Testing - Publications - Faculty & Research

04 Oct 2019
HBS Seminar

Annabelle Fowler (Harvard University), Harvard University

Design-Based Confidence Sequences: A General Approach to Risk Mitigation in Online Experimentation.

Randomized experiments have become the standard method for companies to evaluate the performance of new products or services. In addition to augmenting managers' decision-making, experimentation mitigates risk by limiting the proportion of customers exposed to... View Details

Web

Social Enterprise - Faculty & Research

to avoid disruption costs, but we theorize that such responses evoke concession costs that prompt organizations to shift resources and attention from other social domains whose performance suffers. We test this theory by examining... View Details

09 Nov 2021
Research & Ideas

The Simple Secret of Effective Mentoring Programs

for more than 600 new call center employees in 2019. They tested two different versions of the program. "Some people just won’t admit they need help." The first version created a “broad-mentoring” program in which some new employees were... View Details

Keywords: by Jay Fitzgerald

13 Aug 2012
Research & Ideas

When Good Incentives Lead to Bad Decisions

experimental field study, the researchers set out to test the efficacy of three distinct incentive schemes for employees in charge of assessing risk and issuing loans: the origination bonus (in which officers are rewarded a commission for... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Banking

06 Dec 2022
Research & Ideas

Latest Isn’t Always Greatest: Why Product Updates Capture Consumers

associate professor at the University of Chicago. Consumers put on blindfolds The researchers performed dozens of experiments, using products ranging from gummy candy to dictionaries, and testing out labels such as “newer version,”... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Consumer Products; Retail

Web

Stata Temporary Files and Stata Tmp - Research Computing Services

number of files simultaneously Some of the file sizes may be large ( > several GB) You will submit a large number of jobs (> 10) to run at the same time You may still testing your code, your workflow, or changing parameters, which may... View Details

06 Feb 2020
Research & Ideas

What We Learned from Reading Jeff Bezos’ Patents

answer is yes. The founder’s early fascination with innovation proved key because he remains an active inventor with many patents to his name. Bezos has been known to view Amazon as “a technology company pioneering e-commerce, not a retailer.” We decided to View Details

Keywords: by Tricia Gregg and Boris Groysberg; Retail

26 Apr 2022
Book

What Does Your Business Stand For? Why Building Trust Starts with Purpose

he also took action, closing all Starbucks stores to provide training to employees on racial bias and inclusion. Looking back, Johnson says that moment in Philadelphia gave him the opportunity to reaffirm the company’s sense of purpose. “Values are View Details

Keywords: by Ranjay Gulati

29 Jan 2024
Research & Ideas

Do Disasters Rally Support for Climate Action? It's Complicated.

Environmental disasters like wildfires can ignite awareness of climate change and boost eco-friendly politicians’ careers. But do voters perceive a tradeoff between environmental policies and local economic growth? In Brazil, home to a majority of the Amazon tropical... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne

02 Apr 2020
What Do You Think?

What Are Lessons for Leaders from This Black Swan Crisis?

we be working instead on faster vaccine development once we know the shape of the virus? Rather than take risks with human lives, should we be giving more attention to the development of human substitutes for testing vaccines, substitutes... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

12 Sep 2022
Research & Ideas

When Experts Play It Too Safe: Innovation Lessons from a NASA Experiment

of whether managers should aim to deliberately increase the diversity of their evaluator pools,” the researchers write. Experts prefer feasible robot designs To test how open experts are to unique ideas, the researchers worked with NASA... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne; Aerospace

15 Nov 2022
Op-Ed

Why TikTok Is Beating YouTube for Eyeball Time (It’s Not Just the Dance Videos)

percent, up from 1 percent in 2020, making it the fastest-growing source of news consumption; half of consumers are between 16 and 24 years old. Live broadcasting. This copies a feature available on YouTube, Instagram, Twitch, Facebook, and others. Commerce. TikTok is... View Details

Keywords: by John Deighton and Leora Kornfeld

13 Dec 2022
Research & Ideas

The Color of Private Equity: Quantifying the Bias Black Investors Face

2020 murder, minority-owned funds gain visibility. To test this theory, the researchers looked at periods after high-profile police killings to monitor the performance of minority-owned funds. “Indeed, you do see this temporary blip where... View Details

Keywords: by Pamela Reynolds; Financial Services

14 Sep 2021
Blog Post

Top 5 Myths About HBS

convinced about some of the things I'd been thinking through, and identify things that I would want to test in business school if things worked out. It's not your stock interview questions but I think there's a lot of really rich value... View Details

23 May 2019
News

Tracy P. Palandjian, MBA 1997

Bond CEO and Cofounder, Social Finance Tracy Palandjian attributes her instincts as a social entrepreneur to her Chinese upbringing. “Master the basics, then innovate,” “Waste nothing,” and “Distance tests the strength of horses; time... View Details

Keywords: Susan Young

21 Aug 2020
Blog Post

Pursuing a JD/MBA Joint Degree

year, I was able to split my time between a healthcare startup in New York and blockchain startup in Berlin. Especially during my startup internships, I was able to cross over and help out with legal work, even though my main roles were business-focused. Having the... View Details

08 Sep 2014
Research & Ideas

The Strategic Way To Hire a Sales Team

including simulations, the kinds of tests used at HubSpot, or interviewing techniques. Many sales organizations could emulate the practice used by investment banks and consulting firms when hiring MBAs: the summer job is, in effect, an... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

05 Jul 2006
What Do You Think?

How Important Is “Executive Intelligence” for Leaders?

and too little to types of intelligence that enhance leadership performance. He argues that "when it comes to predicting work performance, cognitive-ability tests have been demonstrated to be approximately ten times as powerful as... View Details