Publications

January 2018
Technical Note

Business at the Base of the Pyramid: Understanding Impact and Impact Evaluations

By: V. Kasturi Rangan and Tricia Gregg

Unlike financial success, there is no clear consensus regarding how best to define and measure social impact. This HBS Technical Note written for students of the HBS MBA course Business at the Base of the Pyramid (BBOP), offers readers pragmatic perspectives on how the... View Details

Keywords: Developing Countries and Economies; Social Issues; Value Creation; Human Needs; Performance Evaluation

Educators

11 Jan 2017
News

A famous scorecard taught at Harvard Business School can help you improve your life and relationships

05 Dec 2023
Research & Ideas

Lessons in Decision-Making: Confident People Aren't Always Correct (Except When They Are)

University of California, Santa Barbara. How does one measure confidence? In the first phase of the study, the team invited more than 2,000 people to perform 15 classic cognitive bias tasks, including: The “knapsack problem”—a strategic... View Details

Keywords: by Kara Baskin

09 Nov 2023
HBS Case

What Will It Take to Confront the Invisible Mental Health Crisis in Business?

impervious to mental health struggles. What can be done to better support people at the top? Cohen: This is a great point. There was a paper looking at the deaths of executives and what happens. Firm profitability and other value measures... View Details

Keywords: by Kara Baskin; Health

03 Oct 2023
What Do You Think?

Do Leaders Learn More From Success or Failure?

led us to a useful conclusion: that a strong culture logically could lead to either success or failure. It was, instead, the presence of values and behaviors—components of its culture—that encouraged openness and adaptability that was associated with success as we... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

November 2017
Case

Loss Prevention at Mac's Convenience Stores (A)

By: Francesca Gino, Katherine DeCelles and Olivia Hull

Faced with a persistent robbery problem at his convenience store company, Sean Sportun, security and loss prevention manager at Mac’s of Central Canada, looked to standardize safety measures and devise a new way of preventing employee injury. But as a 32-year old with... View Details

Keywords: Public Relations; Community Relations; Change Management; Working Conditions; Leading Change; Training; Knowledge Dissemination; Crime and Corruption; Law Enforcement; Legal Liability; Business and Community Relations; Retail Industry; Canada

Educators

2014
Working Paper

De Gustibus non est Taxandum: Heterogeneity in Preferences and Optimal Redistribution

By: Benjamin B Lockwood and Matthew Weinzierl

The prominent but unproven intuition that preference heterogeneity reduces redistribution in a standard optimal tax model is shown to hold under the plausible condition that the distribution of preferences for consumption relative to leisure rises, in terms of... View Details

Keywords: Spending; Policy; Taxation; Theory; United States

SSRN

February 1998
Case

Lyondell Petrochemical Company

By: Jay W. Lorsch and Daniel P. Erikson

In August 1994, Lyondell Petrochemical Co.'s corporate parent and largest single shareholder effectively shed its stock, resulting in the resignation of 5 of its 11 directors. The remaining outside directors immediately acted to overhaul the executive compensation plan... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Governance; Governing and Advisory Boards; Executive Compensation; Design; Business or Company Management; Management Teams; Mining Industry

01 Jan 2007
News

Berry-AMA Book Prize, American Marketing Association

September 2023
Article

Customer Churn and Intangible Capital

By: Scott R. Baker, Brian Baugh and Marco Sammon

Intangible capital is a crucial and growing piece of firms’ capital structure, but many of its distinct components are difficult to measure. We develop and make available several new firm-level metrics regarding a key component of intangible capital – firms’ customer... View Details

Keywords: Customer Base; Transaction Data; Customer Churn; Intangible Capital; Capital Structure; Measurement and Metrics; Customers

SSRN

Web

About Michael Porter - Institute For Strategy And Competitiveness

Letter from Michael Porter Publications 20 May 2013 The Lancet Redefining Global Health-Care Delivery by Jim Yong Kim, Paul Farmer, & Michael E. Porter Oct 2012 FSG Measuring Shared Value: How to Unlock Value by Linking Business & Social... View Details

Program

Driving Nonprofit Performance and Innovation—Virtual

Summary Performance measurement is essential for organizational innovation, learning, and success. Nonprofits, however, must evaluate social or environmental outcomes as well as financial performance, and the ideal metrics are not always... View Details

27 Nov 2023
Research & Ideas

Voting Democrat or Republican? The Critical Childhood Influence That's Tough to Shake

political beliefs. The strategy was to measure the “extent to which a voter whose family moves to a new neighborhood during their childhood adopts a political behavior similar to their permanent-resident peers in that neighborhood,” the... View Details

Keywords: by Ben Rand

November 2023 (Revised May 2024)
Case

Kickstarter: Crowdfunding for the Arts

By: Rohit Deshpandé and Alexis Lefort

Kickstarter was a virtual crowdfunding platform and community that allowed creators of all kinds to raise funding for creative projects. The executive team was wrestling with a tension in its business model: the organization earned the majority of its revenue from... View Details

Keywords: Fundraising; Mission; Crowdfunding; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Mission and Purpose; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; Arts; Web Services Industry; United States

Educators

Article

Consumers' Misunderstanding of Health Insurance

By: George Loewenstein, Joelle Y. Friedman, Barbara McGill, Sarah Ahmad, Suzanne Linck, Stacey Sinkula, John Beshears, James J. Choi, Jonathan Kolstad, David Laibson, Brigitte C. Madrian, John A. List and Kevin G. Volpp

We report results from two surveys of representative samples of Americans with private health insurance. The first examines how well Americans understand, and believe they understand, traditional health insurance coverage. The second examines whether those insured... View Details

Keywords: Behavioral Economics; Simplification; Insurance; Consumer Behavior; Health Care and Treatment; Cognition and Thinking; Insurance Industry; Health Industry; United States

March 2013
Article

Why 'Fair Value' Is the Rule: How a Controversial Accounting Approach Gained Support

By: Karthik Ramanna

For the past two decades, fair-value accounting—the practice of measuring assets and liabilities at estimates of their current values—has been on the ascent. This marks a major departure from the centuries-old tradition of keeping books at historical cost. It also has... View Details

Keywords: Fair Value; FASB; Finance; Politics; Financial History; Accounting; Fair Value Accounting; Financial Reporting; Accounting Industry; Financial Services Industry; United States

11 Feb 2019
News

Strict ID Laws Don’t Stop Voters: Evidence from a U.S. Nationwide Panel

Trading Volume Manipulation and Competition Among Centralized Crypto Exchanges

How competition affects manipulation by firms of information about important attributes of their products and how such information manipulation impacts firms’ short-term and long-term performance are open empirical questions. We use a setting that is especially... View Details

Article

Breakthroughs and the 'Long Tail' of Innovation

The largely erroneous perception that breakthroughs are impossible to predict arises from the tendency to focus on just the breakthroughs while ignoring the iterative process of invention and its distribution of outcomes. When all inventions are considered, they... View Details

Keywords: Diversity; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Independent Innovation and Invention; Innovation and Management; Business Processes; Performance Capacity; Performance Improvement