Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(7,643)
- Faculty Publications (1,659)
- 2007
- Working Paper
Competition in Modular Clusters
By: Carliss Y. Baldwin and C. Jason Woodard
The last twenty years have witnessed the rise of disaggregated "clusters," "networks," or "ecosystems" of firms. In these clusters the activities of R&D, product design, production, distribution, and system integration may be split up among hundreds or even thousands... View Details
- November 2007
- Case
The 1995 Release of the Institutional Investor Research Report: The Impact of New Information
By: Boris Groysberg, Nitin Nohria and Derek Haas
In 1995, Institutional Investor magazine began selling a complete ranking of the best equity research analysts. This report allowed research firms to assess the relative quality of each analyst across the industry, and this enabled firms to know nearly as much about... View Details
- November 2007
- Background Note
Asset Allocation I
By: Joshua D. Coval, Erik Stafford, Rodrigo Osmo, John Jernigan, Zack Page and Paulo Passoni
The goal of these simulations is to understand the mathematics of mean-variance optimization and the equilibrium pricing of risk if all investors use this rule with common information sets. Simulation A focuses on five to 10 years of monthly sector returns that are... View Details
- November 2007 (Revised March 2018)
- Case
Maidenform Bras
By: Tom Nicholas
Uses Ida Rosenthal's entrepreneurship in brassieres to explore how economic, social, and demographic changes reshaped gender and business enterprises in early- to mid-20th century America. It shows the importance of timing and geography to Rosenthal's new firm in New... View Details
- November 2007
- Case
AXA MONY
By: Lucy White and Andre F. Perold
AXA's friendly bid for MONY is contested by activist hedge funds suspicious of management's generous change in control contracts. Votes trade after the record date. AXA financed the bid using an unusual conditionally convertible bond which may have affected incentives... View Details
- November 2007
- Article
A Model of Consumer Learning for Service Quality and Usage
By: Raghuram Iyengar, Asim Ansari and Sunil Gupta
In many services, e.g., the wireless service industry, consumers choose a service plan based on their expected consumption. In such situations, consumers experience two forms of uncertainty. First, consumers may be uncertain about the quality of their service provider... View Details
- November – December 2007
- Article
Fundamentally Flawed Indexing
By: Andre F. Perold
A new theory of finance is being advanced as providing definitive proof that holding stocks in proportion to their market capitalizations is an inferior investment strategy. The claim is that capitalization weighting necessarily invests more in overvalued stocks and... View Details
- 2007
- Working Paper
The 'Fees → Savings' Link, or Purchasing Fifty Pounds of Pasta
By: Michael I. Norton and Leonard Lee
Many consumers have had the experience of entering discount membership clubs to make a few purchases, only to leave with enough pasta to outlast a nuclear winter. We suggest that the presence of membership fees can lead consumers to infer a "fees → savings" link,... View Details
- October 2007 (Revised March 2008)
- Case
Dove: Evolution of a Brand
By: John A. Deighton
Examines the evolution of Dove from functional brand to a brand with a point of view after Unilever designated it as a masterbrand, and expanded its portfolio to cover entries into a number of sectors beyond the original bath soap category. The development causes the... View Details
- October 2007 (Revised April 2009)
- Case
TH!NK: The Norwegian Electric Car Company
By: Joseph B. Lassiter III and David Kiron
On August 1, 2007, 61-year-old Jan-Olaf Willums' plane was flying along the Greenland coastline on his way back to Norway after intense discussions with several prominent U.S. venture capital investors, among them Kleiner Perkins and Rockport Capital Partners, about... View Details
- 2007
- Book
An Experiment in Fair Value Accounting? The State of the Art in Research and Thought Leadership on Accounting for Life Assurance in the UK and Continental Europe
By: Joanne G Horton, Richard H. Macve and George Serafeim
"Fair value" is currently the central topic of debate in the development of accounting standards. While it has now been defined to mean an exit price in US GAAP, the IASB is still considering its own definition, and some commentators are arguing for versions of entry... View Details
- Fourth Quarter 2007
- Article
Contingent Claims Approach to Measuring and Managing Sovereign Credit Risk
By: Dale . F. Gray, Robert C. Merton and Zvi Bodie
This paper proposes a new approach to measure, analyze, and manage sovereign risk based on the theory and practice of modern contingent claims analysis (CCA). The paper provides a new framework for adapting the CCA model to the sovereign balance sheet in a way that can... View Details
- October 2007
- Article
Supply and Demand Shifts in the Shorting Market
By: Lauren Cohen, Karl B. Diether and Christopher J. Malloy
Using proprietary data on stock loan fees and quantities from a large institutional investor, we examine the link between the shorting market and stock prices. Employing a unique identification strategy, we isolate shifts in the supply and demand for shorting. We find... View Details
- October 2007
- Article
The Effectiveness of Pre-Release Advertising for Motion Pictures: An Empirical Investigation Using a Simulated Market
By: Anita Elberse and Bharat N. Anand
One of the most visible and publicized trends in the movie industry is the escalation in movie advertising expenditures over time. Yet, the returns to movie advertising are poorly understood. The main reason is that disentangling the causal effect of advertising on... View Details
- October 2007
- Article
The Power of Stars: Do Star Actors Drive the Success of Movies?
By: Anita Elberse
Is the involvement of star actors critical to the success of motion pictures? Film studios, which they regularly pay multimillion-dollar fees to star actors, seem driven by that belief. I shed light on the returns on this investment using an event study that considers... View Details
- 2007
- Working Paper
Digital Interactivity: Unanticipated Consequences for Markets, Marketing, and Consumers
By: John A. Deighton and Leora Kornfeld
The digital interactive transformation in marketing is not unfolding, as many thought it would, on the model of direct marketing. That model anticipated that digital media using rich profiling data would intrude marketing messaging more deeply and more precisely into... View Details
- 2007
- Working Paper
Intra-Industry Foreign Direct Investment
By: Laura Alfaro and Andrew Charlton
We use a new firm level data set that establishes the location, ownership, and activity of 650,000 multinational subsidiaries -- close to a comprehensive picture of global multinational activity. A number of patterns emerge from the data. Most foreign direct investment... View Details
- 2007
- Working Paper
Mental Accounting and Small Windfalls: Evidence from an Online Grocer
By: Katherine L. Milkman, John Beshears, Todd Rogers and Max H. Bazerman
We study the effect of small windfalls on consumer spending decisions by examining the purchasing behavior of a sample of online grocery shoppers over the course of a year. We compare the purchases customers make when redeeming a $10-off coupon they received from their... View Details
- 2007
- Working Paper
Modularity, Transactions, and the Boundaries of Firms: A Synthesis
This paper constructs a unified theory of the location of transactions and the boundaries of firms. It proposes that systems of production can be viewed as networks of tasks. Transactions, defined as mutually agreed-upon transfers with compensation, are located... View Details
- August 2007
- Module Note
Managing Networked Businesses: Platform Evolution Module
Offers an overview of conceptual content and pedagogical guidance for instructors using a six-session module, "Platform Evolution," from "Managing Networked Businesses" (MNB), a case-based MBA elective course on platform-mediated networks. The module explores the... View Details