Publications

29 Apr 2008
News

How to Revive Securitization Markets

April 1995 (Revised August 1995)
Case

Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield (A)

By: Regina E. Herzlinger and Ramona Hilgenkamp

Mounting financial losses and increasing public scrutiny present many challenges to the board of directors of a large nonprofit health insurer. This case series presents chronologically the increasing problems of the company. View Details

Keywords: Governing and Advisory Boards; Corporate Governance; Financial Condition; Organizational Culture; Problems and Challenges; Nonprofit Organizations; Insurance Industry

October 2010 (Revised June 2014)
Case

Volkswagen do Brasil: Driving Strategy with the Balanced Scorecard

By: Robert S. Kaplan and Ricardo Reisen de Pinho

A new management team at VW do Brazil develops and deploys a strategy map and Balanced Scorecard to accomplish a turnaround and cultural change after eight consecutive years of financial losses and market share declines. The team uses the strategy map to align... View Details

Keywords: Business Cycles; Developing Countries and Economies; Management Teams; Leadership; Balanced Scorecard; Strategic Planning; Balance and Stability; Motivation and Incentives; Communication Strategy; Competitive Advantage; Auto Industry; Brazil; Germany

January 2009
Journal Article

The Fiscal Impact of High-skilled Emigration: Flows of Indians to the U.S.

By: Mihir Desai, D. Kapur, J. McHale and K Rogers

Easing immigration restrictions for the highly skilled in developed countries portends a future of increased human capital outflows from developing countries. The myriad consequences of these developments for developing countries include the direct loss of the fiscal... View Details

Keywords: Talent and Talent Management; Diasporas; Developing Countries and Economies; Taxation; Compensation and Benefits; Human Capital; Mathematical Methods; India; United States

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13 Dec 2010
Research & Ideas

Managing the Support Staff Identity Crisis

Last year, Harvard Business School professor Ranjay Gulati met with the marketing department of a large American corporation and posed a seemingly simple question: What do marketing people actually do? "I got this nervous laughter," says Gulati, an expert on... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

September 1993
Case

Daka International, Inc. (A)

Deals with an employee who contracts AIDS. The employer, a food-service proprietor, is threatened by an old and valued client with the loss of the account if they do not fire him. View Details

Keywords: Ethics; Decision Choices and Conditions

25 Jul 2018
News

Business & patriotism, mutually exclusive?

13 Dec 2019
News

How Influencers Are Making Over Beauty Marketing

15 Feb 2018
Working Paper Summaries

Can Financial Innovation Solve Household Reluctance to Take Risk?

Keywords: by Laurent Calvet, Claire Celerier, Paolo Sodini, and Boris Vallée; Financial Services; Computer

2025
Working Paper

Fiscal Externalities of Transaction Taxes: Evidence from the Los Angeles Mansion Tax

By: Daniel Green, Vikram Jambulapati, Jack Liebersohn and Tejaswi Velayudhan

We estimate the fiscal externalities of a property transfer tax, the Los Angeles “Mansion Tax”, on the revenues from property taxes when assessed values are closely tied to transactions. In California, as in over half of U.S. states, growth in tax as- sessments... View Details

Keywords: Public Finance; Real Estate; Property Demand; Taxation; Property; Revenue; Los Angeles

SSRN

19 Mar 2012
News

HBS Cases: Overcoming the Stress of ‘Englishnization’

March 2024 (Revised January 2025)
Case

Hippo: Weathering the Storm of the Home Insurance Crisis

By: Lauren Cohen, Grace Headinger and Sophia Pan

Rick McCathron, CEO of Hippo, considered how the firm’s underwriting model could account for the effects of climate change. Along with providing smart home packages, targeting risk-friendly customers, and using data-driven pricing, the Insurtech used technologically... View Details

December 2010 (Revised January 2012)
Supplement

Vodafone in Japan (B)

By: Juan Alcacer, Mary Furey and Mayuka Yamazaki

By 2005, Vodafone Group was losing its footing in the sophisticated Japanese telecom market. What were they doing wrong? Should they cut their losses and leave Japan, or could they learn from mistakes and turn things around? View Details

Keywords: Business Subsidiaries; Profit; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues; Knowledge Acquisition; Market Entry and Exit; Operations; Adaptation; Diversification; Expansion; Telecommunications Industry; Japan

January 2011 (Revised July 2011)
Case

Accounting for Catastrophes: BP PLC and Union Carbide Corporation (A)

By: David F. Hawkins

The IASB and FASB propose new contingency loss recognition, measurement, and disclosure rules (A case). The B and C cases apply these proposals to British Petroleum's Mexican Gulf oil spill and Union Carbide's Bhophal gas discharge. View Details

Keywords: Financial Reporting; International Accounting; Trade; International Finance; Standards; Strength and Weakness; Natural Disasters; Crisis Management; Governance Controls; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Energy Industry; India

November 2016
Case

Transformation at Eli Lilly & Co. (A)

By: William R. Kerr and Alexis Brownell

Faced with the imminent loss of 40% of its revenues due to patent expirations, pharma giant Eli Lilly sets out on a dramatic transformation process in 2009. The case considers how Lilly restructured the organization into business areas to aid better decision-making,... View Details

Keywords: Eli Lilly; Restructuring; R＆D; Transformation; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Structure; Pharmaceutical Industry; Indianapolis

Article

Oracle Efficient Private Non-Convex Optimization

By: Seth Neel, Aaron Leon Roth, Giuseppe Vietri and Zhiwei Steven Wu

One of the most effective algorithms for differentially private learning and optimization is objective perturbation. This technique augments a given optimization problem (e.g. deriving from an ERM problem) with a random linear term, and then exactly solves it.... View Details

Keywords: Machine Learning; Algorithms; Objective Perturbation; Mathematical Methods

2017
Article

Frictions or Mental Gaps: What's Behind the Information We (Don't) Use and When Do We Care?

By: Benjamin Handel and Joshua Schwartzstein

Consumers suffer significant losses from not acting on available information. These losses stem from frictions such as search costs, switching costs, and rational inattention, as well as what we call mental gaps resulting from wrong priors/worldviews, or relevant... View Details

Keywords: Information; Consumer Behavior

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2014
Book

Critical Knowledge Transfer: Tools for Managing Your Company's Deep Smarts

By: Dorothy A. Leonard, Walter Swap and Garvin Barton

When highly skilled subject matter experts, engineers, and managers leave their organizations, they take with them years of hard-earned, experience-based knowledge—much of it undocumented and irreplaceable. Organizations can thereby lose a good part of their... View Details

Keywords: Knowledge Management

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2023
Working Paper

'De Gustibus' and Disputes about Reference Dependence

By: Thomas Graeber, Pol Campos-Mercade, Lorenz Goette, Alexandre Kellogg and Charles Sprenger

Existing tests of reference-dependent preferences assume universal loss aversion. This paper examines the implications of heterogeneity in gain-loss attitudes for such tests. In experiments on labor supply and exchange behavior we measure gain-loss attitudes and then... View Details

Keywords: Behavioral Economics; Decision Choices and Conditions; Forecasting and Prediction