Publications

22 Dec 2015
News

Algorithms Need Managers, Too

Web

What We Learned in Three Charts: Innovation, Tariffs, and Gig Work | Working Knowledge

Strategy and Innovation What We Learned in Three Charts: Innovation, Tariffs, and Gig Work Featuring Prithwiraj Choudhury , Alberto F. Cavallo , Ryan W. Buell , and Paige Tsai... View Details

April 1999 (Revised March 2001)
Case

Be Our Guest, Inc.

By: Dwight B. Crane and Penny Joseph

Be Our Guest is a rapidly growing equipment rental company with substantial seasonality in its revenues and profits. In the spring of 1998, the senior management team is reviewing its financial plans in preparation for a meeting with the company's bank. The case... View Details

Keywords: Financial Strategy; Borrowing and Debt; Banks and Banking; Revenue; Management Teams; Business Plan; Forecasting and Prediction; Utilities Industry; Service Industry

I’ve worked at startup companies and I’ve run development teams inside large public companies. In both environments, executives spend far more time forecasting how successful they’ll be than planning what they will do if something breaks down.

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May 2018 (Revised October 2019)
Case

Managing the Future of Work

By: William R. Kerr, Allison Ciechanover and Jeff Huizinga

By 2019, leaders from the public and private sector had become increasingly anxious about how advanced technologies and aging global populations could affect labor markets, workplaces, and workers’ lives. Some analysts forecasted that hundreds of millions of workers... View Details

Keywords: Labor Markets; Workplace; Employment; Technological Innovation; Demographics; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Change Management; Problems and Challenges; Opportunities

We show that the use of algorithms to predict race has significant limitations in measuring and understanding the sources of racial disparities in finance, economics, and other contexts. First, we derive theoretically the direction and magnitude of measurement... View Details

01 Feb 1997
News

Shaping the Future of Business: Entrepreneurial Evolution at HBS

core business of distributing financial information, Bloomberg has added print, broadcast, and other media, with 400 reporters in 70 bureaus writing 3,000 business and nonbusiness stories daily for outlets... View Details

Keywords: Nancy O. Perry and Susan Young; profiles by Garry Emmons

April 1983
Case

National Chemical Corp.: Tiger-Tread

A large chemical company has developed a novel industrial maintenance item, for which a marketing program and budget must be prepared. Case requires students to forecast demand at end-user and industrial customer levels to identify elements of the marketing mix, and to... View Details

Keywords: Product Marketing; Consumer Products Industry; Industrial Products Industry

05 Dec 2012
What Do You Think?

Should Managers Bother Listening to Predictions?

identify fairly reliable predictions from the guesses." Others identified people as the weak point in the process. Adam Hartung commented that " everyone should be evaluating trends and making... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

July 2002 (Revised March 2005)
Case

Kendall Square Research Corporation (A) (Abridged)

By: William J. Bruns Jr. and F. Warren McFarlan

Kendall Square Research was a small competitor in the supercomputer industry. Sales grew rapidly in 1992 and early 1993, and the company sold stock to the public for the first time. Analysts forecasted higher earnings for 1993, then the company's revenue recognition... View Details

Keywords: Revenue Recognition; Standards; Accounting Audits; Computer Industry

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28 Jul 2009
Research Event

Business Summit: Real Estate

next steps in real estate? This panel discussed the global real estate crisis, the future of securitization, and predictions for the future of the U.S. real estate market. After years of abundant capital... View Details

Keywords: Re: Howard H. Stevenson; Construction; Real Estate

April 2010 (Revised May 2017)
Case

Tremblant Capital Group

By: Robin Greenwood

Brett Barakett, CEO and founder of Tremblant Capital Group, a New York–based hedge fund, must decide what to do with his fund's position in Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, which has dropped in value by more than 40% in recent months. Tremblant is a hedge fund that... View Details

Keywords: Business Earnings; Behavioral Finance; Stocks; Investment Funds; Consumer Behavior; Competitive Advantage; Financial Services Industry; New York (city, NY)

Research Summary

Entrepreneurial Management

By: Howard H. Stevenson

Howard H. Stevenson is researching and writing on the need for and consequences of predictability. In work designed for a managerial audience, he is examining the roles played by organizations, cultures, and ethical systems in enabling individuals to predict the... View Details

April 1994 (Revised November 1998)
Case

Kendall Square Research Corporation (A)

By: William J. Bruns Jr.

Kendall Square Research was a small competitor in the supercomputer industry. As sales grew rapidly in 1992 and early 1993, the company sold stock to the public for the first time and analysts forecast higher earnings for 1993. However, when the company's revenue... View Details

Keywords: Revenue Recognition; Standards; Accounting Audits; Computer Industry

25 Oct 2004
Research & Ideas

Planning for Surprises

The train wreck that was Enron's collapse is only one big, blatant example of how some disasters catch us unawares—but shouldn't. In fact, according to Max H. Bazerman and Michael D. Watkins, many surprises in all types View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

20 Oct 2011
Research & Ideas

Getting the Marketing Mix Right

their FSL model, however, the results provided much greater detail about the potential effects of different marketing investments. For example, the model predicted that sales gains from DTCA and M&E... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

Forthcoming
Article

An AI Method to Score Celebrity Visual Potential from Human Faces

By: Flora Feng, Shunyuan Zhang, Xiao Liu, Kannan Srinivasan and Cait Lamberton

It has long been a mantra of marketing practice that, particularly in low-involvement situations, spokespeople should be physically attractive. This paper suggests there is a higher probability of gaining fame and influence (i.e., celebrity potential) than is captured... View Details

Keywords: Personal Characteristics; AI and Machine Learning; Forecasting and Prediction; Marketing

Article

Can Mutual Fund Managers Pick Stocks? Evidence from Their Trades Prior to Earnings Announcements

By: Malcolm Baker, Lubomir Litov, Jessica Wachter and Jeffrey Wurgler

We consider measures of stock-picking skill of mutual fund managers based on the earnings announcement returns of the stocks that they hold and trade. Relative to standard approaches, this approach focuses on an especially informative subset of the returns data,... View Details

Keywords: Competency and Skills; Stocks; Investment Return; Investment Funds; Earnings Management

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Read Now

2021
Working Paper

Equilibrium Effects of Pay Transparency

By: Zoë B. Cullen and Bobak Pakzad-Hurson

The public discourse around pay transparency has focused on the direct effect: how workers seek to rectify newly-disclosed pay inequities through renegotiations. The question of how wage-setting and hiring practices of the firm respond in equilibrium has received... View Details

Keywords: Pay Transparency; Online Labor Market; Privacy; Wage Gap; Negotiation; Corporate Disclosure; Compensation and Benefits; Gender