Publications
Publications
Show Results For
- All HBS Web
(1,959)
- Faculty Publications (194)
- 2019
- Working Paper
Who Should Select New Employees, Headquarters or the Unit Manager? Consequences of Centralizing Hiring at a Retail Chain
By: Carolyn Deller and Tatiana Sandino
We examine how changing the allocation of hiring decision rights in a multiunit organization affects employee-firm match quality, contingent on a unit’s circumstances. Our research site, a US retail chain, switched from a decentralized hiring model (hiring by business... View Details
- November 2015 (Revised October 2017)
- Case
Dollar General Bids for Family Dollar
By: Jonas Heese, Paula A. Price, Suraj Srinivasan and David Lane
In spring 2015, Dollar General's CEO Rick Dreiling was looking ahead to retiring at year's end but worried about ensuring continued growth for the company he had built since 2008 into a market leader in the U.S. discount retail world. Dollar General operated over... View Details
- 2019
- Working Paper
The Wisdom of Crowds in Operations: Forecasting Using Prediction Markets
By: Achal Bassamboo, Ruomeng Cui and Antonio Moreno
Prediction is an important activity in various business processes, but it becomes difficult when historical information is not available, such as forecasting demand of a new product. One approach that can be applied in such situations is to crowdsource opinions from... View Details
- September 2015 (Revised February 2017)
- Case
MOD Pizza: A Winning Recipe?
By: Boris Groysberg, John D. Vaughan and Matthew Preble
Scott and Ally Svenson, the founders of MOD Pizza, had to make a number of decisions in planning how to scale their small company. They wanted to grow MOD from 45 stores as of May 2015 to 200 stores by the end of 2016, and while the two believed that MOD could manage... View Details
- 2015
- Working Paper
Lost in the Clouds: The Impact of Changing Property Rights on Investment in Cloud Computing Ventures
By: Josh Lerner and Greg Rafert
Our analysis seeks to understand the impact of changing allocations of property rights on investment in new firms. We focus on the Cartoon Network, et al. v. Cablevision decision in the U.S., which narrowed the protection enjoyed by content creators (e.g., movie... View Details
- 2015
- Other Teaching and Training Material
Marketing Reading: Marketing Intelligence
By: Robert J. Dolan and Leslie K. John
This reading provides the basic knowledge a marketing manager needs in order to choose the right combination of research methods, as well as the best way to present research findings to stakeholders. Furthermore, this Reading shows how effective decision making hinges... View Details
- April 2015
- Case
Domeyard: Starting a High-Frequency Trading (HFT) Hedge Fund
By: Lauren Cohen, Christopher Malloy and Matthew Foreman
The principals at Domeyard, a start-up high frequency trading (HFT) hedge fund based in Cambridge, faced a myriad of important decisions: which markets to trade on, how to raise capital, and from whom to raise capital. Many of these decisions were standard for... View Details
- 2014
- Working Paper
Making the Business Case for Environmental Sustainability
Can a business case be made for acting sustainably? This is a difficult question to answer precisely, largely because there is no generally accepted definition of the term "sustainability". Is it acting sustainably to protect the human rights of the firm's workforce?... View Details
- 2014
- Other Teaching and Training Material
Marketing Reading: Customer Management
By: Sunil Gupta
This Reading on customer management sheds light on how companies should evaluate and manage their customers in order to grow profitably. Customer management allows marketing managers to inform investment decisions by drilling down into each customer's profitability or... View Details
- October 2014
- Article
The Transparency Trap
By: Ethan Bernstein
To get people to be more creative and productive, managers increase transparency with open workspaces and access to real-time data. But less transparent work environments can yield more-transparent employees. Employees perform better when they can try out new ideas and... View Details
- 2014
- Article
Thought Calibration: How Thinking Just the Right Amount Increases One’s Influence and Appeal
By: Daniella Kupor, Zakary L. Tormala, Michael I. Norton and Derek D. Rucker
Previous research suggests that people draw inferences about their attitudes and preferences based on their own thoughtfulness. The current research explores how observing other individuals make decisions more or less thoughtfully can shape perceptions of those... View Details
- February 2014
- Article
Governance and CEO Turnover: Do Something or Do the Right Thing?
By: Ray Fisman, Rakesh Khurana, Matthew Rhodes-Kropf and Soojin Yim
We study how corporate governance affects firm value through the decision of whether to fire or retain the CEO. We present a model in which weak governance—which prevents shareholders from controlling the board—protects inferior CEOs from dismissal, while at the same... View Details
- January 2014
- Case
Maricopa, Inc.: Finding the Right Treatment for Growth
The founders of Maricopa, Inc., a startup that sold proprietary hair-care products directly to salons, were preparing a board presentation to address the young company's inability to meet financial projections. While the products had caught on with customers, the... View Details
- January 2014
- Case
Steven Carpenter at Cake Financial (Abridged)
Steven Carpenter reflects on the successes and failures of his recent venture, Cake Financial. Carpenter had just sold the four-year-old startup and was at work on a new business plan. But first, he wanted to understand why Cake Financial, a service that allowed users... View Details
- January 2014 (Revised December 2014)
- Case
GenapSys: Business Models for the Genome
By: Richard G. Hamermesh, Joseph B. Fuller and Matthew Preble
GenapSys, a California-based startup, was soon to release a new DNA sequencer that the company's founder, Hesaam Esfandyarpour, believed was truly revolutionary. The sequencer would be substantially less expensive—potentially costing just a few thousand dollars—and... View Details
- 2013
- Working Paper
NBC and the 2012 London Olympics: Unexpected Success
By: Stephen A. Greyser and Vadim Kogan
"The 2010 Vancouver Winter Games lost $223 million, astonishing for a 17-day event. Next year's London Summer Games, which cost a record Olympic rights fee of $1.18 billion, are expected to lose at least as much..." wrote Richard Sandomir in The New York Times. "NBC... View Details
- June 2013
- Article
What Is Privacy Worth?
By: Alessandro Acquisti, Leslie K. John and George Loewenstein
Understanding the value that individuals assign to the protection of their personal data is of great importance for business, law, and public policy. We use a field experiment informed by behavioral economics and decision research to investigate individual privacy... View Details
- May 2013
- Supplement
Transport Corporation of India (B): Choosing the Right Candidate
By: V.G. Narayanan and Saloni Chaturvedi
Transport Corporation of India was a logistics company that provided multi-modal transport solutions to its customers. Set up in 1958, TCI had grown from a 'one man, one truck, one office' set-up to a company with revenues of $400 million in half a century. TCI's... View Details
- Article
On Derivatives Markets and Social Welfare: A Theory of Empty Voting and Hidden Ownership
By: Jordan M. Barry, John William Hatfield and Scott Duke Kominers
In the past twenty-five years, derivatives markets have grown exponentially. Large, modern derivatives markets increasingly enable investors to hold economic interests in corporations without owning voting rights, and vice versa. This leads to both empty... View Details
- December 2012 (Revised October 2022)
- Case
Plastiq
By: Jeffrey J. Bussgang, Gaurav Jain, Liroy Haddad, Luke Langford and Matt Noble
The young CEO of a venture-backed startup needs to figure out his go to market strategy and the right profile for his first key sales hires. Should he develop partnerships with channels that would provide leverage or build out a direct sales force? And should the sales... View Details