Publications

December 2000 (Revised January 2002)
Background Note

Incentives and Controllability: A Note and Exercise

By: Brian J. Hall

Describes three performance measures for "plants" or businesses: cost centers, revenue centers, and profit centers. Discusses what should be done if a function outside of the "controllability" of the manager affects the performance measure and therefore compensation. View Details

Keywords: Factories, Labs, and Plants; Cost; Profit; Revenue; Compensation and Benefits; Managerial Roles; Performance Evaluation; Motivation and Incentives

2016
Chapter

Ignore, Avoid, Abandon, and Embrace: What Drives Firm Responses to Environmental Regulation?

By: David F. Drake and Robin L. Just

A regulator's ability to incentivize environmental improvement among firms is vital in achieving long-term sustainability. However, firms can and do respond to environmental regulation in a variety of ways: complying with its intent; avoiding the regulation by... View Details

Keywords: Sustainability; Environmental Operations; Regulation; Cost vs Benefits; For-Profit Firms; Operations; Environmental Sustainability

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13 Sep 2021
News

Manufacturers, Retailers Face Price Increases on Rising Transportation Costs, Says Economist

21 Jan 2020
News

China-based Fuyao Glass Considers Manufacturing in the U.S.

1980
Article

Consumer Impulse Purchase and Credit Card Usage: An Empirical Examination Using the Log Linear Model

By: Rohit Deshpandé and S. Krishnan

Most of the work in impulse purchase behavior has investigated the association of socioeconomic variables and unplanned purchases with equivocal results. This paper examines the interrelationship between impulse purchases, credit card usage, cost of items bought, and... View Details

Keywords: Consumer Behavior; Mathematical Methods; Credit Cards; Income

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July 1996 (Revised September 1998)
Case

Coming Soon: A Theater Near You

Designed to illustrate the complexity of buyer-seller arrangements in an established industry. When movie studios negotiate with theater operators to show new films, the costs to the studios of making the films are largely sunk. Similarly, the costs to the theaters of... View Details

Keywords: Competitive Advantage; Industry Structures; Film Entertainment; Entertainment and Recreation Industry; Motion Pictures and Video Industry

18 Aug 2014
News

Have a Better Idea To Improve Health Care?

Leemore S. Dafny

Leemore Dafny is the Bruce V. Rauner Professor of Business Administration and the Mary Ellen Jay and Jeffrey Jay Fellow at the Harvard Business School, and Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Dafny is an applied microeconomist whose... View Details

Keywords: health care

Web

The Five Forces - Institute For Strategy And Competitiveness

to retain customers. Actually, entry brings new capacity and pressure on prices and costs. The threat of entry, therefore, puts a cap on the profit potential of an industry. This threat depends on the size of a series of barriers to entry, including economies of scale,... View Details

29 Apr 2019
Research & Ideas

Is the Digital Age Making Us Petty?

With the rise of mobile payment apps like Venmo, many people can easily record the exact charges incurred by a lunch partner and pay back debts to the cent. They see themselves as efficient and fair. Others often have a different word for their behavior: petty.... View Details

Keywords: by Kristen Senz

August 2009
Case

The TSMC Way: Meeting Customer Needs at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.

By: Willy C. Shih, Chen-Fu Chien, Chintay Shih and Jack Chang

When L.C. Tu receives an emergency order, he is confronted with a range of production scheduling choices, each of which has unique costs and trade-offs. The case was designed to help students understand job-shop style production and the impact of disruptions and... View Details

Keywords: Disruption; Customer Relationship Management; Decision Choices and Conditions; Cost; Order Taking and Fulfillment; Production; Semiconductor Industry; Taiwan

April 2020 (Revised April 2023)
Case

TransDigm in 2017: The Beginning of the End or the End of the Beginning?

By: Benjamin C. Esty and Daniel Fisher

TransDigm was a highly acquisitive company that manufactured a wide range of highly engineered aerospace parts for both military and commercial customers. Over the ten years ending in 2016, its stock price had increased ten times, and both EBITDA and revenues had grown... View Details

July 1996 (Revised August 2017)
Case

Continuous Casting Investments at USX Corporation

By: Clayton Christensen

Focuses on the difficulty established companies face when confronted with disruptive technological innovations. The power that their prior asset investments, their cost structures, and their customers have in constraining their investment and innovation decisions are... View Details

Keywords: Disruption; Assets; Cost; Investment; Technological Innovation; Problems and Challenges; Mining Industry; Real Estate Industry

26 Jun 2019
Research & Ideas

Why the US-China Tariff Standoff Hurts American Companies More

affected by the retaliation tariffs started falling by 5 percent, on average. US retailers partially absorbed the tariffs. In-progress analyses of retail prices show more heterogeneity, with some retailers passing higher import costs to... View Details

Keywords: by Danielle Kost; Retail; Manufacturing; Steel

Who Benefits Most in Disease Management Programs?

Disease management programs aim to reduce cost by improving the quality of care for chronic diseases. Evidence of their effectiveness is mixed. Reducing health care spending sufficiently to cover program costs has proved particularly challenging. This study uses a... View Details

October 2023 (Revised February 2024)
Case

Loris

By: Shunyuan Zhang, Das Narayandas, Stacy Straaberg and David Lane

In December 2022, Loris’s executive team considered their go-to-market strategy. Loris was an artificial intelligence (AI) software startup for the customer service industry with two products on the market: 1) Agent Assist which provided customer service agents (CSAs)... View Details

Keywords: Decisions; Growth and Development Strategy; Product Launch; Product Positioning; Business Strategy; Competitive Strategy; Business Startups; AI and Machine Learning; Applications and Software; Marketing Strategy; Sales; Technology Industry; United States

Article

Do We Spend Too Much on Health Care?

By: Katherine Baicker and Amitabh Chandra

Health system reforms—such as changes in insurance design, patient cost sharing, payment reform, or price regulation—should be judged by whether they move us toward higher-value use of resources, rather than by whether they reduce spending. View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Cost; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Value Creation

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2023
Chapter

Inflation and Misallocation in New Keynesian Models

By: Alberto Cavallo, Francesco Lippi and Ken Miyahara

The New Keynesian framework implies that sluggish price adjustment results in a distorted allocation of resources. We use a simple model to quantify these unobservable distortions, using data that depict the price-setting behavior of firms, specifically the frequency... View Details

Keywords: Macroeconomics; Inflation and Deflation; Price; Analytics and Data Science; Cost