Publications

02 Jul 2010
What Do You Think?

Is Profit as a “Direct Goal” Overrated?

illustration of that point; BP is very profitable, but there is official evidence that it continues to compromise safety.) Gerald Nanninga, on the other hand, argued that profit is a default measure, commenting that "It is easier to View Details

Keywords: by Jim Heskett

July 2023
Article

Design and Analysis of Switchback Experiments

By: Iavor I Bojinov, David Simchi-Levi and Jinglong Zhao

In switchback experiments, a firm sequentially exposes an experimental unit to a random treatment, measures its response, and repeats the procedure for several periods to determine which treatment leads to the best outcome. Although practitioners have widely adopted... View Details

Keywords: Switchback Experiments; Design; Analysis; Mathematical Methods

02 Sep 2013
Research & Ideas

The Curse of Double-Digit Growth

consumption, fewer paved roads, and fewer Internet users," he writes. That wasn't all. "Almost all broad measures of governance were also weaker for the double-digit growers. Indexes measuring the... View Details

Keywords: by Kim Girard

2020
Working Paper

Design and Analysis of Switchback Experiments

By: Iavor I Bojinov, David Simchi-Levi and Jinglong Zhao

In switchback experiments, a firm sequentially exposes an experimental unit to a random treatment, measures its response, and repeats the procedure for several periods to determine which treatment leads to the best outcome. Although practitioners have widely adopted... View Details

Keywords: Switchback Experiments; Design; Analysis; Mathematical Methods

2012
Chapter

Mental Health in the Aftermath of Conflict

By: Quy-Toan Do and Lakshmi Iyer

We survey the recent literature on the mental health effects of conflict. We highlight the methodological challenges faced in this literature, which include the lack of validated mental health scales in a survey context, the difficulties in measuring individual... View Details

Keywords: Conflict of Interests; Measurement and Metrics; Surveys; Analytics and Data Science; Ethnicity; War; Health Disorders; Body of Literature; Problems and Challenges; Bosnia and Hercegovina

2023
Working Paper

The Complexity of Economic Decisions

By: Xavier Gabaix and Thomas Graeber

We propose a theory of the complexity of economic decisions. Leveraging a macroeconomic framework of production functions, we conceptualize the mind as a cognitive economy, where a task’s complexity is determined by its composition of cognitive operations. Complexity... View Details

Keywords: Decisions; Complexity; Perception; Consumer Behavior; Production

2015
Chapter

The Fourth Wave: Business Management and Business Education in the Age of the Anthropocene

By: Andrew J. Hoffman and John Ehrenfeld

Sustainability has become mainstream in both management practice and management research. Firms incorporate sustainability strategies into their core mission. University administrators promote sustainability as central to their curricula. Scholars pursue sustainability... View Details

Keywords: Environmental Sustainability; Social Issues; Natural Environment; Leading Change; Management Systems

Find at Harvard

19 Aug 2008
First Look

First Look: August 19, 2008

blurring by retailers have generally increased both inventory levels and gross profit dollars across retail segments. Download paper: http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/08-078.pdf New Framework for Measuring and Managing Macrofinancial Risk... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

14 Sep 2010
First Look

First Look: September 14, 2010

management practices and decentralization. Productivity dispersion between firms and countries has motivated the improved measurement of firm organization across industries and countries. There appears to be substantial variation in... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

Research Summary

Learning Organizations

David A. Garvin is studying how companies pursue improvement and change through efforts to stimulate organizational learning. He has found the following activities to be common in learning organizations: intelligence gathering; experimentation; learning from... View Details

2018
Working Paper

Is Overconfidence a Motivated Bias? Experimental Evidence

By: Jennifer M. Logg, Uriel Haran and Don A. Moore

Are overconfident beliefs driven by the motivation to view oneself positively? We test the relationship between motivation and overconfidence using two distinct, but often conflated, measures: better-than-average (BTA) beliefs and overplacement. Our results suggest... View Details

Keywords: Self-perception; Overconfidence; Motivation; Better-Than-Average Effect; Specifically; Personal Characteristics; Perception; Motivation and Incentives; Cognition and Thinking

SSRN

2011
Working Paper

The Flexible Substitution Logit: Uncovering Category Expansion and Share Impacts of Marketing Instruments

By: Qiang Liu, Thomas J. Steenburgh and Sachin Gupta

Different instruments are relevant for different marketing objectives (category demand expansion or market share stealing). To help brand managers make informed marketing mix decisions, it is essential that marketing mix models appropriately measure the different... View Details

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Forecasting and Prediction; Investment; Brands and Branding; Marketing Strategy; Demand and Consumers; Mathematical Methods

August 2000 (Revised November 2001)
Background Note

Liability Reporting

By: Paul M. Healy and Preeti Choudhary

By examining key criteria for recognizing a liability, this case explores liability recognition in straightforward situations and then examines the most difficult reporting issues in recording liabilities. These often arise when: 1) uncertainty arises about whether an... View Details

Keywords: Financial Reporting; Legal Liability; Valuation; Problems and Challenges; Accounting Industry

21 May 2007
Research & Ideas

Fixing the Marketing-CEO Disconnect

problem is that these managers don't know what metrics to measure or how to interpret the results. They may collect all manner of plausible marketing-performance metrics, from customer satisfaction to... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

05 Mar 2013
First Look

First Look: March 5

Allocators with suspicious partners did not significantly differ from liars on word count. Allocators with suspicious partners used more negative emotion words and profanity. Mixed support was found for indexes from Coh-Metrix that View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

December 2022 (Revised January 2025)
Case

Akooda: Charging Toward Operational Intelligence

By: Christopher Stanton and Mel Martin

The Akooda case describes the challenges confronting founder and CEO Yuval Gonczarowski (MBA ‘17) in 2022 as he attempts to boost sales. Launched in November 2020, Akooda was an AI company that mined 20 different sources of digital data, from tools like Slack, Google... View Details

Keywords: Data Mining; Productivity; Monitoring; Data Analysis; AI and Machine Learning; Knowledge Management; Operations; Problems and Challenges; Employee Relationship Management; Information Technology Industry; Technology Industry; Information Industry; Boston; Israel

August 2023 (Revised March 2024)
Case

Arla Foods: Data-Driven Decarbonization (A)

By: Michael Parzen, Michael W. Toffel, Susan Pinckney and Amram Migdal

The case describes Arla’s history, in particular its climate change mitigation efforts, and how it implemented a price incentive system to motivate individual farms to implement scope 1 greenhouse gas emissions mitigation measures and receive a higher milk price. The... View Details

December 18, 2024
Article

Is AI the Right Tool to Solve That Problem?

By: Paolo Cervini, Chiara Farronato, Pushmeet Kohli and Marshall W Van Alstyne

While AI has the potential to solve major problems, organizations embarking on such journeys of often encounter obstacles. They include a dearth of high-quality data; too many possible solutions; the lack of a clear, measurable objective; and difficulty in identifying... View Details

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence; AI and Machine Learning; Problems and Challenges