Publications

February 5, 2009
Comment

In Praise of Marketing

By: John A. Quelch

Many dismiss marketing as manipulative, deceptive, and intrusive. Marketing, they argue, focuses too much of our attention on material consumption. More recently, Benjamin Barber, in his 2007 book Consumed, claims that marketing is "sucking up the air from every other... View Details

Keywords: Marketing; Consumer Loyalty; Local Vs. Global Branding; Multi-national Brands; Misleading and Fraudulent Advertising; Customer Value and Value Chain; Customer Satisfaction; Globalized Economies and Regions; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues; Multinational Firms and Management; Globalized Markets and Industries; Brands and Branding; Marketing Communications; Marketing Strategy; Product Positioning

June 2010 (Revised December 2013)
Case

Hang Lung Properties and the Chengdu Decision (A)

By: John D. Macomber, Michael Shih-Ta Chen and Keith Chi-Ho Wong

A residential real estate developer competes in a heated auction for a prime retail development site in the interior of China during the 2009 boom. Total project cost might be in excess of $1 billion U.S. for over 4,000,000 square feet of building. Hang Lung Properties... View Details

Keywords: Buildings and Facilities; Decision Choices and Conditions; Investment Return; Geographic Location; Auctions; Bids and Bidding; Infrastructure; Valuation; Real Estate Industry; Chengdu

December 2006 (Revised August 2008)
Case

Pervasis Therapeutics, Inc.

By: Robert F. Higgins and Virginia Fuller

In May 2005, Steve Bollinger was about to become president and chief operating officer of Pervasis Therapeutics, a small cell therapy start-up in Cambridge, Mass. If proven successful, Pervasis' product, Vascugel, could change the way vascular disease is treated and... View Details

Keywords: Business Startups; Venture Capital; Financial Strategy; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Health Care and Treatment; Health Testing and Trials; Health Industry; Cambridge

28 Jan 2020
News

The Most Important Social Skill You Can Master, According to a Harvard Business School Professor

09 Dec 2002
Research & Ideas

Unilever—A Case Study

that foreign firms possess an "advantage" when they invest in a foreign market, it might be expected that they would earn higher returns than their domestic competitors. 7 This seems to be the general case, but perhaps not for... View Details

Keywords: by Geoffrey Jones; Consumer Products; Entertainment & Recreation; Food & Beverage; Manufacturing; Retail

Web

FAQs - Alumni

carbon footprint? Offset your travel greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions . HBS has received requests to provide carbon credit recommendations to offset travel emissions as some don't deliver their expected GHG reductions. HBS is sharing a link... View Details

23 Nov 2021
Book

What It Takes to Build an Organizational Culture That Wins

customer-centered and emphasize employee development but it allows only limited employee voice and gives limited support for cross-boundary (read silo) cooperation. As a result, organizations employing a track A culture can expect only... View Details

Keywords: by Avery Forman

01 Sep 2023
News

Money Does Grow on (Family) Trees

For 17 years, Andre Kearns (MBA 1999) has been tracing his family tree. One by one, he has added branches, grounding himself in a long and sometimes complicated lineage. Through family stories, forgotten heirlooms, and vital records, Kearns has traveled back through... View Details

Keywords: April White; Illustrations by Fabio Consoli; News, Library, Internet, and Other Services; Information

01 May 2013
What Do You Think?

Why Isn’t ‘Servant Leadership’ More Prevalent?

The remarkable thing was that board members and employees alike hardly noticed as he did it. It was as if it was expected in a company with self-proclaimed servant leadership. Lao-Tzu wrote about servant leadership in the fifth-century... View Details

Keywords: by Jim Heskett

December 2023
Case

Food & Life Companies

By: Forest L. Reinhardt and Akiko Saito

Founded in 1984 in Japan, Food & Life Companies Ltd. (F&LC) operated Sushiro, the largest conveyor belt sushi restaurant chain in Japan, and other types of restaurants that offered sushi and fish cuisine. F&LC was committed to offering high-quality sushi at an... View Details

Keywords: Growth and Development Strategy; Market Entry and Exit; Expansion; Food and Beverage Industry; Japan; Asia; United States

October 2022
Article

Underestimating Counterparts' Learning Goals Impairs Conflictual Conversations

By: Hanne K. Collins, Charles A. Dorison, Francesca Gino and Julia A. Minson

Given the many contexts in which people have difficulty engaging with views that disagree with their own— from political discussions to workplace conflicts—it is critical to understand how conflictual conversations can be improved. Whereas previous work has focused on... View Details

Keywords: Interpersonal Communication; Conflict and Resolution; Values and Beliefs; Learning; Perception

March 24, 2020
Article

Delayed Negative Effects of Prosocial Spending on Happiness

By: Armin Falk and Thomas Graeber

Does prosocial behavior promote happiness? We test this longstanding hypothesis in a behavioral experiment that extends the scope of previous research. In our Saving a Life paradigm, every participant either saved one human life in expectation by triggering a targeted... View Details

Keywords: Prosocial Behavior; Altruism; Happiness; Well-being; Spending; Behavior

Article

Optimality Bias in Moral Judgment

By: Julian De Freitas and Samuel G.B. Johnson

We often make decisions with incomplete knowledge of their consequences. Might people nonetheless expect others to make optimal choices, despite this ignorance? Here, we show that people are sensitive to moral optimality: that people hold moral agents accountable... View Details

Keywords: Moral Judgment; Lay Decision Theory; Theory Of Mind; Causal Attribution; Moral Sensibility; Decision Making

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December 2018
Case

The Global-Local Tension: Vodafone CEO Vittorio Colao Leading with 'International Values and Local Roots' (A)

By: Tsedal Neeley

Vittorio Colao, CEO of telecommunication giant Vodafone, must respond to reports of disturbing accounting practices at two of Vodafone’s operating companies. In one case, €60 million have been misreported due to a series of failures to check manual accounting... View Details

Keywords: GLOBAL-LOCAL; Organization Culture; Global Identity; Local Identity; Accounting Discrepency; Globalization; Leadership; Trust; Organizational Culture; Organizational Design; Organizations; Identity; Local Range; Global Range; Values and Beliefs; Accounting Audits

July–August 2016
Article

Minimum Advertised Pricing: Patterns of Violation in Competitive Retail Markets

By: Ayelet Israeli, Eric Anderson and Anne Coughlan

Manufacturers in many industries frequently use vertical price policies, such as minimum advertised price (MAP), to influence prices set by downstream retailers. Although manufacturers expect retail partners to comply with MAP policies, violations of MAP are common in... View Details

Keywords: Pricing Policies; Pricing; Channel Management; Legal Aspects Of Business; Price; Governance Compliance; Marketing Channels; Retail Industry

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May 2014
Article

Cynicism in Negotiation: When Communication Increases Buyers' Skepticism

By: Eyal Ert, Stephanie J. Creary and Max H. Bazerman

The economic literature on negotiation shows that strategic concerns can be a barrier to agreement, even when the buyer values the good more than the seller. Yet behavioral research demonstrates that human interaction can overcome these strategic concerns through... View Details

Keywords: Trust; Information Asymmetry; Perspective Taking; Reactive Devaluation

September 2008
Article

Firm Heterogeneity and Credit Risk Diversification

By: Samuel G. Hanson, M. Hashem Pesaran and Til Schuermann

This paper examines the impact of neglected heterogeneity on credit risk. We show that neglecting heterogeneity in firm returns and/or default thresholds leads to under estimation of expected losses (EL), and its effect on portfolio risk is ambiguous. Once EL is... View Details

Keywords: Volatility; Credit; Investment Return; Outcome or Result; Risk and Uncertainty; Loss; Diversification; Complexity; United States

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2009
Working Paper

Why Do Countries Adopt International Financial Reporting Standards?

By: Karthik Ramanna and Ewa Sletten

In a sample of 102 non-European Union countries, we study variations in the decision to adopt International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). There is evidence that more powerful countries are less likely to adopt IFRS, consistent with more powerful countries being... View Details

Keywords: Financial Reporting; International Accounting; Globalized Economies and Regions; Network Effects; Standards; Adoption

SSRN

March 1999 (Revised May 1999)
Case

Network Associates: Securing the Internet

By: Debora L. Spar

Follows one company's path through the uncharted terrain of government regulation and the Internet. In March 1998, Network Associates announced it would begin selling powerful encryption software from its Dutch subsidiary. Such a move looked to the U.S. government like... View Details

Keywords: Internet and the Web; Information Technology Industry; Public Administration Industry; Telecommunications Industry; United States