Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(3,816)
- Faculty Publications (720)
- February 2022 (Revised January 2024)
- Supplement
Winning Business at Russell Reynolds (C)
By: Ethan Bernstein and Cara Mazzucco
In an effort to make compensation drive collaboration, Russell Reynolds Associates’ (RRA) CEO Clarke Murphy sought to re-engineer the bonus system for his executive search consultants in 2016. As his HR analytics guru, Kelly Smith, points out, that risks upsetting—and... View Details
- February 2022
- Case
Agora (A)
By: Lindsay N. Hyde, Thomas R. Eisenmann and Tom Quinn
Agora was a civic technology (civic tech) startup founded by Elsa Sze, who wanted to enhance the connection between political officials and their constituents by facilitating virtual “town halls,” making underrepresented voices heard and benefiting elected and... View Details
- February 2022
- Supplement
Agora (B)
By: Lindsay N. Hyde, Thomas R. Eisenmann and Tom Quinn
This is the conclusion to Agora (A), where founder Elsa Sze decides if she wants to continue investing energy in her civic technology startup.
Agora was a civic technology (civic tech) startup founded by Elsa Sze, who wanted to enhance the connection between... View Details
- February 2022 (Revised March 2022)
- Case
National Electric Vehicles Sweden (NEVS): Materializing a Vision
By: Shane Greenstein and Elena Corsi
In 2021, the car manufacturer National Electric Vehicle Sweden (NEVS) faced the challenge of securing funding from its investor to launch an innovative mobility solution based on fleets of shared autonomous driving (AD) cars. The system was complex as it required the... View Details
- February 2022
- Teaching Note
AptDeco: Circular Economy Furniture Marketplace
By: Ayelet Israeli
Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 521-069. AptDeco, a used furniture marketplace, was growing rapidly in the tri-state area. The co-founders were confident that the business model, financial position, and unit economics positioned AptDeco for scaling in the massive $120... View Details
Keywords: E-Commerce Strategy; Mobile; Word-of-Mouth; Word Of Mouth; Word-of-mouth Marketing; Internet Marketing; Growth Strategy; Platform; Platforms; Two Sided Markets; Two-sided Market; Two-sided Marketplace; Two-Sided Markets; Two-sided Network; Black Entrepreneurs; Black Leadership; African Americans; African-American Protagonist; Circular; Peer-to-peer Markets; Furniture Industry; Growth Hacking; Monetization Strategy; Growth Management; Marketing Strategy; Entrepreneurship; Digital Platforms; Marketing Channels; Digital Marketing; Consumer Behavior; Acquisition; Retention; Growth and Development Strategy; Customer Focus and Relationships; Expansion; Brands and Branding; E-commerce; Retail Industry; Consumer Products Industry; Technology Industry; Web Services Industry; United States; North America; New York (city, NY); New York (state, US)
- 2022
- Working Paper
The Disagreement Problem in Explainable Machine Learning: A Practitioner's Perspective
By: Satyapriya Krishna, Tessa Han, Alex Gu, Javin Pombra, Shahin Jabbari, Steven Wu and Himabindu Lakkaraju
As various post hoc explanation methods are increasingly being leveraged to explain complex models in high-stakes settings, it becomes critical to develop a deeper understanding of if and when the explanations output by these methods disagree with each other, and how... View Details
- January 2022
- Case
Bee-ing Better at Bombas
By: Elizabeth A. Keenan, Youngme Moon and John Masko
David Heath and Randy Goldberg founded Bombas in 2013 to serve two missions: to deliver the “best socks in the history of feet,” and to donate socks (the most requested item in homeless shelters) to Americans experiencing homelessness. Eight years later, Bombas had... View Details
Keywords: Social Entrepreneurship; Values and Beliefs; Brands and Branding; Marketing Strategy; Digital Marketing; Distribution; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Mission and Purpose; Quality; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Human Needs; Poverty; Growth and Development Strategy; Apparel and Accessories Industry; New York (city, NY)
- January 2022 (Revised February 2022)
- Case
Introducing EVA at ISS: A Better Way to Evaluate CEO Performance and Compensation?
By: Jonas Heese, Charles C.Y. Wang and James Weber
In early 2019, Anthony Campagna, the global director of fundamental research at ISS EVA, a unit of the proxy advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS), was preparing to release ISS's analyses of public company performance and CEO compensation ahead of Say... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
TalkToModel: Explaining Machine Learning Models with Interactive Natural Language Conversations
By: Dylan Slack, Satyapriya Krishna, Himabindu Lakkaraju and Sameer Singh
Practitioners increasingly use machine learning (ML) models, yet they have become more complex and harder to understand. To address this issue, researchers have proposed techniques to explain model predictions. However, practitioners struggle to use explainability... View Details
- December 2021
- Case
Bunge: Building a Sustainable Future?
By: Forest Reinhardt, David E. Bell, Pedro Levindo and Ruth Costas
Bunge, one of the world’s leading agribusiness traders and processors, strives to comply with its commitment to having a deforestation-free value chain by 2025 while it considers potential new business growth areas. After a complex turnaround, which involved one of the... View Details
- December 2021
- Article
Auctioneers Sometimes Prefer Entry Fees to Extra Bidders
By: Jiafeng Chen and Scott Duke Kominers
We investigate a market thickness–market power tradeoff in an auction setting with endogenous entry. We find that charging admission fees can sometimes dominate the benefit of recruiting additional bidders, even though the fees themselves implicitly reduce competition... View Details
- December 2021
- Article
Entrepreneurial Learning and Strategic Foresight
By: Aticus Peterson and Andy Wu
We study how learning by experience across projects affects an entrepreneur's strategic foresight. In a quantitative study of 314 entrepreneurs across 722 crowdfunded projects supplemented with a program of qualitative interviews, we counterintuitively find that... View Details
- Article
Social Technology: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Improving Care for Older Adults
By: Arthur Kleinman, Hongtu Chen, Sue E. Levkoff, Ann Forsyth, David E. Bloom, Winnie Yip, Tarun Khanna, Conor J. Walsh, David Perry, Ellen W. Seely, Anne S. Kleinman, Yan Zhang, Yuan Wang, Jun Jing, Tianshu Pan, Ning An, Zhenggang Bai, Jiexiu Wang, Qing Liu and Fawwaz Habbal
Population aging is a defining demographic reality of our era. It is associated with an increase in the societal burden of delivering care to older adults with chronic conditions or frailty. How to integrate global population aging and technology development to help... View Details
- November 2021 (Revised December 2022)
- Case
Farfetch: Digital Transformation for Luxury Brands
By: Sunil Gupta, Jill Avery, Elena Corsi and Federica Gabrieli
Farfetch, a global luxury technology platform and digital marketplace had been surfing the wave of digital transformation in the luxury fashion industry since 2008. While the company’s stock price and market valuation had fluctuated since its IPO in 2018, it had... View Details
Keywords: Digital Marketing; Marketplaces; Retailing; Internet Marketing; E-Commerce Strategy; Marketing; Marketing Strategy; Marketing Channels; Brands and Branding; Luxury; Growth and Development Strategy; Digital Transformation; E-commerce; Apparel and Accessories Industry; Beauty and Cosmetics Industry; Fashion Industry; Retail Industry; Web Services Industry; Technology Industry; United Kingdom; Europe; Portugal; China
- 2021
- Working Paper
The Business of K-12 Education in China
By: Geoffrey Jones and Yuhai Wu
This working paper examines the evolution of K-12 education in China, especially between 1985 and the present day, drawing extensive interviews with participants in the educational sector. China has been hugely successful in reaching almost 100 percent literacy,... View Details
- 2021
- Other Unpublished Work
Computer-Implemented Methods and Systems for Measuring, Estimating, and Managing Economic Outcomes and Technical Debt in Software Systems and Projects: US Patent 11,126,427 B2
By: Daniel J. Sturtevant, Carliss Baldwin, Alan MacCormack, Sunny Ahn and Sean Gilliland
An interrelated set of tools and methods is disclosed for: (1) measuring the relationship between software source code attributes (such as code quality, design quality, test quality, and complexity metrics) and software economics outcome metrics (such as... View Details
- July 2021 (Revised July 2024)
- Course Overview Note
Social Entrepreneurship and Systems Change
By: Brian Trelstad and Preeti Varma
Systems thinking is a discipline that emerged in the 20th century as a way to understand the complex interrelationships among various players and dynamics within an industry or field that resist simple, reductionist thinking. The big challenges we face play out in... View Details
- 2021
- Working Paper
The Value of Data and Its Impact on Competition
By: Marco Iansiti
Common regulatory perspective on the relationship between data, value, and competition in online platforms has increasingly centered on the volume of data accumulated by incumbent firms. This view posits the existence of "data network effects," where more data leads to... View Details
- July 2021 (Revised October 2021)
- Case
Allianz Customer Centricity: Is Simplicity the Way Forward?
By: Eva Ascarza and Emilie Billaud
This case explores the tradeoffs between product personalization and simplicity as companies grow. The case presents an opportunity to understand whether and how each of these approaches enables and/or limits companies’ abilities to provide customer satisfaction while... View Details
- Article
Towards the Unification and Robustness of Perturbation and Gradient Based Explanations
By: Sushant Agarwal, Shahin Jabbari, Chirag Agarwal, Sohini Upadhyay, Steven Wu and Himabindu Lakkaraju
As machine learning black boxes are increasingly being deployed in critical domains such as healthcare and criminal justice, there has been a growing emphasis on developing techniques for explaining these black boxes in a post hoc manner. In this work, we analyze two... View Details