individual.... View Details
- December 2016
- Simulation
Venture Capital and Private Equity Game
By: Matthew Rhodes-Kropf, Josh Lerner, G. Felda Hardymon and Nathaniel Burbank
The Venture Capital and Private Equity Simulation enables groups of students to play the role of either an early or later stage private equity firm. Within the simulation, students raise funds, search for companies to invest in, complete deals, and manage a portfolio... View Details
- 18 Nov 2016
- Conference Presentation
Rawlsian Fairness for Machine Learning
By: Matthew Joseph, Michael J. Kearns, Jamie Morgenstern, Seth Neel and Aaron Leon Roth
Motivated by concerns that automated decision-making procedures can unintentionally lead to discriminatory behavior, we study a technical definition of fairness modeled after John Rawls' notion of "fair equality of opportunity". In the context of a simple model of... View Details
- October 2016 (Revised September 2017)
- Case
The CRISPR-Cas9 Quarrel
By: Richard G. Hamermesh and Matthew G. Preble
In mid-2016, the Broad Institute and the University of California, Berkeley were in the middle of a contentious patent dispute over which entity controlled a breakthrough gene editing technology called CRISPR-Cas9. With CRISPR-Cas9, scientists might soon be able to... View Details
- 2017
- Working Paper
A Welfarist Role for Nonwelfarist Rules: An Example with Envy
I propose and formalize an argument for why economists working in the welfarist normative tradition should include nonwelfarist principles in how they judge economic policy. The key idea behind this argument is that the world is too complex, and our ability to model it... View Details
- August 2016 (Revised August 2016)
- Teaching Note
Intrapreneurship at DaVita Healthcare Partners
By: Joseph B. Fuller and Matthew Preble
DaVita Healthcare Partners Inc. (DaVita) is one of the U.S.'s leading dialysis providers, a process whereby persons with end-stage renal disease (ESRD) are connected to a machine that performs the functions of a healthy kidney. Kent Thiry, DaVita's CEO, has expanded... View Details
- June 2016 (Revised February 2025)
- Course Overview Note
The Role of Government in Market Economies (RoGME)
- March 2016 (Revised May 2021)
- Case
Michael Milken: The Junk Bond King
By: Tom Nicholas and Matthew G. Preble
Michael Milken, an investment banker who dominated the junk bond market in the 1980s, was sentenced to jail in 1990 after pleading guilty to a number of securities and tax-related felonies. In the preceding decade, Milken had helped usher in a new wave of leveraged buy... View Details
Keywords: Junk Bonds; High-yield Bonds; Financial Innovation; Shareholder Value; Bonds; Capital; Capital Structure; Cost of Capital; Crime and Corruption; Entrepreneurship; Ethics; Finance; Investment Banking; Leveraged Buyouts; Mergers and Acquisitions; Ownership; Private Equity; Restructuring; United States
- 2016
- Working Paper
Popular Acceptance of Inequality Due to Innate Brute Luck and Support for Classical Benefit-Based Taxation
U.S. survey respondents' views on distributive justice are shown to differ in two specific, related ways from what is conventionally assumed in modern optimal tax research. A large share of respondents, and in some cases a large majority, resist the full equalization... View Details
- March 2016
- Module Note
Government Policy and Distributive Justice
This note introduces the second of two main modules in the HBS elective curriculum course, The Role of Government in Market Economies (RoGME). This module is focused on policies, such as taxes, that change the distribution of economic outcomes. Like the... View Details
- Article
Optimal Taxation When Children's Abilities Depend on Parents' Resources
By: Alexander Gelber and Matthew Weinzierl
Empirical research suggests that parents' economic resources affect their children's future earnings abilities. Optimal tax policy therefore treats future ability distributions as endogenous to current taxes. We model this endogeneity, calibrate the model to match... View Details
- February 2016
- Teaching Note
Astroscale, Space Debris, and Earth's Orbital Commons
- February 2016 (Revised May 2016)
- Case
Astroscale, Space Debris, and Earth's Orbital Commons
By: Matthew Weinzierl, Angela Acocella and Mayuka Yamazaki
An engineer and technology entrepreneur, Nobu Okada, had turned a mid-life crisis into a bold—some would say quixotic—quest to prevent a tragedy of the commons at the global scale. Namely, Okada believed the accumulation of debris in near-Earth orbital space posed a... View Details