Puzzles - Publications - Faculty & Research

23 Aug 2021
Research & Ideas

Why White-Collar Crime Spiked in America After 9/11

her study, it “remains a puzzle why financial fraud persists despite the severity of the penalties for and negative consequences of being caught.” Her study set out to probe the extent to which FBI enforcement deters white-collar crime.... View Details

Keywords: by Jay Fitzgerald

16 May 2000
Research & Ideas

The Simple Economics of Open Source

also draw an analogy to academe, writing that commercial interests can easily preclude creativity and intellectual exploration if programmers become too fixated on exciting, short-term commercial goals. Puzzles For The Future The open... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Technology

24 Apr 2019
Research & Ideas

The 'Amazon Effect' Is Changing Online Price Competition—and the Fed Needs to Pay Attention

quickly to world events The upshot, Cavallo says, is that retail prices have become less insulated from economic shocks, like changes in fuel costs or exchange rates, as retailers capture changing costs more quickly. This helps explain some of the View Details

Keywords: by Roberta Holland; Retail

21 Feb 2023
Research & Ideas

Are Your Employees Passing Up Incentives? Try Promoting the Programs More

offer these benefits. Even getting consumers with some of the highest electric bills in the country to turn off the lights can be challenge, as California found out with a failed discount program. Why some incentives spur action while others don’t has been View Details

Keywords: by Scott Van Voorhis

17 Jun 2017
Research & Ideas

Amazon, Whole Foods Deal a Big Win for Consumers

Source: 400tmax Editor's Note. Online retailing behemoth Amazon announced June 16 that it would acquire upscale grocery chain Whole Foods Market in a deal valued at more than $13 billion. Though the company has dabbled with the idea of a brick-and-mortar footprint in... View Details

Keywords: by Jose Alvarez and Len Schlesinger; Retail

30 Jul 2012
Research & Ideas

How Technology Adoption Affects Global Economies

The dynamics of technology adoption are very persistent," Comin says. Extensive Vs. Intensive Margins While those findings were significant, Comin was puzzled by one apparent paradox related to the fact that technology adoption lags have... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

07 Jan 2002
Research & Ideas

How Marketing Can Reduce Worldwide Poverty

spur agriculture. Or the supermarket going up in the inner city. What can a marketing background say to you when your goal is not to sell Coca-Cola, but to offer a better existence to people on the edge? That's the puzzle facing HBS... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

11 Feb 2020
Sharpening Your Skills

10 Rules Entrepreneurs Need to Know Before Adopting AI

similarly strive to develop and quickly market a minimum viable algorithm. This approach may take some convincing; the DNA of founding technical teams is often around solving technical puzzles and increasing accuracy from 90 percent to 95... View Details

Keywords: by Rocio Wu

11 Aug 2011
Lessons from the Classroom

Perfecting the Project Pitch

it's important for speakers to grab the audience's attention early. There are a number of tricks for doing so, such as posing a puzzle to capture the audience's attention. "I tell students that they have 30 seconds with an... View Details

Keywords: by Dennis Fisher

21 Feb 2005
Op-Ed

Is Business Management a Profession?

scientific reasoning and method appear to be applicable to business, thus helping to legitimate the study of business as an activity within the university. Yet what exactly a "science" of management should study would be puzzled... View Details

Keywords: by Rakesh Khurana, Nitin Nohria & Daniel Penrice

13 Nov 2019
Research & Ideas

Don't Turn Your Marketing Function Over to AI Just Yet

learning leverages Big Data, giving managers new tools to help unravel complex marketing puzzles and understand consumer behavior like never before. Tomomichi Amano, assistant professor in the Marketing Unit at Harvard Business School, is... View Details

Keywords: by Kristen Senz

30 Jun 2021
In Practice

The Harvard Business School Faculty Summer Reader 2021

handbook for rethinking diversity and inclusion; and the new book Glass Half-Broken by HBS colleagues Colleen Ammerman and Boris Groysberg. Voting rights is a contentious immediate issue in America, which is puzzling to those of us who... View Details

Keywords: by Kathryn Haviland

Research Summary

Overview

By: Vincent Pons

Professor Pons studies questions in political economy and development with the goal of understanding how democratic systems function, and how they can be improved.

He decomposes the electoral cycle into four essential steps: the factors affecting voter... View Details

18 Aug 2008
Research & Ideas

How Disruptive Innovation Changes Education

incumbents and where there are people who would like to do something but cannot access the available offering. By targeting these areas, you have a much greater chance of launching successfully a disruptive innovation that can transform a market. The View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Education

11 Jan 2010
Research & Ideas

Mixing Open Source and Proprietary Software Strategies

resources to developing open source products. That sort of behavior is initially puzzling to economists because the firm is participating in the development of something that is going to be given away for free. Once you begin studying... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Hanna; Web Services

19 Sep 2016
Research & Ideas

Why Isn't Business Research More Relevant to Business Practitioners?

humans are often irrational—and the fact that the logic of real-world decisions therefore sometimes flies in the face of established economic theory. “Most of my research projects are motivated by puzzles or strange patterns of behavior I... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Education

15 Jun 2007
Research & Ideas

Remembering Alfred Chandler

also remember thinking how kind he was; he had a palpable kindness about him. And an unquenchable curiosity. And beneath the raincoat and sometimes rumpled jacket, a steely determination to get the story right, to put the puzzle pieces... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

Research Summary

Research

The founding and expansion of new firms is central to innovation and economic growth, but the determinants of a new idea’s success are difficult to ascertain. The decision to form a new firm and its ultimate outcome are impacted by ownership structure, financing... View Details

06 Oct 2011
What Do You Think?

How Will the ‘Moneyball Generation’ Influence Management?

course, referred to a type of analytic data that might suggest nontraditional indicators designed to provide a competitive edge in everything from investments to selection of talent. One such example is the use of puzzles to select... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

11 Jan 2016
Research & Ideas

Is Group Loyalty a Force for Good or Evil?

sheets, just reporting the number of puzzles they got right. To sweeten the pot, participants were told they could earn 25 cents for themselves for each problem they got right, along with 25 cents for each member of their randomly... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

Publications