Publications

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May 2018
Article

Selection and Market Reallocation: Productivity Gains from Multinational Production

By: Laura Alfaro and Maggie X. Chen

Assessing the productivity gains from multinational production has been a vital topic of economic research and policy debate. Positive aggregate productivity gains are often attributed to within-firm productivity improvement; however, an alternative, less emphasized... View Details

Keywords: Productivity Gains; Multinational Production; Selection; Market Reallocation; And Within-firm Productivity; Multinational Firms and Management; Production; Performance Productivity; Competition; Mathematical Methods

May–June 2023
Article

Analytics for Marketers: When to Rely on Algorithms and When to Trust Your Gut

By: Fabrizio Fantini and Das Narayandas

Advanced analytics can help companies solve a host of management problems, including those related to marketing, sales, and supply-chain operations, which can lead to a sustainable competitive advantage. But as more data becomes available and advanced analytics are... View Details

Keywords: Analytics and Data Science; Decision Making

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March 2017
Teaching Note

AmazonFresh: Rekindling the Online Grocery Market

By: Rory McDonald

Teaching Note for HBS No. 615-013. View Details

Keywords: Innovation; Strategy; New Markets; Grocery; Operations Strategy; Innovation and Invention; Competition; Emerging Markets; Learning; Service Operations; Online Technology; United States

August 2020
Article

Lone Wolves in Competitive Equilibria

By: Ravi Jagadeesan, Scott Duke Kominers and Ross Rheingans-Yoo

This paper develops a class of equilibrium-independent predictions of competitive equilibrium with indivisibilities. Specifically, we prove an analogue of the “Lone Wolf Theorem” of classical matching theory, showing that when utility is perfectly transferable, any... View Details

Keywords: Indivisibilities; Matching; Lone Wolf Theorem; Marketplace Matching; Theory

2016
Book

Strategy Beyond Markets

By: John de Figueiredo, Michael Lenox, Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Rick Vanden Bergh

Strategy beyond markets has been an active area of research inquiry since the early 1990s. Since its inception, the scholarship emanating from this research stream has grown substantially in quantity, quality, and breadth. Likewise, firms across the world have... View Details

Keywords: Strategy

November – December 2011
Article

Competitive Strategy for Open Source Software

By: Vineet Kumar, Brett Gordon and Kannan Srinivasan

Commercial open source software (COSS) products-privately developed software based on publicly available source code-represent a rapidly growing, multibillion-dollar market. A unique aspect of competition in the COSS market is that many open source licenses require... View Details

Keywords: Applications and Software; Competitive Strategy; Product Development; Growth and Development; Markets; Motivation and Incentives; Quality; Policy; Perspective; Profit; Open Source Distribution; Emerging Markets

Brand-new markets are like the wormholes of science fiction, where the usual rules of time and space do not apply. When a market has just been born, the forces of competition there are constantly in flux, it's unclear who your customers really are, and conventional... View Details

January 2022
Article

Pushed into a Crowd: Repositioning Costs, Resources, and Competition in the RTE Cereal Industry

By: Young Hou and Dennis Yao

This paper exploits a natural experiment involving self-regulation in the ready-to-eat (RTE) breakfast cereal industry to evaluate the performance impact of product repositioning. It then examines how a product's brand equity value declines with repositioning distance... View Details

Keywords: Positioning; Resources; Brand Equity; Competitive Dynamics; Non-market Strategy; Regulation; Repositioning; Product Positioning; Performance Evaluation; Brands and Branding; Competitive Strategy; Consumer Products Industry

June 2014
Article

Mastering the Intermediaries: Strategies for Dealing with the Likes of Google, Amazon, and Kayak

By: Benjamin Edelman

Many companies depend on powerful platforms which distinctively influence buyers' purchasing. (Consider, Google, Amazon, and myriad others in their respective spheres.) I consider implications of these platforms' market power, then suggest strategies to help companies... View Details

Keywords: Competition; Market Power; Dominance; Advertising Campaigns; Marketing Channels; Agreements and Arrangements; Competitive Strategy; Negotiation; Transportation Industry; Information Technology Industry; Web Services Industry

July 2021
Article

Information Transparency, Multihoming, and Platform Competition: A Natural Experiment in the Daily Deals Market

By: Hui Li and Feng Zhu

Platform competition is shaped by the likelihood of multi-homing (i.e., complementors or consumers adopt more than one platform). To take advantage of multi-homing, platform firms often attempt to motivate their rivals’ high-performing complementors to adopt their own... View Details

Keywords: Platform Competition; Multi-homing; Information Transparency; Daily Deals; Groupon; LivingSocial; Digital Platforms; Information; Competition

January 2012 (Revised March 2014)
Module Note

Managers and Market Capitalism

By: Rebecca Henderson and Karthik Ramanna

The last thirty years have seen the widespread embrace of market capitalism as not only a highly efficient form of economic organization but also as one that best meets the diversity of human preferences. In large, complex societies, an increasing body of theoretical... View Details

Keywords: Economic Systems; Management

2017
Working Paper

Lone Wolves in Competitive Equilibria

By: Ravi Jagadeesan, Scott Duke Kominers and Ross Rheingans-Yoo

This paper develops a class of equilibrium-independent predictions of competitive equilibrium with indivisibilities. Specifically, we prove an analogue of the “Lone Wolf Theorem” of classical matching theory, showing that when utility is perfectly transferable, any... View Details

Keywords: Indivisibilities; Matching; Lone Wolf Theorem; Marketplace Matching; Theory

SSRN

12 Apr 2004
Research & Ideas

Operations and the Competitive Edge

Obstacles facing companies in today's hyper-competitive global markets are seemingly more complex than ever, to the point that managers must rethink many of the basic principles of good operations management, says Robert Hayes. In a new... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

16 Nov 2015
Research & Ideas

Does Competition Make Us More Creative?

produce incremental market share in a crowded market—then it’s not worth pursuing,” he says. IMPLICATIONS FOR MANAGERS The implication for managers is that sharp incentives can be effective in eliciting creative effort from employees—but... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Advertising

08 Mar 2012
Working Paper Summaries

Customer-Driven Misconduct: How Competition Corrupts Business Practices

Keywords: by Victor Manuel Bennett, Lamar Pierce, Jason A. Snyder & Michael W. Toffel; Auto

1994
Chapter

Competition Policy and Privatization: An Organizational Perspective

By: James Langenfeld and Dennis Yao

Competition (antitrust) policies in Central and Eastern Europe need to address both short-term problems associated with the transition to a market economy as well as the development of institutions suitable for a mature market economy. In this paper we employ an... View Details

Keywords: Economic Systems; Policy; Development Economics; Emerging Markets

Research Summary

Competing in New Markets

Strategic advisors counsel managers to conduct a thorough competitive analysis emphasizing key points of differentiation. But for new markets, Professor McDonald’s research suggests that reports of the threat posed by similar rivals may be greatly exaggerated, and... View Details

11 Apr 2013
Working Paper Summaries

Managers and Market Capitalism

Keywords: by Rebecca Henderson & Karthik Ramanna

Article

Competition for Scarce Resources

By: Peter Eso, Volker Nocke and Lucy White

We model a downstream industry where firms compete to buy capacity in an upstream market that allocates capacity efficiently. Although downstream firms have symmetric production technologies, we show that industry structure is symmetric only if capacity is sufficiently... View Details

Keywords: Competitive Strategy; Natural Environment; Technology; Production; Business Cycles; Forecasting and Prediction; Cost; Demand and Consumers; Industry Structures; Performance Capacity