Publications

2013
Working Paper

The Dirty Laundry of Employee Award Programs: Evidence from the Field

By: Timothy Gubler, Ian I. Larkin and Lamar Pierce

Many scholars and practitioners have recently argued that corporate awards are a "free" way to motivate employees. We use field data from an attendance award program implemented at one of five industrial laundry plants to show that awards can carry significant... View Details

Keywords: Motivation and Incentives; Service Delivery; Performance Productivity; Failure; Service Industry

13 Feb 2018
First Look

New Research and Ideas, February 13, 2018

passionately for a global-historical approach to political ideas. To better understand the development of liberalism, he looked not only to the works of great thinkers but also to their reception and use amid revolution and interstate competition. His innovative View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

24 Mar 2011
Working Paper Summaries

Individual Rationality and Participation in Large Scale, Multi-Hospital Kidney Exchanges

Keywords: by Itai Ashlagi & Alvin E. Roth; Health

Ananth Raman

Ananth Raman is a professor in the Technology and Operations Management area where he has taught courses on various aspects of Operational Excellence—supply chain management, technology and operations management, and service operations—to MBA students... View Details

Keywords: apparel; retailing; software

March 2017
Case

Intellectual Ambition at Harvard Business School: Elton Mayo and Fritz Roethlisberger

By: Jan W. Rivkin and Amram Migdal

This case, set in the 1920s and 1930s, discusses the contributions of Harvard Business School (HBS) Professors Elton Mayo and Fritz Roethlisberger to management research and to the Human Relations Movement in management scholarship. The case focuses on their research... View Details

Educators

2019
Working Paper

Intelligent Design of Inclusive Growth Strategies

By: Robert S. Kaplan, George Serafeim and Eduardo Tugendhat

Improving corporate engagement with society, as advocated in the Business Roundtable’s 2019 statement, should not be viewed as a zero-sum proposition where attention to new stakeholders detracts from delivering shareholder value. Corporate programs for sustainable and... View Details

Keywords: Inclusion; Sustainability; Performance Measures; Environmental Sustainability; Social Issues; Strategy; Governance; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Business and Stakeholder Relations

December 2016
Article

Fake It Till You Make It: Reputation, Competition, and Yelp Review Fraud

By: Michael Luca and Georgios Zervas

Consumer reviews are now part of everyday decision making. Yet, the credibility of these reviews is fundamentally undermined when businesses commit review fraud, creating fake reviews for themselves or their competitors. We investigate the economic incentives to commit... View Details

Keywords: Ethics; Marketing Reference Programs

Find at Harvard

18 Apr 2013
Working Paper Summaries

The Impact of Pooling on Throughput Time in Discretionary Work Settings: An Empirical Investigation of Emergency Department Length of Stay

Keywords: by Hummy Song, Anita L. Tucker & Karen L. Murrell; Health

28 Aug 2014
Op-Ed

Government Can Do More to Unfreeze Small Business Credit

program of $100 million with a proven default rate of 5 percent will be "costed" at $5 million, but will deploy $100 million of new capital into the marketplace. A second important piece of SBJA was the effort to infuse capital into... View Details

Keywords: by Karen Mills; Banking

06 Jul 2015
Research & Ideas

Money and Quotas Motivate the Sales Force Best

just given it—conditional versus unconditional. Doug J. Chung, an assistant professor in the Marketing unit, and Das Narayandas, the James J. Hill Professor of Business Administration, explain what kind of bump managers can expect from different bonus plans in their... View Details

Keywords: by Roberta Holland; Retail

06 Aug 2013
First Look

First Look: August 6

MBA program in 1963. By 2013, the number of women in the MBA classroom had reached 40%. The 50th anniversary of women's enrollment in the traditional MBA program gave HBS Dean Nitin Nohria the opportunity to... View Details

Keywords: Anna Secino

2021
Working Paper

CRM and AI in Time of Crisis

By: Michelle Y. Lu and Navid Mojir

A crisis can affect the incentives of various players within a firm’s multi-layered sales and marketing organization (e.g., headquarters and branches of a bank). Such shifts can result in sales decisions against the firm’s best interests. Motivated by the backlash to... View Details

Keywords: CRM; Artificial Intelligence; AI; B2B Marketing; Decision Authority; Crisis Marketing; Intra-organizational Conflict; COVID-19 Pandemic; Customer Relationship Management; Technological Innovation; Decision Making; Strategy; Health Pandemics; Crisis Management; AI and Machine Learning

February 2018
Article

Retention Futility: Targeting High-Risk Customers Might Be Ineffective.

By: Eva Ascarza

Companies in a variety of sectors are increasingly managing customer churn proactively, generally by detecting customers at the highest risk of churning and targeting retention efforts towards them. While there is a vast literature on developing churn prediction models... View Details

Keywords: Retention/churn; Proactive Churn Management; Field Experiments; Heterogeneous Treatment Effect; Machine Learning; Customer Relationship Management; Risk Management

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26 Jan 2010
First Look

First Look: Jan. 26

restructuring. Gilson's case studies have been used extensively in executive programs and are perfect tools to refer to when faced with real-world corporate restructuring issues. The Co-Mingled Code: Open Source and Economic Development... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

Article

What Makes a Critic Tick? Connected Authors and the Determinants of Book Reviews

By: Loretti I. Dobrescu, Michael Luca and Alberto Motta

This paper investigates the determinants of expert reviews in the book industry. Reviews are determined not only by the quality of the product, but also by the incentives of the media outlet providing the review. For example, a media outlet may have the incentive to... View Details

Keywords: Quality; Media; Relationships; Marketing Reference Programs; Books; Publishing Industry

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23 Dec 2008
First Look

First Look: December 23, 2008

program relative to their peers. Most specifications find weak crowding-in effects or no effect at all for native patenting. Total invention increases with higher admission levels primarily through the direct contributions of ethnic... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

January 2024 (Revised June 2024)
Case

School of Rock: Tuning into Structured Empowerment (A)

By: Tatiana Sandino, Jeffrey Rayport, Samuel Grad and Stacy Straaberg

In summer 2021, School of Rock was a youth-oriented music education company with 291 franchise- and company-owned schools globally. Before CEO Rob Price’s hire in 2017, School of Rock’s nonconformist rock ‘n’ roll culture led to variability in teaching styles,... View Details

Educators

July 2016 (Revised January 2017)
Case

Banking on Change: Aligning Culture and Compensation at Morgan Stanley

By: Malcolm S. Salter

This case study was prepared as part of a research project on Culture, Conduct, and Governance in Financial Firms. The objective of this project is to compare and contrast the efforts of U.S. and European banks to induce changes in organization culture in the aftermath... View Details

Keywords: Business or Company Management; Corporate Accountability; Ethics; Organizational Culture; Corporate Governance; Banks and Banking; United States; Europe

Educators