Publications

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March 2011 (Revised April 2021)
Case

The Whiz Kids

By: Tom Nicholas and David Chen

In October 1945, Henry Ford II received a telegram in his office at the Ford Motor Company in Dearborn, Michigan written by Charles "Tex" Thornton, a U.S. Air Force colonel. The telegram presented an opportunity for Ford to deploy a system of statistical control which... View Details

Keywords: Ford Motor Company; Statistical Control; Management Systems; Accounting; Operations; Strategy; Mathematical Methods; Auto Industry; United States

2010
Working Paper

Employee Selection as a Control System

By: Dennis Campbell

Theories from the economics, management control, and organizational behavior literatures predict that when it is difficult to align incentives by contracting on output, aligning preferences via employee selection may provide a useful alternative. This study... View Details

Keywords: Accounting; Decision Making; Governance Controls; Employees; Selection and Staffing; Management Systems; Financial Services Industry

Article

Bargaining with Imperfect Enforcement

By: Lucy White and Mark Williams

The game-theoretic bargaining literature insists on non-cooperative bargaining procedure but allows 'cooperative' implementation of agreements. The effect of this is to allow free-reign of bargaining power with no check upon it. In reality, courts cannot... View Details

Keywords: Agreements and Arrangements; Body of Literature; Contracts; Motivation and Incentives; Code Law; Game Theory

Web

Case Development - Faculty & Research

feedback in the classroom on those very concepts. In addition, case writing provides faculty a means to collaborate and to develop research ideas both across disciplines and across institutions. Field case development is a dynamic and... View Details

Research Summary

Wearing a Red Hat ¨C The Impact of Activist Industrial Policy on Software Development in China

The idea that the government should steer economic development by strategically hand-picking and managing certain industries is controversial but appeals to many developing countries that are eager to upgrade their industries. In this paper, I study China's recent... View Details

14 Feb 2023
Research & Ideas

When a Vacation Isn’t Enough, a Sabbatical Can Recharge Your Life—and Your Career

workers In all of these trajectories, DiDonna says, it’s clear that a sabbatical is more than just a long vacation; rather, those who take advantage of them can make profound changes, ranging from a renewed focus at their job to a radical career switch. “We want to... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

15 May 2024
Research & Ideas

A Major Roadblock for Autonomous Cars: Motorists Believe They Drive Better

‘guardian and ‘chauffeur.’ While the first connotes safety, the second conveys the idea that you can sit back and relax while the vehicle drives you around. Our results suggest the second label may leverage more persuasive benefits.” 2.... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne; Transportation; Auto

03 May 2024
Research & Ideas

How Much Does Proximity Influence Startup Innovation? 20 Meters' Worth to Be Exact

different backgrounds becomes pretty important.” You Might Also Like: ‘Intrinsic Joy’ Sparks Ideas Better than Cash Cofounder Courtship: How to Find the Right Mate—for Your Startup Feeling Separation Anxiety at Your Startup? 5 Tips to... View Details

Keywords: by Ben Rand

25 Jun 2024
Research & Ideas

Rapport: The Hidden Advantage That Women Managers Bring to Teams

Middle Manager of the Future: More Coaching, Less Commanding Feedback or ideas to share? Email the Working Knowledge team at hbswk@hbs.edu. Image: Image created by HBSWK with assets from AdobeStock/Vera Kuttelvaserova View Details

Keywords: by Kara Baskin; Food & Beverage

Web

Podcast - Business & Environment

often to address both military threats and humanitarian crises caused by climate change. In this episode of HBR Idea Cast, Climate Rising host Harvard Business School professor Mike Toffel and his colleague Forest Reinhardt discuss how... View Details

Research Summary

Financing Payouts

Despite the obvious interest in payout policy, no paper to date has systematically analyzed how payouts are funded, perhaps because the answer might have appeared just too obvious: payouts are funded with free cash flow — at least over long enough time periods.... View Details

October 2020 (Revised February 2021)
Case

The Tulsa Massacre and the Call for Reparations

By: Mihir A. Desai, Suzanne Antoniou and Leanne Fan

How should historic social injustices be addressed? Survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Massacre and their descendants, including Representative Regina Goodwin of Tulsa, believe they should be addressed through reparations and have consequently continued to push the government... View Details

2019
Working Paper

Why Do User Communities Matter for Strategy?

By: Sonali K. Shah and Frank Nagle

User communities represent a unique organizing structure for the exchange of ideas and knowledge. They are organizations composed primarily of users working collaboratively, voluntarily, and with minimal oversight to freely and openly develop and exchange knowledge... View Details

Keywords: Strategic Management; Knowledge Sharing; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Organizations; Knowledge Use and Leverage; Strategy

SSRN

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Spring 2016
Article

Risk Neglect in Equity Markets

By: Malcolm Baker

The link between measures of risk and return within the equity market has been very weak over the past 47 years: in the United States, returns on high-risk stocks have cumulatively fallen short of the returns on low-risk stocks, during a period when the equity market... View Details

Keywords: Asset Allocation; Equity Investment; Behavioral Finance; Private Equity

September–October 2012
Article

One-Switch Conditions for Multiattribute Utility Functions

By: Ali E. Abbas and David E. Bell

We introduce a variety of new independence conditions for multiattribute utility functions that permit preference dependencies among the attributes of a decision problem. The hierarchy of new conditions varies in the degree to which it specifies the functional form,... View Details

Keywords: One-switch; Utility Independence; Risk Aversion; Multiattribute Utility; Decision Making

March 2002 (Revised October 2002)
Background Note

Service on the Internet: The Effect of Physical Service on Scalability

Develops a framework for exploring the idea of, how service affects the economics of Internet organizations. Development of the framework requires an understanding of the different forms service takes in organizations that conduct business through the Internet. These... View Details

Keywords: Internet and the Web; Service Delivery; Service Industry

November 2000
Case

Clust.com: Dream More and Pay Less

Clust is a French group-buying Web site. Instead of marketing products to consumers, Clust is marketing aggregated consumer demands to manufacturers. Consequently, beyond the usual act of choosing among predefined alternatives, consumers are expected to bring up their... View Details

Keywords: Customer Value and Value Chain; Marketing