Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(1,854)
- Faculty Publications (419)
- 2019
- Working Paper
Decarbonization Factors
By: Alex Cheema-Fox, Bridget LaPerla, George Serafeim, David Turkington and Hui (Stacie) Wang
In the face of accelerating climate change, investors are making capital allocations seeking to decarbonize portfolios by reducing the carbon emissions of their holdings. To understand the performance of portfolio decarbonization strategies and investor behavior... View Details
- September 2019
- Case
Shell: A Company of Opportunity?
By: Joseph B. Fuller and Emer Moloney
The Opportunity Hub was a cloud-based platform that enabled managers to market projects they were working on and associated resourcing needs as “Opportunity Owners” and employees, or “Opportunity Seekers,” to browse these statements of need and engage when they had... View Details
Keywords: Business Divisions; Change Management; Competency and Skills; Experience and Expertise; Talent and Talent Management; Energy; Energy Sources; Non-Renewable Energy; Renewable Energy; Human Resources; Employees; Retention; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Innovation and Management; Innovation Strategy; Technological Innovation; Jobs and Positions; Job Design and Levels; Knowledge Sharing; Knowledge; Knowledge Use and Leverage; Labor; Human Capital; Labor Unions; Leading Change; Resource Allocation; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Performance Evaluation; Performance Productivity; Strategic Planning; Projects; Motivation and Incentives; Business Strategy; Social and Collaborative Networks; Technology Platform; Chemical Industry; Energy Industry; Information Technology Industry; Technology Industry; United Kingdom; Netherlands
- 2020
- Working Paper
Digital Experimentation and Startup Performance: Evidence from A/B Testing
By: Rembrand Koning, Sharique Hasan and Aaron Chatterji
Recent work argues that experimentation is the appropriate framework for entrepreneurial strategy. We investigate this proposition by exploiting the time-varying adoption of A/B testing technology, which has drastically reduced the cost of experimentally testing... View Details
- August 2019
- Case
Bark Gift Shop Ltd.
By: Susanna Gallani, Jan Bouwens and Peter Kroos
This case describes a setting in which the CFO of Bark Gift Shop Ltd., a gift items retailer, discovers an undesired pattern in the performance data suggesting that her shop managers that perform well during the first part of the year, purposely reduce their effort in... View Details
- August 2019 (Revised March 2022)
- Case
Lemonade: Disrupting Insurance with Instant Everything, Killer Prices, and a Big Heart
By: Elie Ofek and Danielle Golan
Launching its first products in the fall of 2016 in New York, insurtech startup Lemonade was on a mission to disrupt the insurance market by using AI and behavioral economics principles. The company offered renters, homeowners, and condo insurance and mainly targeted... View Details
- July 2019
- Article
Evaluation of Economic and Clinical Outcomes Under Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Mandatory Bundled Payments for Joint Replacements
By: Derek A. Haas, Xiaoran Zhang, Robert S. Kaplan and Zirui Song
In 2016, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) launched its first mandatory bundled payment program, the Comprehensive Care for Joint Replacement (CJR) model, by randomizing metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) into the payment model. The paper analyzed... View Details
- June 2019
- Article
Brokers vs. Retail Investors: Conflicting Interests and Dominated Products
By: Mark Egan
I study how brokers distort household investment decisions. Using a novel convertible bond dataset, I find that consumers often purchase dominated bonds—cheap and expensive versions of otherwise identical bonds coexist in the market. The empirical evidence suggests... View Details
- 2021
- Working Paper
rTSR: Properties, Determinants, and Consequences of Benchmark Choice
By: Paul Ma, Jee-Eun Shin and Charles C.Y. Wang
We develop a measurement-error framework for assessing the quality of relative-performance metrics designed to filter out the systematic component of performance and analyze relative total shareholder return (rTSR)—the predominant metric market participants use to... View Details
- April 2019
- Case
Barber Cardiosystems
By: Ranjay Gulati and Paul S. Myers
Barber Cardiosystems, based in Melbourne, Australia, designs and manufactures therapeutic devices used for treatment of coronary conditions. Over four decades, it has grown to be among the top 200 medical device companies in the world. It competes against much larger... View Details
- April 2019 (Revised January 2025)
- Case
Clear Link Technologies, LLC: Driving Sales with Peer Effects
By: Christopher Stanton, Richard Saouma and Olivia Hull
The importance of a good peer or coworker is widely discussed, but understanding the glue that makes coworkers valuable is less understood. This case sheds light on the importance of peers and the practices and environments that make a group greater than the sum of its... View Details
Keywords: Talent and Talent Management; Interactive Communication; Experience and Expertise; Decision Making; Training; Design; Compensation and Benefits; Knowledge Acquisition; Knowledge Sharing; Human Capital; Working Conditions; Measurement and Metrics; Outcome or Result; Performance; Performance Improvement; Research; Sales; Salesforce Management; Motivation and Incentives; Telecommunications Industry; Utah; United States
- April 2019
- Article
Incentives for Public Goods Inside Organizations: Field Experimental Evidence
By: Andrea Blasco, Olivia S. Jung, Karim R. Lakhani and Michael Menietti
Understanding why employees go the extra mile at work is a key problem for many organizations. We conduct a field experiment at a medical organization to study motivations for employees to submit project proposals for organizational improvement. In total, we analyze... View Details
- April 2019
- Article
Private Equity and Financial Fragility during the Crisis
By: Shai Bernstein, Josh Lerner and Filippo Mezzanotti
Do private equity firms contribute to financial fragility during economic crises? We find that during the 2008 financial crisis, PE-backed companies increased investments relative to their peers, while also experiencing greater equity and debt inflows. The effects are... View Details
- April 2019
- Article
Shooting the Messenger
By: Leslie John, Hayley Blunden and Heidi Liu
Eleven experiments provide evidence that people have a tendency to “shoot the messenger,” deeming innocent bearers of bad news unlikeable. In a preregistered lab experiment, participants rated messengers who delivered bad news from a random drawing as relatively... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
When Does Gamified Training Improve Performance? The Roles of Office and Leader Engagement
By: Ryan W. Buell, Wei Cai and Tatiana Sandino
Gamified training is a novel management control system in which companies use gamification
techniques to engage and motivate employees to learn. This study empirically examines the
performance consequences of gamified training using data from a natural field... View Details
- Article
Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation Appropriateness: An Interdisciplinary Consensus-Based Approach
By: Robert S. Kaplan, Michael Nurok, Jonathan Warsh, Todd Griner, Mayumi Kharabi, Joseph Castongia, Cali Overbeck, Lisa Krueger, Bernice Coleman, Danny Ramzy, Joshua Chung, Alice Chan, Eric Ley, Sindhu Kubendran, Neil Parrish, Zhe Yu, Michael Landberg, Stuart Finder, Bradley T. Rosen, Harry Sax and Francisco Arabia
We describe a quality improvement initiative aimed at achieving interdisciplinary consensus about the appropriate delivery of extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO). Interdisciplinary rounds were implemented for all patients on ECMO and addressed whether care was... View Details
- Article
Why Am I Seeing This Ad? The Effect of Ad Transparency on Ad Effectiveness
By: Tami Kim, Kate Barasz and Leslie K. John
Given the increasingly specific ways marketers can target ads, many consumers and regulators are demanding ad transparency: disclosure of how consumers’ personal information was used to generate ads. We investigate how and why ad transparency impacts ad effectiveness.... View Details
- January 2019 (Revised February 2020)
- Case
Should a Pension Fund Try to Change the World? Inside GPIF's Embrace of ESG
In the fall of 2018, Hiro Mizuno, the Chief Investment Officer (CIO) of GPIF, the Japanese Government Pension Fund, was reflecting on his efforts to integrate Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) issues into every aspect of GPIF’s portfolio. His efforts ranged... View Details
- 2019
- Working Paper
Relative Performance Transparency: Effects on Sustainable Choices
By: Ryan W. Buell, Shwetha Mariadassou and Yanchong Zheng
We study how transparency into the levels and changes of relative sustainability performance affects consumer choices. Our work considers two forms of transparency: process transparency, in which customers receive information about the company's sustainability... View Details
- 2018
- Working Paper
Corporate Sustainability: A Strategy?
By: George Serafeim
We explore the conditions under which firms maintain their competitive advantage through sustainability-based differentiation when faced with imitation pressures by industry peers. We document growing intraindustry convergence on sustainability actions over time for... View Details
Keywords: Sustainability; Corporate Performance; Industry Analysis; CSR; ESG; ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) Performance; Environment; Social Responsibility; Strategy And Execution; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Environmental Sustainability; Strategy; Performance; Corporate Strategy
- January 2019
- Article
Making Moves Matter: Experimental Evidence on Incentivizing Bureaucrats Through Performance-Based Postings
By: Adnan Q. Khan, Asim Ijaz Khwaja and Benjamin A. Olken
Bureaucracies often post staff to better or worse locations, ostensibly to provide incentives. Yet we know little about whether this works, with heterogeneity in preferences over postings impacting effectiveness. We propose a performance-ranked serial dictatorship... View Details