Publications

Educators

March 2024
Case

Expanding the Bicester Collection to New York

By: Boris Vallee, Kirby Brand, Kristina Brown, Julie McCrimlisk, Chloe Sztabnik and Arthur Segel

Secretariat, if anyone remembers, won the triple crown at the Belmont Race Track on Long Island, located at the nexus of La Guardia, JFK Airports, the Long Island Railroad and multiple major highways. Belmont Race Track is now being rebuilt along with an adjacent UBS... View Details

Keywords: Consumer Behavior; Urban Development; Brands and Branding; Entertainment and Recreation Industry; Sports Industry; Retail Industry; New York (state, US)

Educators

September 2018
Article

Religious Shoppers Spend Less Money

By: Didem Kurt, J. Jeffrey Inman and Francesca Gino

Although religion is a central aspect of life for many people across the globe, there is scant research on how religion affects people’s non-religious routines. In the present research, we identify a frequent consumption activity that is influenced by religiosity:... View Details

Keywords: Religion; Spending; Consumer Behavior; Values and Beliefs

Find at Harvard

April 2020
Supplement

Luvo (B)

By: José B. Alvarez and Natalie Kindred

This case, a follow on to HBS No. 517-049 "Luvo," provides a brief look at changes that have occurred at Luvo, now called Performance Kitchen, since the timing of the first case (mid-2016). Set in January 2020, “Luvo (B)” touches on developments such as the company's... View Details

Keywords: Consumer Behavior; Health; Health Care and Treatment; Nutrition; Food; Strategy; Product Positioning; Product Marketing; Consumer Products Industry; Consumer Products Industry; Consumer Products Industry; Consumer Products Industry; United States; Canada

October 2022
Exercise

Shanty Real Estate: Confidential Information for Homebuyer 1

By: Michael Luca, Jesse M. Shapiro and Nathan Sun

Shanty is a simulation in which students inhabit the role of either a traditional home buyer or an iBuyer, both bidding on the same condo. The traditional home buyer has access to a “comp sheet” of similar properties that have recently sold, and has done a walkthrough.... View Details

Keywords: Data-driven Decision-making; Decisions; Negotiation; Bids and Bidding; Valuation; Consumer Behavior; Real Estate Industry

2019
Working Paper

Managing Churn to Maximize Profits

By: Aurelie Lemmens and Sunil Gupta

Customer defection threatens many industries, prompting companies to deploy targeted, proactive customer retention programs and offers. A conventional approach has been to target customers either based on their predicted churn probability, or their responsiveness to a... View Details

Keywords: Churn Management; Defection Prediction; Loss Function; Stochastic Gradient Boosting; Customer Relationship Management; Consumer Behavior; Profit

SSRN

March 2011
Supplement

Cree, Inc.: An Update

By: David J. Collis and Mary Furey

An update to "Cree Inc.: Which Bright Future?" View Details

Keywords: Disruptive Innovation; Consumer Behavior; Strategy; Technology Adoption; Electronics Industry

2022
Working Paper

The Routledge Handbook of Digital Consumption, Chapter 41: The Internet’s Effects on Consumption: Useful, Harmful, Playful

By: John A. Deighton and Leora Kornfeld

This chapter considers how digital culture has changed over the past decade, as the internet has grown its scope and user base. Billions around the world connect daily to an ever-expanding set of applications. A framework for thinking about digital effects is offered:... View Details

Keywords: Digital Culture; Internet and the Web; Consumer Behavior; Society

01 Mar 2008
News

Innovation, Inc.

complementary producers, distribution channels, and consumers must often develop new capabilities, beliefs, and behaviors for the product to succeed, creating a challenge for the innovator.” Tripsas has... View Details

Keywords: Julia Hanna; Mary Tripsas; Colleges, Universities, and Professional Schools; Educational Services; Management

21 Mar 2004
Research & Ideas

Loyalty: Don’t Give Away the Store

Frequent shopping programs that reward customers with discounts or other perks are commonplace in grocery stores, but many are not as effective in influencing buying behavior as they could be, argues HBS professor Rajiv Lal. "The... View Details

Keywords: by Manda Salls; Consumer Products; Consumer Products

2023
Working Paper

No Mask, No Service: Customer Reaction to Walmart’s 2020 National Mask Mandate

By: Innessa Colaiacovo

Multi-location firms face a complex series of economic tradeoffs when deciding whether to implement standard processes or allow processes to vary across establishments. One element of this tradeoff is customer response. This paper explores customer reaction to a... View Details

Keywords: Consumer Behavior; Geographic Location; Policy; Health Pandemics; Retail Industry; United States

January–February 2018
Article

Some Customers Would Rather Leave Without Saying Goodbye

By: Eva Ascarza, Oded Netzer and Bruce G.S. Hardie

We investigate the increasingly common business setting in which companies face the possibility of both observed and unobserved customer attrition (i.e., “overt” and “silent” churn) in the same pool of customers. This is the case for many online-based services where... View Details

Keywords: Churn; Retention; Attrition; Customer Base Analysis; Hidden Markov Models; Latent Variable Models; Customer Relationship Management; Consumer Behavior

Find at Harvard

September 2008
Teaching Note

Harrington Collection: Sizing Up the Active-Wear Market (Brief Case)

By: Richard S. Tedlow and Heather Beckham

Keywords: Breakeven Analysis; Product Introduction; Analysis; Consumer Behavior; Profit; Product Launch

October 2008 (Revised August 2010)
Case

The Christmas Eve Closing

By: Peter Tufano

In 2002, two homeowners in Massachusetts are deciding whether to refinance their home less than two years after taking out an initial mortgage and a subsequent home equity line of credit. View Details

Keywords: Mortgages; Personal Finance; Consumer Behavior; Banking Industry; Massachusetts

Educators

15 Feb 2022
News

Charlotte Club Hosts Webinar to Mark 100 Years of the Case Method

developed our courses,” said Bower. “The field of marketing developed around case writing in retail and consumer goods companies. The field of management accounting developed from cases on the use of numbers for managers to use for... View Details

Keywords: Margie Kelley

02 Nov 2020
What Do You Think?

Is Antitrust Just a Quaint Notion in the Digital Age?

Joel put it, “Though I get the point that their behavior excludes competitors, the consumer would seem to benefit for now. What I wonder is why there is not more aggressive enforcement where the View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett; Consumer Products; Consumer Products; Consumer Products; Consumer Products; Consumer Products; Consumer Products

01 Sep 2020
News

Action Plan: Finding Fluency

trying to be disciplined about a marketing calendar with 16-week lead times,” Dunaway recalls. Plans for April Fool’s Day and Olympics-related campaigns went out the window. “We had to ask: What are the needs that consumers have right now... View Details

Keywords: April White; foreign language; education and technology; digital marketing; change management; COVID-19; Educational Services

2025
Working Paper

A Preference for Revision Absent Improvement

By: Ximena Garcia-Rada, Leslie K. John, Ed O’Brien and Michael I. Norton

People regularly encounter revised stimuli (e.g., revised versions of products, new editions of books, tweaked recipes, and technological updates). In principle, a world of constant revision should benefit people by affording them the most up-to-date offerings. In... View Details

Keywords: Product Change; Versioning; Expectancy Effects; Heuristics; Intuitive Processing; Product Marketing; Change; Perception; Consumer Behavior

SSRN