Publications

Find at Harvard

20 Oct 2015
Working Paper Summaries

Internalizing Global Value Chains: A Firm-Level Analysis

Keywords: by Laura Alfaro, Pol Antras, Davin Chor & Paola Conconi

November 2017 (Revised August 2018)
Case

Fair Value Accounting at Noble Group (A)

By: Siko Sikochi, Suraj Srinivasan and Quinn Pitcher

Noble Group was a large commodities trader based in Hong Kong and listed on the Singapore Stock Exchange. In 2012, Noble shifted its business strategy towards an asset-light model. Under this model, Noble did not own mines or farms to produce commodities but built... View Details

Keywords: Fair Value Accounting; Policy; Goods and Commodities; Contracts; Valuation

Educators

April 1999 (Revised March 2000)
Background Note

Discovering What Has Already Been Discovered: Why Did Your Customers Hire Your Product?

By: Clayton M. Christensen

Describes a methodology for identifying markets for new technologies and for defining the highest value attributes of new products or services. It helps innovators escape the trap of incremental improvements to established product concepts by asking a straightforward... View Details

Keywords: Customer Focus and Relationships; Markets; Product; Technology Adoption; Value

Educators

September 2003
Case

Valuing a Cross-Border LBO: Bidding on the Yell Group

By: Mihir A. Desai, Paolo Notarnicola and Mark Veblen

A team of private equity investors must value the leveraged buyout of a Yellow Pages business that operated in both the United States and the United Kingdom. In the process, they must wrestle with issues of how to conduct cross-border valuations and how to value a... View Details

Keywords: Leveraged Buyouts; Cash Flow; Private Equity; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues; Valuation

Educators

March 2011
Case

Cash Flow Productivity at PepsiCo: Communicating Value to Retailers

PepsiCo developed a new metric that better measured the value added by Pepsi products than did gross margin, the traditional metric used by retailers to determine shelf space and promotional activity. The new metric, cash flow productivity, captured the value of... View Details

Keywords: Customer Relationship Management; Cash Flow; Measurement and Metrics; Distribution; Performance Productivity; Value Creation; Food and Beverage Industry; Retail Industry

Find at Harvard

January 2019 (Revised February 2024)
Teaching Note

Hubble Contact Lenses: Data Driven Direct-to-Consumer Marketing

By: Ayelet Israeli

Teaching Note for HBS No. 519-011. As its Series A extension round approaches, the founders of Hubble, a subscription-based, social-media fueled, direct-to-consumer (DTC) brand of contact lenses, are reflecting on the marketing strategies that have taken them to a... View Details

1996
Other Unpublished Work

Value-Added: How Your Customers Can Grasp It

By: Frank V. Cespedes

Keywords: Value Creation; Customers

21 Oct 2002
Research & Ideas

The Parable of the Bungled Baggage And the Unhappy Customer

satisfy this customer at the very top end. So, I kept quizzing her about this and it was obvious that they'd done a lot of homework. They understood the value of this customer... View Details

Keywords: by W. Earl Sasser

07 Apr 2020
Research & Ideas

What Customers Need to Hear from You During the COVID Crisis

need, the new world for brands will have trust at its core. The mandate to brands from global consumers is clear: step up and help, not just your own customers and employees, but the world at large; protect all, support and care for all,... View Details

Keywords: by Jill Avery and Richard Edelman

27 Sep 2010
Research & Ideas

Customer Experts Lose Influence When Teams are Pressured

It's a common problem: A work team tackles a high-pressure project for a client, but along the way something goes wrong with team dynamics and the client ends up feeling shortchanged. Even though team members initially recognize and value... View Details

Keywords: by Sarah Jane Gilbert

2025
Working Paper

Dynamic Personalization with Multiple Customer Signals: Multi-Response State Representation in Reinforcement Learning

By: Liangzong Ma, Ta-Wei Huang, Eva Ascarza and Ayelet Israeli

Reinforcement learning (RL) offers potential for optimizing sequences of customer interactions by modeling the relationships between customer states, company actions, and long-term value. However, its practical implementation often faces significant challenges.... View Details

Keywords: Dynamic Policy; Deep Reinforcement Learning; Representation Learning; Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment; Latent Variable Models; Customer Relationship Management; Customer Value and Value Chain; Foreign Direct Investment; Analytics and Data Science

SSRN

11 Nov 2013
Research & Ideas

A Smarter Way to Reduce Customer Defections

often fail to take into account the complete value of the customers they are trying to retain. "What's missing from traditional methods is that they focus only on a customer's likelihood to churn, but not on... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman; Retail; Service

Article

Adding Value by Talking More

By: Robert S. Kaplan, Derek A. Haas and Jonathan Warsh

The prevailing fee-for-service payment model has led health care administrators and physician practices to impose severe constraints on the time physicians spend talking, for which they are reimbursed poorly or not at all. New value-based reimbursement models, however,... View Details

Keywords: Value Creation; Cost Management; Health Care and Treatment; Customer Focus and Relationships; Health Industry

18 Nov 2002
Research & Ideas

Where Morals and Profits Meet: The Corporate Value Shift

Harvard Business School professor Lynn S. Paine's new book, Value Shift, argues that companies can't consider themselves amoral or apart from society anymore—that the relationship between companies and society at large necessitates... View Details

Keywords: by Carla Tishler

Research Summary

Overview

By: Ryan W. Buell

From creating flight itineraries online, to interacting with tellers to complete complex banking transactions, to engaging with the government to address civic problems, customers are playing an increasingly vital role in the performance of operations in a broadening... View Details

September 2010
Supplement

Compass Maritime Services, LLC: Valuing Ships (CW)

By: Benjamin C. Esty and Albert W. Sheen

Tom Roberts, a founding partner of Compass Maritime Services, a New Jersey-based shipping research and consulting firm, has been asked by a new potential customer in May 2008 for advice on purchasing a capesize bulk carrier. After identifying a suitable ship with his... View Details

Keywords: Acquisition; Decisions; Microeconomics; Finance; Price; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques; Market Transactions; Partners and Partnerships; Mathematical Methods; Valuation; Consulting Industry; New Jersey

21 Jul 2003
Research & Ideas

Don’t Get Buried in Customer Data—Use It

Future (Currency/Doubleday), focuses on share of customer: Using the insights about what makes your most loyal customers different to maximize the value of those relationships. By the end of the decade, many... View Details

Keywords: by Jean Ayers

July 2020
Article

Reframing Value in a Crisis

By: Frank V. Cespedes and David Hoffeld

Reframing is the process of moving buyers from their current perspective(s) to one that motivates a different response. The current crisis makes this capability more important than ever. View Details

Keywords: Sales; Customers; Perspective; Value; Change; Health Pandemics