Publications

Purchase

June 1983
Article

A Comparison of Tournaments and Contracts

By: Jerry R. Green and Nancy Stokey

Tournaments, reward structures based on rank order, are compared with individual contracts in a model with one risk-neutral principal and many risk-averse agents. Each agent's output is a stochastic function of his effort level plus an additive shock term that is... View Details

Keywords: Tournaments; Contracts

22 Mar 2013
Research & Ideas

Pulling Campbell’s Out of the Soup

thinking. But people aren't mind readers," Conant told a roomful of CEOs during the second Higher-Ambition CEO Leadership Conference, held at Harvard Business School in January. "I had to go out on... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman; Food & Beverage

01 Jun 2000
News

Of Dugouts and Sweatshops

students at the student-organized Leadership and Ethics Forum last March. Under Reich's review was a labor inspector's ruling that a batboy for the minor-league Savannah Cardinals be removed from his dream job because of View Details

Keywords: Eileen K. McCluskey

18 Aug 2010
Working Paper Summaries

The Role of Organizational Scope and Governance in Strengthening Private Monitoring

Keywords: by Lamar Pierce & Michael W. Toffel

July 2024
Article

The Passive-Ownership Share Is Double What You Think It Is

By: Alex Chinco and Marco Sammon

Each time a stock gets added to or dropped from a benchmark index, we ask: “How much money would have to be tracking that index to explain the huge spike in rebalancing volume we observe on reconstitution day?” While index funds held 16% of the US stock market in 2021,... View Details

Keywords: Indexing; Passive Investing; Exchange-traded Funds (ETFs); Russell Reconstitution Day; Trading Volume; Information-based Asset Pricing; Investment Funds; Asset Pricing

SSRN

2008
Working Paper

An Investigation of Earnings Management through Marketing Actions

By: Craig James Chapman and Thomas J. Steenburgh

Prior research hypothesizes managers use "real actions," including the reduction of discretionary expenditures, to manage earnings to meet or beat key benchmarks. This paper examines this hypothesis by testing how different types of marketing expenditures are used... View Details

Keywords: Performance Expectations; Earnings Management; Marketing Strategy; Financial Reporting; Brands and Branding; Food and Beverage Industry

SSRN

November 2006 (Revised March 2007)
Case

eDonkey--Deciding the Future of File Sharing

By: Felix Oberholzer-Gee

Sam Yagan, CEO of the upstart MetaMachine, Inc., received a letter from the Recording Industry Association of America, Inc. (RIAA) asking him to shut down eDonkey, MetaMachine's popular file-sharing system. In September 2005, more than 30 million users relied on... View Details

Keywords: Applications and Software; Crisis Management; Music Entertainment; Legal Liability; Copyright; Information Technology Industry; Music Industry; United States

2013
Working Paper

Competing by Restricting Choice: The Case of Search Platforms

By: Hanna Halaburda and Mikolaj Jan Piskorski

Seminal papers recommend that platforms in two-sided markets increase the number of complements available. We show that a two-sided platform can successfully compete by limiting the choice of potential matches it offers to its customers while charging higher prices... View Details

Keywords: Matching Platform; Indirect Network Effects; Limits To Network Effects; Decision Choices and Conditions; Network Effects; Two-Sided Platforms; Marketplace Matching; Competitive Strategy

SSRN

16 Mar 2009
Research & Ideas

When the Internet Runs Out of IP Addresses

The Internet is running out of room. Experts predict that in two or three years we will run out of Web addresses, so-called IP addresses, that can be assigned to new Internet-based sites and services. Each... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Telecommunications

11 Jan 2019
Blog Post

The ABCs of Recruiting at HBS

at HBS. Before we kick off the ABCs, let us introduce ourselves. We are HBS CPD – Harvard Business School Career & Professional Development. A – Aldrich. Aldrich Hall is one of our main academic... View Details

Forthcoming
Article

The Imperfect Intermediation of Money-Like Assets

By: Jeremy C. Stein and Jonathan Wallen

We study supply-and-demand effects in the U.S. Treasury bill market by comparing the returns on T-bills to the administered policy rate on the Federal Reserve’s reverse repurchase (RRP) facility. In spite of the arguably more money-like properties of an investment in... View Details

Keywords: Debt Securities; Demand and Consumers; Price

August 2007
Case

The Battle Of Union Square

Union Square Ventures, a Private Equity firm founded in 2003, filed a trademark infringement suit against Union Square Partners, another private equity firm founded in November 2006. Examines the possible impact that public litigation will have on the two firms. The... View Details

Keywords: Private Equity; Investment; Trademarks; Lawsuits and Litigation; Conflict Management; Reputation; Financial Services Industry

September 2009 (Revised December 2009)
Supplement

The Future of Iraq Project (B)

By: Noel Maurer and Sogomon Tarontsi

The first round of bidding on the rights to develop Iraq's oil field did not go as planned. All the bidding groups wanted to charge a fee per barrel that the Iraqi government considered too high. As a result, the Iraqi government conducted the auction a second time,... View Details

Keywords: Non-Renewable Energy; Foreign Direct Investment; Contracts; Auctions; Business and Government Relations; Energy Industry; Iraq

Purchase

September 2015 (Revised March 2017)
Case

Château Margaux (Abridged)

By: Elie Ofek, Eric E. Vogt and Robert J. Dolan

Château Margaux, one of only five prestigious estates in the Bordeaux Medoc wine region to have been classified as a "first-growth", is facing a host of strategic decisions in early 2013. Up until this point the estate had been selling two red wines, a first wine whose... View Details

Keywords: New Product Launch; Marketing Plan; Brand Management; Go To Market Strategy; Channels Of Distribution; Wine Industry; Marketing; Brands and Branding; Marketing Strategy; Distribution Channels; Product Launch; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Food and Beverage Industry; France

Educators

04 Aug 2006
What Do You Think?

What Happens When the Economics of Scarcity Meets the Economics of Abundance?

of scarcity has not been repealed by the digital Long Tail prices are set by demand, not the constraints of supply." Edward Hare opened an aspect View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

Fall 2020
Article

Christo and Jeanne‐Claude: The Negotiation of Art and Vice Versa

By: Michael A. Wheeler

Over the past two decades the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School (PON) has named thirteen people as Great Negotiators. The project, directed by my colleague Jim Sebenius, has given us the opportunity to commend our honorees’ outstanding work and to learn from... View Details

Keywords: Art; Negotiation; Arts

May 2007
Article

Corporate Financing Decisions When Investors Take the Path of Least Resistance

By: Malcolm Baker, Joshua Coval and Jeremy Stein

We explore the consequences for corporate financial policy that arise when investors exhibit inertial behavior. One implication of investor inertia is that, all else equal, a firm pursuing a strategy of equity-financed growth will prefer a stock-for-stock merger to... View Details

Keywords: Behavior; Investment; Policy; Corporate Finance

2005
Other Unpublished Work

Corporate Financing Decisions When Investors Take the Path of Least Resistance

By: Malcolm Baker, Joshua Coval and Jeremy Stein

We explore the consequences for corporate financial policy that arise when investors exhibit inertial behavior. One implication of investor inertia is that, all else equal, a firm pursuing a strategy of equity-financed growth will prefer a stock-for-stock merger to... View Details

Keywords: Decisions; Behavior; Stocks; Mergers and Acquisitions; Policy; Investment; Financial Institutions; Equity; Corporate Finance