Publications

2025
Working Paper

Dynamic Personalization with Multiple Customer Signals: Multi-Response State Representation in Reinforcement Learning

By: Liangzong Ma, Ta-Wei Huang, Eva Ascarza and Ayelet Israeli

Reinforcement learning (RL) offers potential for optimizing sequences of customer interactions by modeling the relationships between customer states, company actions, and long-term value. However, its practical implementation often faces significant challenges.... View Details

Keywords: Dynamic Policy; Deep Reinforcement Learning; Representation Learning; Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment; Latent Variable Models; Customer Relationship Management; Customer Value and Value Chain; Foreign Direct Investment; Analytics and Data Science

SSRN

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06 May 2002
Research & Ideas

A Toolkit for Customer Innovation

"Listen carefully to what your customers want and then respond with new products that meet or exceed their needs." That mantra has dominated many a business, and it has undoubtedly led to great products and has even shaped... View Details

Keywords: by Stefan Thomke & Eric Von Hippel

Article

The Growing Strategic Importance of End-of-Life Product Management

By: Michael W. Toffel

Requiring manufacturers to manage the their products when they become waste is an innovative form of regulation, one that has been adopted by countries in Asia, Europe, and North America on a variety of products that range from vehicles to appliances to batteries.... View Details

Keywords: Product; Environmental Sustainability; Cost Management; Wastes and Waste Processing; Strategy; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Manufacturing Industry; Asia; Europe; North and Central America

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08 Sep 2014
Research & Ideas

The Strategic Way To Hire a Sales Team

with engineering on custom applications, and up-selling or cross-selling additional services. Allocation of sales talent should change. Focus on behaviors in selection. In many firms, this means upgrading... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

2009
Chapter

Creating Superior Customer Value in a Connected World

By: Ranjay Gulati

"In the early twenty-first century, customers are more demanding than ever, and difficult economic times make them all the more so. As customers tighten their wallets and increase their demands, firms face greater pressure to provide superior customer value. Reducing... View Details

Keywords: Customer Satisfaction; Customer Value and Value Chain; Consumer Behavior; Product Design; Social and Collaborative Networks; Value Creation

21 Mar 2016
HBS Case

Can Customer Reviews Be 'Managed?'

Brian Kenny: What motivated you to write the case? Why were you interested in it? Thales Teixeira: Some of my research is on the economics of attention and online reviews have amassed a vast amount of attention nowadays. People have changed their View Details

Keywords: by Brian Kenny; Advertising; Travel

2016
Book

Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice

By: Clayton M. Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon and David S. Duncan

The foremost authority on innovation and growth presents a path-breaking book every company needs to transform innovation from a game of chance to one in which they develop products and services that customers want to buy and are willing to purchase at a premium price.... View Details

Keywords: Disruptive Innovation; Consumer Behavior

16 Jun 2020
Research & Ideas

Your Customers Have Changed. Here's How to Engage Them Again.

engage them? How should firms adjust? What is clear in the COVID-deaccession is that this change in customer behavior is pushing firms into a new “directional reality.” Firms need to adapt to shifting View Details

Keywords: by Rohit Deshpandé, Ofer Mintz, and Imran S. Currim; Retail; Service

13 Mar 2017
Research & Ideas

Hiding Products From Customers May Ultimately Boost Sales

portion of your full product catalog—and leaving customers to wonder what you’ll offer next? Or is it better to display all your wares at once, in hopes of encouraging a shopping spree? For example, is a View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Retail; Fashion

August 2018 (Revised September 2018)
Supplement

Predicting Purchasing Behavior at PriceMart (B)

By: Srikant M. Datar and Caitlin N. Bowler

Supplements the (A) case. In this case, Wehunt and Morse are concerned about the logistic regression model overfitting to the training data, so they explore two methods for reducing the sensitivity of the model to the data by regularizing the coefficients of the... View Details

Keywords: Data Science; Analytics and Data Science; Analysis; Customers; Household; Forecasting and Prediction

17 Jun 2016
Op-Ed

Companies Need to Start Marketing Security to Customers

behavior would not sit well at the annual industry association meeting and your holier-than-thou superiority claim might tempt fate and attract a terrorist attack. If anything, safety is downplayed as pre-flight instructions to airline... View Details

Keywords: by John A. Quelch; Entertainment & Recreation

09 Apr 2001
Research & Ideas

The Manager’s Guide to Communicating with Customers Collection

Are you reaching your customers? The key is knowing who they are and what they want To appeal to retail customers you need to understand what makes them tick. What better way to do that than by studying actual consumer behavior? A great... View Details

Keywords: by Richard Bierck; Retail

Teaching Interest

MBA Required Curriculum Leadership and Organizational Behavior (LEAD)

By: Rakesh Khurana

This course focuses on how managers become effective leaders by addressing the human side of enterprise.

The first modules examine teams, individuals, and networks in the context of:

The determinants of group... View Details

Teaching Interest

Managing Global Health: Applying Behavioral Economics to Create Impact (MBA)

Health, and development more broadly, is not something we give to people: it is something they produce themselves, interacting with supply-side and institutional factors. This course trains students to see through the lens of the end-user and to use the levers of... View Details

Summer 2017
Article

Measuring Consumer Preferences for Video Content Provision via Cord-Cutting Behavior

By: Jeffrey Prince and Shane Greenstein

The television industry is undergoing a generational shift in structure; however, many demand-side determinants are still not well understood. We model how consumers choose video content provision among over-the-air (OTA), paid subscription to cable or satellite, and... View Details

Keywords: Information Technology; Service Delivery; Consumer Behavior; Television Entertainment; Service Industry; Media and Broadcasting Industry

2009
Working Paper

Altruistic Dynamic Pricing with Customer Regret

By: Julio J. Rotemberg

A model is considered where firms internalize the regret costs that consumers experience when they see an unexpected price change. Regret costs are assumed to be increasing in the size of price changes and this can explain why the size of price increases is less... View Details

Keywords: Inflation and Deflation; Price; Marketing; Consumer Behavior; Mathematical Methods

October 2007
Article

Grist: A Strategic Approach to Climate

By: Michael E. Porter and Forest Reinhardt

Climate change will affect everything businesses do, as government efforts to mitigate carbon emissions cause their prices to rise steeply. This special edition of Forethought takes a hard-nosed look at the risks and opportunities of climate change. Michael E. Porter... View Details

Keywords: Customer Value and Value Chain; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Leadership; Logistics; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Performance Improvement; Climate Change; Competitive Advantage; Corporate Strategy

27 Sep 2010
Research & Ideas

Customer Experts Lose Influence When Teams are Pressured

engage in collective behaviors that diminish their ability to do so. Sarah Jane Gilbert:What led you to study the effects of performance pressure on work teams? Heidi Gardner: I experienced similar team dynamics when I worked in a... View Details

Keywords: by Sarah Jane Gilbert

August 2009 (Revised July 2010)
Case

Jones Lang LaSalle: Reorganizing around the Customer (2005)

By: Ranjay Gulati and Lucia Menzer Marshall

Peter Roberts, CEO of Jones, Lang, LaSalle (JLL) Americas division, has been charged with expanding the company's presence in its core geographic markets while simultaneously growing its corporate account business. Roberts and his task force have narrowed their options... View Details

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Global Strategy; Growth and Development Strategy; Organizational Structure; Business Strategy; Real Estate Industry

Educators