Publications

2025
Working Paper

Dynamic Personalization with Multiple Customer Signals: Multi-Response State Representation in Reinforcement Learning

By: Liangzong Ma, Ta-Wei Huang, Eva Ascarza and Ayelet Israeli

Reinforcement learning (RL) offers potential for optimizing sequences of customer interactions by modeling the relationships between customer states, company actions, and long-term value. However, its practical implementation often faces significant challenges.... View Details

Keywords: Dynamic Policy; Deep Reinforcement Learning; Representation Learning; Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment; Latent Variable Models; Customer Relationship Management; Customer Value and Value Chain; Foreign Direct Investment; Analytics and Data Science

SSRN

December 1998
Article

Entrepreneurs and Business Performance in Nineteenth Century France

By: Tom Nicholas, Elisa Boccaletti and James Foreman-Peck

A popular explanation for the supposed "delayed industrialisation" of the nineteenth century French economy has been the inappropriate attitudes and actions of the managerial classes and family firms. To address these claims we model the supply and demand for... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Performance; Economy; Management; Success; Opportunities; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques; Saving; Higher Education; Training; Demand and Consumers; France

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January 2021
Case

Bespoken Spirits: Disrupting Distilling

By: Benjamin C. Esty and Daniel Fisher

On October 7, 2020, Bespoken Spirits publicly announced it had received $2.6 million of seed funding for its “sustainable maturation process,” a process that could produce award-winning whiskeys in just days rather than years using a novel technology and data science. ... View Details

Keywords: Business Ventures; Business Strategy; Competitive Advantage; Disruption; Entrepreneurship; Environmental Sustainability; Cash Flow; Disruptive Innovation; Innovation Strategy; Brands and Branding; Business Model; Consumer Products Industry; Food and Beverage Industry; Service Industry; United States; California

Web

Marketing - Faculty & Research

Marketing helps a firm in creating value by better understanding the needs of its customers and providing them with innovative products and services. This value is communicated through a variety of channels as well as through the firm's branding strategy. Effective... View Details

06 Jun 2024
Research & Ideas

How Younger Immigrants Gain an Edge in American Business

opportunities,” says Kerr. That kind of legal support mattered “rather significantly,” he says. “Likewise, the placement of younger arrivals into the US school systems was very important for their education and social integration.” Kerr wrote the study with Sari... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne

November 2021
Article

Determining Variable Costs in the Acute Urolithiasis Cycle of Care Through Time-driven Activity-based Costing

By: Tyler R. McClintock, David F. Friedlander, Aiden Y. Feng, Mahek A. Shah, Daniel J. Pallin, Steven L. Chang, Angela M. Bader, Thomas W. Feeley, Robert S. Kaplan and George E. Haleblian

Objective. To characterize full cycle of care costs for managing an acute ureteral stone using time-driven activity-based costing.
Methods. We defined all phases of care for patients presenting with an acute ureteral stone and built an... View Details

Keywords: Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing; Health Care and Treatment; Cost; Activity Based Costing and Management

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August 1991 (Revised March 1993)
Case

Champion International Corp.: Timber, Trade, and the Northern Spotted Owl

By: Forest L. Reinhardt

Champion's forest products division owns timberlands, sawmills, and plywood mills in the Pacific Northwest. The listing of the northern spotted owl as an endangered species, and restrictions on exports of logs from state-owned lands, have disrupted the stumpage, log... View Details

Keywords: Science-Based Business; Natural Environment; Product Marketing; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Government and Politics; Environmental Sustainability; Corporate Strategy; Trade; Decisions; Management Teams; Forest Products Industry; North and Central America

Research Summary

Creating Trust in International Joint Ventures in Asia: An Empirical Comparative Study

In the wake of the currently ongoing financial crisis in Asia, we anticipate a rapid increase of international joint ventures between Asian and Western firms. However, so far, the sources of success in international joint ventures have not been well understood. Why do... View Details

March 2008 (Revised June 2008)
Case

The Broad Institute: Applying the Power of Genomics to Medicine

By: Vicki L. Sato and Rachel Gordon

In June 2003, Harvard University and MIT announced an unprecedented partnership to create a biomedical institute, The Broad Institute. The culture of the Broad centered on science, and those involved considered it to be at the edge of the scientific frontier. In just... View Details

Keywords: Education; Health Care and Treatment; Innovation Leadership; Growth and Development Strategy; Organizational Culture; Partners and Partnerships; Research and Development; Genetics

September 2014
Article

Defining the Value of Proton Therapy Using Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing

By: N.G. Thaker, A.B. Guzman, Thomas W. Feeley, T.M. Jones, J.R. Incalcaterra, C. Kolom, S.J. Frank, L.S. Tatum, Ronald S. Walters, Scott B. Cantor, D.I. Rosenthal, A.S. Garden, G.B. Gunn, C.D. Fuller and M.B. Palmer

Technological innovations in radiation therapy (RT) have rapidly improved the quality of care for patients with head and neck cancer. Intensity-modulated proton therapy (MPT) holds promise of further improving outcomes compared with the current photon-based technique... View Details

Keywords: Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing; Health Care and Treatment; Technological Innovation; Activity Based Costing and Management

09 Jan 2024
In Practice

Harnessing AI: What Businesses Need to Know in ChatGPT’s Second Year

This partnership offers a reimagined competitive edge, where the embrace of human-AI collaboration becomes a strategic imperative for forward-thinking firms. Jacqueline Ng Lane is an assistant professor in the Technology and Operations View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne; Information Technology

Comment

Nothing to See Here: Richard Tedlow Explains Why So Many CEOs Refuse to Confront the Truth

By: Richard S. Tedlow

The article presents an interview with business historian Richard Tedlow on the topic of why chief executive officers (CEOs) sometimes refuse to acknowledge data or information that indicate they need to shift their strategy. He notes that denial is a typical response... View Details

Keywords: Management

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January 2023 (Revised December 2023)
Case

OhmConnect: Energizing the Future

By: Jeffrey F. Rayport, Jennifer Fonstad and Nicole Tempest Keller

Founded in 2013, OhmConnect was a free consumer web app that alerted customers about peak hours of electricity demand, and paid them to lower their energy use at home during these periods. The company sold the aggregated reductions generated by thousands of households... View Details

Keywords: App Development; Renewable Energy; Electricity Usage; Regulations; VC; Technology; Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC); Scalability; Applications and Software; Growth and Development Strategy; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Business Model; Venture Capital; Energy Industry; United States; California; Texas; Europe

24 Jul 2023
Research & Ideas

Part-Time Employees Want More Hours. Can Companies Tap This ‘Hidden’ Talent Pool?

many such workers are caregivers, excluded from full-time jobs because short-sighted employers don’t offer them the flexibility they need. Filtered out by hiring algorithms due to employment gaps or other hiring “red flags,” these willing workers could offer one... View Details

Keywords: by Kara Baskin

Research Summary

The Effects of Firm Size and Sales Growth Rate on Inventory Turnover Performance in the U.S. Retail Sector

We review and extend recent academic literature on the inventory turnover performance of public-listed U.S. retailers using firm-level financial data. Past research has shown that there is a large variation in the inventory turnover performance of retailers across... View Details

2022
Chapter

Coordinating Marketing and Sales in B2B Organizations

By: Frank V. Cespedes

This Handbook is targeted at academics and graduate students who want an overview of the academic state of the business-to-business marketing domain and at B2B practitioners who want to be aware of the current state of knowledge in their domains. This chapter examines... View Details

Keywords: B2B Marketing; Marketing

Organizations today can use both crowds and experts to produce knowledge. While prior work compares the accuracy of crowd-produced and expert-produced knowledge, we compare bias in these two models in the context of contested knowledge, which involves subjective,... View Details

2021
Working Paper

Granular Corporate Hedging Under Dominant Currency

By: Laura Alfaro, Mauricio Calani and Liliana Varela

Foreign currency use can be a source of risk associated with currency mismatches, which firms can hedge using FX derivatives. This paper uncovers five novel facts about firms’ use of foreign currency (FX) derivatives employing a unique dataset covering the universe of... View Details

Keywords: FX Derivatives; Hedging; Currency; Cash Flow; Emerging Markets; Chile

March 2024
Supplement

Madrigal: Conducting a Customer-Base Audit

By: Eva Ascarza, Bruce Hardie, Peter S. Fader and Michael Ross

This case presents a scenario where Madrigal, a U.S. retailer with a rich 20-year history and a solid loyalty program, faces a turning point with the arrival of a new CEO. This leadership change reveals a critical gap in understanding the customer base, prompting an... View Details

Keywords: Customer Relationship Management; Analytics and Data Science; Growth and Development Strategy; Retail Industry; United States