Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(3,246)
- Faculty Publications (586)
- Article
Fighting Bias on the Front Lines
By: Alexandra C. Feldberg and Tami Kim
Most companies aim for exceptional customer service, but too few are attentive to the subtle discrimination by frontline employees that can alienate customers, lead to lawsuits, or even cause lasting brand damage by going viral.
This article presents research... View Details
This article presents research... View Details
- Article
How Direct-to-Consumer Brands Can Continue to Grow
By: V. Kasturi Rangan, Daniel Corsten, Matt Higgins and Leonard A. Schlesinger
Direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands such as Allbirds, Casper, Peloton, and Warby Parker have creatively found a weakness in the marketing citadel of incumbent brands. By using data gleaned from daily interactions with customers, these brands have been able to adapt how... View Details
- November 2021
- Article
Ratings, Reviews, and the Marketing of New Products
By: Itay P. Fainmesser, Dominique Olié Lauga and Elie Ofek
We study how user-generated content (UGC) about new products impacts a firm's advertising and pricing decisions and the effect on profits and market dynamics. We construct a two-period model where consumers value quality and are heterogeneous in their taste for the new... View Details
- October 2021 (Revised December 2021)
- Case
Customer-Centric Design with Artificial Intelligence: Commonwealth Bank
By: Karim R. Lakhani, Yael Grushka-Cockayne, Jin Hyun Paik and Steven Randazzo
As Commonwealth Bank (CommBank) CEO Matt Comyn delivered the full financial year results in August 2021 over videoconference, it took less than two minutes for him to make his first mention of the organization's Customer Engagement Engine (CEE), the AI-driven customer... View Details
- October 2021
- Article
Changing Gambling Behavior through Experiential Learning
By: Shawn A. Cole, Martin Abel and Bilal Zia
This paper tests experiential learning as a debiasing tool to reduce gambling in South Africa, through a randomized field experiment. The study implements a simple, interactive game that simulates the odds of winning the national lottery through dice rolling.... View Details
- September 2021 (Revised March 2024)
- Case
Bühler: Mobilizing Industry around a Common Purpose
By: Ranjay Gulati, Franz Wohlgezogen and Malini Sen
Bühler Group, a Swiss multinational processing technology provider, started by selling machines for processing grains and later transitioned into selling food processing solutions. A family-owned business in the fifth generation, Bühler’s high-end milling, grinding,... View Details
- September 2021
- Article
Diagnostic Bubbles
By: Pedro Bordalo, Nicola Gennaioli, Spencer Yongwook Kwon and Andrei Shleifer
We introduce diagnostic expectations into a standard setting of price formation in which investors learn about the fundamental value of an asset and trade it. We study the interaction of diagnostic expectations with two well-known mechanisms: learning from prices and... View Details
- September 2021
- Article
Network Interconnectivity and Entry into Platform Markets
By: Feng Zhu, Xinxin Li, Ehsan Valavi and Marco Iansiti
Digital technologies have led to the emergence of many platforms in our economy today. In certain platform networks, buyers in one market purchase services from providers in many other markets, whereas in others, buyers primarily purchase services from providers within... View Details
- September 2021
- Article
Trials and Terminations: Learning from Competitors' R&D Failures
I analyze project continuation decisions where firms may resolve uncertainty through news about competitors' research and development (R&D) failures, as well as through their own results. I examine the trade-offs and interactions between product-market competition and... View Details
- Article
Unconscious Bias Training That Works
By: Francesca Gino and Katherine Coffman
To become more diverse, equitable, and inclusive, many companies have turned to unconscious bias (UB) training. By raising awareness of the mental shortcuts that lead to snap judgments—often based on race and gender—about people’s talents or character, it strives to... View Details
- Article
Design Physical and Digital Spaces to Foster Inclusion
By: Eric Anicich, Jon M. Jachimowicz, Merrick Osborne and L. Taylor Phillips
Often, strategies around making organizations more anti-racist focus on changing hearts and minds. Sometimes this isn’t enough, however, and can result in backlash or increased self-segregation among white employees. In these situations, leaders should consider using... View Details
- 2021
- Working Paper
The Changing Role of Business in Society
Business interaction with the U.S. government, historically based on securing industry or company special interests at the expense of the public good, has enabled and furthered government dysfunction. Gridlock within the American political system has precluded the... View Details
Keywords: Politics; Shared Value; Social Progress Index; Competitiveness; Walmart; BlackRock; ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) Performance; ESG; Transparency; Campaign Contributions; Campaign Finance; Lobbying; Revolving Door; Political Ideology; Political Parties; Political Partisanship; Government And Business; Government Innovation; Elections; Democracy; Capitalism; Stakeholder Capitalism; Shareholder Engagement; Competition; Strategy; Government and Politics; Society; Social Issues; Human Needs; Wealth and Poverty; Business and Community Relations; Business and Government Relations; Corporate Accountability; Financial Services Industry; Banking Industry; United States
- Article
Are They Useful? The Effects of Performance Incentives on the Prioritization of Work Versus Personal Ties
By: Julia Hur, Alice Lee-Yoon and Ashley V. Whillans
Most working adults report spending very little time with friends and family. The current research explores the aspects of work that encourage employees to spend less time with personal ties. We show that incentive systems play a critical role in shaping how people... View Details
- July 2021
- Article
Do Interactions with Candidates Increase Voter Support and Participation? Experimental Evidence from Italy
By: Enrico Cantoni and Vincent Pons
We test whether politicians can use direct contact to reconnect with citizens, increase turnout, and win votes. During the 2014 Italian municipal elections, we randomly assigned 26,000 voters to receive visits from city council candidates, from canvassers supporting... View Details
- July–August 2021
- Article
Surfacing the Submerged State: Operational Transparency Increases Trust in and Engagement with Government
By: Ryan W. Buell, Ethan Porter and Michael I. Norton
Problem definition: As trust in government reaches historic lows, frustration with government performance approaches record highs.
Academic/practical relevance: We propose that in co-productive settings like government services, peoples’ trust and... View Details
- 2021
- Working Paper
Accounting for Product Impact in the Interactive Media and Services Industry
By: DG Park, George Serafeim and Katie Trinh
We apply the product impact measurement framework of the Impact-Weighted Accounts Initiative (IWAI) in two competitor companies within the interactive media and services industry. We design a monetization methodology that allows us to calculate monetary impact... View Details
Keywords: Product Innovation; Impact; Impact Investing; Impact Measurement; ESG; ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) Performance; ESG Ratings; Social Corporate Responsibility; Corporate Social Responsibility; Social Impact; Product Design; Product Positioning; Society; Product; Environmental Sustainability; Measurement and Metrics; Framework; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Social Media; Technology Industry
- June 2021
- Case
Acelero Learning
By: Mario Small, Kathleen L. McGinn, Amy Klopfenstein and Katherine Chen
In November 2020, Henry Wilde, co-founder and CEO of Acelero, Inc., must decide whether to change his company’s program model for delivering early childhood education to low-income children. One of the only for-profit Head Start providers in the United States, Acelero... View Details
- Article
Birds of a Feather...Enforce Social Norms? Interactions Among Culture, Norms, and Strategy
By: Hongyi Li and Eric J. Van den Steen
Does culture eat strategy for breakfast? This paper investigates the interactions among corporate culture, norms, and strategy, in order to better understand this issue and related questions. It first shows, through microfoundations, how the forces that drive toward... View Details
- June 2021
- Article
Cognition and Emotion in Extreme Political Action: Individual Differences and Dynamic Interactions
By: Leor Zmigrod and Amit Goldenberg
Who is most likely to join and engage in extreme political action? While traditional theories have focused on situational factors or group identity attributes, an emerging science illustrates that tendencies for extreme political action may also be rooted in... View Details
- June 2021
- Article
Deals in the Time of Pandemic
By: Guhan Subramanian and Caley Petrucci
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought new attention to the period between signing and closing in M&A transactions. Transactional planners heavily negotiate the provisions that govern the behavior of the parties during this window, not only to allocate risk between the... View Details