Publications

April 2021 (Revised July 2021)
Case

Public Equities Impact Investing at BlackRock

By: Shawn A. Cole, Vikram S. Gandhi, Michael Norris and John Masko

In early 2021, BlackRock—the world’s largest asset manager with $9 trillion in assets under management (AUM)—sought to become a leader in promoting environmental and social sustainability. Over the previous ten years, CEO Larry Fink had written an annual open letter to... View Details

Keywords: Impact Investing; Renewable Energy; Climate Change; Environmental Sustainability; Equity; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Financial Management; Investment Funds; Investment Return; Mission and Purpose; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Financial Services Industry; United States

March 2021 (Revised April 2021)
Case

Making Impact Investing Markets: IFC (A)

By: Shawn A. Cole, John Masko and T. Robert Zochowski

In 2017, the International Finance Corporation (IFC) faced the first big investment decision in its new Scaling Solar project. Founded in 1956, IFC was an international investment body with national governments as shareholders, whose mission was to promote economic... View Details

March 2021
Supplement

Making Impact Investing Markets: IFC (B)

By: Shawn A. Cole, John Masko and T. Robert Zochowski

In 2018, Thailand’s Bank of Ayudhya (known as Krungsri), was considering whether to participate in the first issue of a new financial instrument from the International Finance Corporation (IFC), known as a gender bond. Building on the success of the Green Bond program... View Details

Keywords: Impact Investment; Development Economics; Developing Countries and Economies; Borrowing and Debt; Credit; Equity; Bonds; Financing and Loans; Growth and Development; Emerging Markets; Non-Governmental Organizations; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Financial Instruments; Gender; Financial Services Industry; Thailand

March 2021 (Revised January 2023)
Case

The Trouble with TCE

By: Vincent Pons, Rafael Di Tella and Galit Goldstein

Trichloroethylene, or TCE, was a chemical used by tens of thousands of businesses in the United States. It was an affordable tool for many. Yet, TCE had been associated with important health risks, including cancer and autoimmune disease. TCE potentially posed other... View Details

Keywords: Trichloroethylene; Toxicity; Lobbying; Chemicals; Health Disorders; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Policy; Ethics; Business and Government Relations; Chemical Industry; United States

2021
Working Paper

First Law of Motion: Influencer Video Advertising on TikTok

By: Jeremy Yang, Juanjuan Zhang and Yuhan Zhang

This paper engineers an intuitive feature that is predictive of the causal effect of influencer video advertising on product sales. We propose the concept of m-score, a summary statistic that captures the extent to which a product is advertised in the most engaging... View Details

Keywords: Influencer Advertising; Video Advertising; Computer Vision; Machine Learning; Advertising; Online Technology

SSRN

February 2021
Case

Threadless: The Renewal of an Online Community

By: Shane Greenstein, Karim Lakhani and Christian Godwin

Threadless, an online apparel company and artist community which Jake Nickell founded in 2000, continued to maintain its status as a top company in the online apparel industry during its second decade. From 2010 to 2020, Threadless continued to operate its... View Details

January 2021
Case

Value-Based Insurance Design at Onex

By: Joshua Schwartzstein, Amitabh Chandra and Amram Migdal

The operating executives of Health and Benefits for Onex Partners, Megan Jackson Frye and Sam Camens, faced a challenge: Healthcare costs for employees of Onex’s portfolio companies were continuing to rise above the consumer price index, reflecting broader trends... View Details

1 Jan 2021
Interview

Encore Teams That Succeed with Amy Edmondson

By: Amy C. Edmondson and Wanda Wallace

Teams in which people are not afraid to speak up, to challenge, to risk saying a wild idea are teams with the best performance. Google has found that psychological safety is a key component of their best teams. Yet, people are afraid of causing trouble, looking... View Details

Keywords: Psychological Safety; Organizational Culture; Trust; Groups and Teams; Performance Effectiveness

2021
Article

Helping and Happiness: A Review and Guide for Public Policy

By: Lara B. Aknin and Ashley V. Whillans

Perhaps one of the most reaffirming findings to emerge over the past several decades is that humans not only engage in generous behavior, they also appear to experience pleasure from doing so. Yet not all acts of helping lead to greater happiness. Here, we review the... View Details

Keywords: Generosity; Helping; Behavior; Motivation and Incentives; Happiness; Policy

January 2021
Article

Veil-of-Ignorance Reasoning Mitigates Self-Serving Bias in Resource Allocation During the COVID-19 Crisis

By: Karen Huang, Regan Bernhard, Netta Barak-Corren, Max Bazerman and Joshua D. Greene

The COVID-19 crisis has forced healthcare professionals to make tragic decisions concerning which patients to save. Furthermore, the COVID-19 crisis has foregrounded the influence of self-serving bias in debates on how to allocate scarce resources. A utilitarian... View Details

Keywords: Self-serving Bias; Procedural Justice; Bioethics; COVID-19; Fairness; Health Pandemics; Resource Allocation; Decision Making

December 2020
Case

Tencent: Combining Technology and Culture

By: Elie Ofek, Billy Chan and Dawn H. Lau

Tencent, one of the largest Internet conglomerates in China, had a vision to become a "Tech+Culture" firm. With dominant market shares in online games and social networking, it had built a vast Internet-based entertainment ecosystem, and was now focused on cultural... View Details

Keywords: Media Franchise; Marketing; Market Entry and Exit; Product Launch; Strategy; Culture; China

December 2020 (Revised March 2021)
Case

eXp Realty and the Virbela Platform

By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Jan Bena, David Rowat and Emma Salomon

As he considered his plans for the future, Glenn Sanford, CEO of eXp World Holdings, Inc., faced an exciting conundrum. He had built the first all-remote real estate brokerage firm, eXp Realty, which had been growing exponentially and was thriving, even amidst the... View Details

Keywords: Real Estate; All Remote; Virtual Platform; Internet and the Web; Strategy; Decision Making; Resource Allocation; Digital Platforms; Real Estate Industry; Technology Industry

Article

Returnable Reciprocity: Returnable Gifts Are More Effective than Unreturnable Gifts at Promoting Virtuous Behaviors

By: J.J. Zlatev and Rogers, T.

Increasing virtuous behaviors, such as initiating healthy habits, is an important goal for policymakers and social scientists. To promote compliance with requests to perform virtuous behaviors, we study “returnable reciprocity.” Whereas traditional reciprocity involves... View Details

Keywords: Nudges; Reciprocity; Want-should Conflicts; Wellness; Health; Behavior; Change; Well-being

2020
Article

Worry at Work: How Organizational Culture Promotes Anxiety

By: Jeremy A. Yip, Emma E. Levine, Alison Wood Brooks and Maurice E. Schweitzer

Organizational culture profoundly influences how employees think and behave. Established research suggests that the content, intensity, consensus, and fit of cultural norms act as a social control system for attitudes and behavior. We adopt the norms model of... View Details

Keywords: Anxiety; Norms; Stress; Culture; Tightness-looseness; Curvilinear; Organizational Culture; Emotions; Performance

October 2020 (Revised December 2020)
Case

Investing at Pivotal Ventures

By: Emil N. Siriwardane, Emily R. McComb and Eren Kuzucu

Launched in 2015 by Melinda Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Pivotal Ventures is an investment and incubation company. The company aims to support and promote transformational ideas, people and organizations, and advance social progress for women... View Details

Keywords: Investment; Management; Mission and Purpose; Venture Capital

Fall 2020
Article

Christo and Jeanne‐Claude: The Negotiation of Art and Vice Versa

By: Michael A. Wheeler

Over the past two decades the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School (PON) has named thirteen people as Great Negotiators. The project, directed by my colleague Jim Sebenius, has given us the opportunity to commend our honorees’ outstanding work and to learn from... View Details

Keywords: Art; Negotiation; Arts

October 2020
Case

Israelis, Palestinians and the Technology Bridge Between Them: A Work in Progress

By: Elie Ofek and Lia Weiner

In Israel of 2020 the demand for software engineers was endless. Meanwhile just miles away, Palestinian universities were graduating 3,000 engineers a year, and many of them could not find jobs in the still nascent Palestinian tech sector. Could these dots be... View Details

Keywords: Geopolitics; Technology Ecosystem; Software Engineers; Information Technology; Applications and Software; Business Startups; International Relations; Cooperation; Opportunities; Problems and Challenges; Technology Industry; Israel; Palestinian state

October 2020
Article

Why Time Poverty Matters for Individuals, Organisations, and Nations

By: Laura Giurge, Ashley V. Whillans and Colin West

Over the last two decades, global wealth has risen. Yet, material affluence has not translated into time affluence. Instead, most people today report feeling persistently “time poor”—like they have too many things to do and not enough time to do them. This is critical... View Details

Keywords: Time Poverty; Health; Well-being; Human Needs; Global Range

September 2020 (Revised July 2022)
Technical Note

Algorithmic Bias in Marketing

By: Ayelet Israeli and Eva Ascarza

This note focuses on algorithmic bias in marketing. First, it presents a variety of marketing examples in which algorithmic bias may occur. The examples are organized around the 4 P’s of marketing – promotion, price, place and product—characterizing the marketing... View Details