Publications

20 Feb 2017
Research & Ideas

Having No Life is the New Aspirational Lifestyle

decades of social history, where enjoyment of nonproductive leisure time was seen as a mark of a successful life. The ability to fritter away your hours was considered the apex of success as evidenced in books from sociologist Thorstein Veblen’s 1899 classic The View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

January 2009 (Revised May 2009)
Case

College Summit: Rethinking the Relationship Between Growth and Impact

By: Stacey M. Childress and Geoff Eckman Marietta

College Summit, a nonprofit organization "committed to the day when every student who can make it in college makes it to college," was faced with an important strategic decision. After growing rapidly at more than 30% a year for the last several years, founder and CEO,... View Details

Keywords: Secondary Education; Growth and Development Strategy; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Mission and Purpose; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Nonprofit Organizations; Education Industry

Carl Kester is a Baker Foundation Professor and the George Fisher Baker Jr. Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus at Harvard Business School. He is a member of the Finance Unit. He served as Deputy Dean for Academic Affairs (2006-2010), Chairman of the... View Details

Keywords: asset management; banking; education industry; financial services; investment banking industry; pharmaceuticals; private equity (LBO funds)

13 Jun 2011
HBS Case

Mobile Banking for the Unbanked

bank accounts at all—they wanted effective ways to send money home to their families. The case's key lesson is the importance of meeting the real needs of your target audience, not the needs as you perceive them, says professor V. Kasturi... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Banking; Communications; Telecommunications

25 Oct 2006
Op-Ed

Fixing Executive Options: The Veil of Ignorance

he or she will be sitting. Without knowing where you'll end up, you have to really think through what's a fair allocation. What in the world does this theory of distributive justice have to do with option... View Details

Keywords: by Mihir Desai & Joshua Margolis

October 2009
Case

Low-k Dielectrics at IBM

By: Willy C. Shih and Giovanni Carraro

Innovations at the frontiers of technology carry enormous risk of making wrong choices. This case examines a decision made by IBM in its semiconductor process technology strategy: a material to use as a dielectric insulator in its leading edge silicon chip technology.... View Details

Keywords: Competency and Skills; Decision Choices and Conditions; Technological Innovation; Product Development; Science; Creativity; Semiconductor Industry; United States

Find at Harvard

02 Jan 2020
Op-Ed

Medicare for All or Public Option: Can Either Heal Health Care?

allow people to choose Medicare or private insurance. The Republicans, for their part, have focused on dismantling Obamacare and making hospital prices more transparent. Which, if any of these, can solve these serious problems? We think that a public View Details

Keywords: by Regina E. Herzlinger and James Wallace; Health; Public Administration

2021
Working Paper

Racial Inequality in Organizations: A Systems Psychodynamic Perspective

By: Sanaz Mobasseri, William Kahn and Robin Ely

This paper uses systems psychodynamic concepts to develop a theory about the persistence of racial inequality in U.S. companies, treating White men as the dominant group and Black people as an illustrative subordinate group. We theorize that this persistence is rooted... View Details

Keywords: Systems Psychodynamics; Organizational Inequality; Masculinity; Equality and Inequality; Race; Gender; Identity; Power and Influence

Read Now

September 2005 (Revised July 2008)
Case

Rancho Cucamonga

By: Arthur I Segel and David Robert Cotterman

Mikey Jones must decide what type of senior housing to develop, whether he should operate the facility himself, and what financing option he should pursue. View Details

Keywords: Financing and Loans; Investment; Housing; Real Estate Industry

14 Apr 2014
Working Paper Summaries

Facts and Figuring: An Experimental Investigation of Network Structure and Performance in Information and Solution Spaces

Keywords: by Jesse Shore, Ethan Bernstein & David Lazer

2018
Chapter

Behavioral Empirics and Field Experiments

By: Maria Ibanez and Bradley R. Staats

As the study of behavioral operations has continued to grow, an increasing number of researchers are turning to the field (e.g., conducting observational studies or natural or field experiments) to push deeper in order to find the answers to relevant behavioral... View Details

Keywords: Behavioral Operations; Empirical Operations; Empirical Operations Management; Field Experiments; Behavior; Operations; Management; Research

Read Now

23 Jul 2020
Research & Ideas

How Countries Use Financial Policy to Fight COVID-19

confirmed this notion using the detailed database, updated in real time until the end of May. There is a “stark difference between the announcements as a share of GDP in the developed countries relative to the developing countries,” says... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne

01 Aug 2005
Research & Ideas

How to Choose the Best Deal

presents special strategic and tactical challenges. (See the sidebar "Linked Negotiations" for descriptions of three categories of such talks.) This article focuses on "birds in the bush"—situations in which, like Jim, you have more than one... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Wheeler

23 Feb 2004
Research & Ideas

It’s Back to Business-Basics for Nonprofits

everything is not equally worth doing.— Jeff Bradach Bradach said when he moved from the classroom to consulting he was surprised to find so many nonprofits lacking a basic business theory to run their organizations. The philosophies of... View Details

Keywords: by Manda Salls

June 2012 (Revised March 2014)
Case

I Paid a Bribe (Dot) Com

By: Karthik Ramanna and Rachna Tahilyani

Anti-corruption web platform "ipaidabribe.com" leverages the transparency and anonymity of the Internet to encourage private citizens in India who have been the victims of corruption to self-report details of bribes paid, including the bribe amount, the name of the... View Details

Keywords: Crime and Corruption; Internet and the Web; Ethics; Service Industry; India

Research Summary

The Asymmetric Effect of Discount Retraction on Subsequent Choice

This paper examines the subsequent impact of a temporary price discount on brand preference after the promotion is retracted. Theorizing that price salience has an impact on price sensitivity, we propose that the effects of retracting a discount depend on the promoted... View Details

2022
Conference Presentation

Towards the Unification and Robustness of Post hoc Explanation Methods

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

Keywords: AI and Machine Learning