Publications

January 1996 (Revised November 1997)
Case

Weston Presidio Offshore Capital: Confronting the Fundraising Challenge

By: Josh Lerner

Weston Presidio Capital encounters substantial difficulties while raising its first fund. The incentives and roles of investment advisors ("gatekeepers") pension funds and consultants are explored. The relationship with lead investors is considered. View Details

Keywords: Private Equity; Financing and Loans; Investment Funds; Markets; Problems and Challenges; Relationships; Motivation and Incentives; Financial Services 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

11 Mar 2021
Blog Post

A Year as Co-Presidents: Q+A with AASU's Bukie Adebo (MBA 2021) and Alexis Jackson (MBA 2021)

or normal term for African American Student Union (AASU) Co-Presidents Bukie Adebo (MBA 2021) and Alexis Jackson (MBA 2021). We talked to the two second-year students about how 2020 affected their term, highlights from their time as... View Details

October 15, 2021
Article

Virtuous Victims

By: Jillian J. Jordan and Maryam Kouchaki

How do people perceive the moral character of victims? We find, across a range of transgressions, that people frequently see victims of wrongdoing as more moral than non-victims who have behaved identically. Across 15 experiments (total n = 9,355), we document this... View Details

Keywords: Moral Judgment; Restorative Justice; Punishment; Compensation; Person Perception; Moral Sensibility; Judgments; Perception

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February 2015 (Revised April 2016)
Supplement

Quincy Apparel (B)

By: Thomas R. Eisenmann and Lisa C. Mazzanti

The (B) case provides post-mortem analysis from Quincy's cofounders on why their startup failed and what they could have done differently. Explanations for failure focus on Quincy's ambitious value proposition and resulting operational challenges; cofounder conflict;... View Details

Keywords: Retail; Online Retail; Women's Apparel; Internet and the Web; Entrepreneurship; Failure; Business Startups; E-commerce; Apparel and Accessories Industry; Apparel and Accessories Industry

July 2008 (Revised July 2020)
Case

Managing a Global Team: Greg James at Sun Microsystems, Inc. (A)

By: Tsedal Neeley and Thomas J. DeLong

Greg James, a global manager at Sun Microsystems, Inc., sets out to meet with his entire 43-member customer implementation team spread across India, France, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States of America to resolve a dire customer system outage as required... View Details

Keywords: Groups and Teams; Global Range; Management; Customer Satisfaction; Service Delivery; Crisis Management; Conflict and Resolution; Technology Industry; India; United Arab Emirates; France; United States

November 2000 (Revised November 2002)
Case

Activity-Based Management at W.S. Industries (A)

By: V.G. Narayanan and Sanjay Pothen

W.S. Industries undertakes the design and implementation of an activity based costing (ABC) system, and the ABC information empowers workers to make process improvement decisions. Workers' incentive pay is tied to cost savings from process improvements. View Details

Keywords: Activity Based Costing and Management; Motivation and Incentives; Performance Evaluation; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Knowledge Management; Energy Industry; India

30 Aug 2012
Working Paper Summaries

Incentivizing Calculated Risk-Taking: Evidence from an Experiment with Commercial Bank Loan Officers

Keywords: by Shawn Cole, Martin Kanz & Leora Klapper

October 2005 (Revised August 2006)
Case

Perelson Weiner LLP

By: Thomas J. Steenburgh and Das Narayandas

Perelson Weiner LLP, a successful accounting firm in New York City, is re-evaluating its incentive strategy as it makes plans to grow its business. View Details

Keywords: Accounting; Growth and Development; Compensation and Benefits; Management; Planning; Sales; Motivation and Incentives; Corporate Strategy; Accounting Industry; New York (city, NY)

16 May 2000
Research & Ideas

The Simple Economics of Open Source

observers. What Lerner and Tirole learned has led them to suggest ways that the commonly espoused motivations of programmers might be different when people work on open source projects as opposed to... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Technology

2011
Working Paper

The Dark Side of Creativity: Original Thinkers Can Be More Dishonest

By: Francesca Gino and Dan Ariely

Creativity is a common aspiration for individuals, organizations, and societies. Here, however, we test whether creativity increases dishonesty. We propose that a creative personality and creativity primes promote individuals' motivation to think outside the box and... View Details

Keywords: Ethics; Behavior; Creativity; Motivation and Incentives; Personal Characteristics

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September 2009
Case

Peter Schultz at The Scripps Research Institute

By: H. Kent Bowen, Alison Berkley Wagonfeld and Courtney Purrington

Peter Schultz, Professor of Chemistry at The Scripps Research Institute, managed an extremely productive lab. This case examines how Schultz recruited, motivated and inspired the students and scientists that worked with him. View Details

Keywords: Higher Education; Factories, Labs, and Plants; Research and Development; Recruitment; Selection and Staffing; Management Style; Motivation and Incentives; Leadership Style

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15 May 2007
Working Paper Summaries

I’ll Have the Ice Cream Soon and the Vegetables Later: Decreasing Impatience over Time in Online Grocery Orders

Keywords: by Todd Rogers, Katherine L. Milkman & Max H. Bazerman; Food & Beverage

24 Sep 2014
Op-Ed

Stop Thinking of Climate Change as a Religious or Political Issue

You sometimes hear people say things like, "I believe in global warming" or "I don't believe in climate change." It seems odd to approach climate change in this way, as though it were a question of belief, like religion. Most of the time when we confront uncertainty in... View Details

Keywords: by Forest Reinhardt; Energy; Utilities

21 Jan 2013
Research & Ideas

Altruistic Capital: Harnessing Your Employees’ Intrinsic Goodwill

Measuring Social Impact Historically, economists and firms alike have banked on the theory that workers are motivated by earning financial incentives View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

V.G. Narayanan

Professor Narayanan is the Thomas D. Casserly, Jr. Professor of Business Administration, and Senior Associate Dean of Executive Education and HBS Online. His research focuses on management accounting with an interest in performance evaluation and incentives... View Details

Keywords: accounting industry; banking; service industry; telecommunications; health care

20 Nov 2015
Working Paper Summaries

Impact Evaluation Methods in Public Economics: A Brief Introduction to Randomized Evaluations and Comparison with Other Methods

Keywords: by Dina Pomeranz; Public Administration

August 1983
Article

The Social Psychology of Creativity: A Componential Conceptualization

By: T. M. Amabile

Considers the definition and assessment of creativity and presents a componential framework for conceptualizing this faculty. Including domain-relevant skills, creativity-relevant skills, and task motivation as a set of necessary and sufficient components of... View Details

Keywords: Theory; Social Psychology; Creativity; Cognition and Thinking; Motivation and Incentives; Personal Characteristics

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2011
Article

The Consumer Psychology of Mail-in Rebates

By: John T. Gourville and Dilip Soman

Consumers who buy a product intending to use an accompanying mail-in rebate often do not redeem the rebate. To explain this behavior, we argue that consumers use an anchoring and adjustment approach to predicting the likelihood of redeeming a rebate. In keeping with... View Details

Keywords: Product Marketing; Consumer Behavior; Sales; Motivation and Incentives