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- June 23, 2021
- Article
Research: When A/B Testing Doesn't Tell You the Whole Story
By: Eva Ascarza
When it comes to churn prevention, marketers traditionally start by identifying which customers are most likely to churn, and then running A/B tests to determine whether a proposed retention intervention will be effective at retaining those high-risk customers. While... View Details
Keywords: Customer Retention; Churn; Targeting; Market Research; Marketing; Investment Return; Customers; Retention; Research
- June 2021
- Case
Acelero Learning
By: Mario Small, Kathleen L. McGinn, Amy Klopfenstein and Katherine Chen
In November 2020, Henry Wilde, co-founder and CEO of Acelero, Inc., must decide whether to change his company’s program model for delivering early childhood education to low-income children. One of the only for-profit Head Start providers in the United States, Acelero... View Details
- June 2021
- Article
Engineering Serendipity: When Does Knowledge Sharing Lead to Knowledge Production?
By: Jacqueline N. Lane, Ina Ganguli, Patrick Gaule, Eva C. Guinan and Karim R. Lakhani
We investigate how knowledge similarity between two individuals is systematically related to the likelihood that a serendipitous encounter results in knowledge production. We conduct a natural field experiment at a medical research symposium, where we exogenously... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Virtual Water Coolers: A Field Experiment on the Role of Virtual Interactions on Organizational Newcomer Performance
Designing management practices to better onboard organizational newcomers working remotely is a key priority for firms. We report results from a randomized field experiment conducted at a large global firm that estimates the performance effects of different types of... View Details
- Article
A Megastudy of Text-Based Nudges Encouraging Patients to Get Vaccinated at an Upcoming Doctor's Appointment
By: Katherine L. Milkman, Mitesh S. Patel, Linnea Gandhi, Heather N. Graci, Dena M. Gromet, Hung Ho, Joseph S. Kay, Timothy W. Lee, Modupe Akinola, John Beshears, Jonathan E. Bogard, Alison Buttenheim, Christopher F. Chabris, Gretchen B. Chapman, James J. Choi, Hengchen Dai, Craig R. Fox, Amir Goren, Matthew D. Hilchey, Jillian Hmurovic, Leslie K. John, Dean Karlan, Melanie Kim, David Laibson, Cait Lamberton, Brigitte C. Madrian, Michelle N. Meyer, Maria Modanu, Jimin Nam, Todd Rogers, Renante Rondina, Silvia Saccardo, Maheen Shermohammed, Dilip Soman, Jehan Sparks, Caleb Warren, Megan Weber, Ron Berman, Chalanda N. Evans, Christopher K. Snider, Eli Tsukayama, Christophe Van den Bulte, Kevin G. Volpp and Angela L. Duckworth
Many Americans fail to get life-saving vaccines each year, and the availability of a vaccine for COVID-19 makes the challenge of encouraging vaccination more urgent than ever. We present a large field experiment (N = 47,306) testing 19 nudges delivered to patients via... View Details
Keywords: Vaccination; COVID-19; Nudge; Influenza; Field Experiment; Health; Communication Strategy; Behavior
- May 2021
- Case
André Hoffmann: Beyond Philanthropy
By: Lauren Cohen, Hao Gao, Jiawei Ye and Spencer C.N. Hagist
André Hoffmann is a leader of one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies. His exceptional tenure in philanthropy over the past several decades, including being president of the WWF and the vice-president of the MAVA Foundation, has allowed him access to a far... View Details
- Article
Diversity and Team Performance in a Kenyan Organization
By: Benjamin Marx, Vincent Pons and Tavneet Suri
We present the results from a field experiment on team diversity. Individuals working as door-to-door canvassers for a non-profit organization were randomly assigned a teammate, a supervisor, and a list of individuals to canvass. This created random variation within... View Details
- May–June 2021
- Article
How to Close the Gender Gap
By: Colleen Ammerman and Boris Groysberg
Most companies say they’re committed to advancing women into leadership roles. What they may fail to recognize, though, is that systemic barriers are holding women back. As a result, women remain disadvantaged at every stage of their employment and underrepresented in... View Details
- Article
Large-Scale Field Experiment Shows Null Effects of Team Demographic Diversity on Outsiders' Willingness to Support the Team
By: Edward H. Chang, Erika L. Kirgios and Rosanna K. Smith
Demographic diversity in the United States is rising, and increasingly, work is conducted in teams. These co-occurring phenomena suggest that it might be increasingly common for work to be conducted by demographically diverse teams. But to date, in spite of copious... View Details
- April 16, 2021
- Article
A Playbook for Negotiators in the Social Media Era
By: James K. Sebenius, Ben Cook, David Lax, Ron S. Fortgang, Isaac Silberberg and Paul Levy
The disruptive effects of social media have been felt in virtually every corner of the world. Yet the information revolution has been largely ignored in the field of negotiation. Through a series of case studies we explore how savvy practitioners can ethically harness... View Details
- 2021
- Book
Glass Half-Broken: Shattering the Barriers That Still Hold Women Back at Work
By: Colleen Ammerman and Boris Groysberg
Why does the gender gap persist and how can we close it? For years women have made up the majority of college-educated workers in the United States. In 2019, the gap between the percentage of women and the percentage of men in the workforce was the smallest on record.... View Details
- April 2021
- Article
The Effects of Quota Frequency: Sales Performance and Product Focus
By: Doug J. Chung, Das Narayandas and Dongkyu Chang
This study investigates the comprehensive and multidimensional effects of quota (goal) frequency on sales force performance. We develop a theory of salespeople’s behavior—aggregate effort and the product type focus—in response to the temporal length of a sales-quota... View Details
- April 2021
- Article
Work-From-Anywhere: The Productivity Effects of Geographical Flexibility
By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Cirrus Foroughi and Barbara Larson
An emerging form of remote work allows employees to work-from-anywhere, so that the worker can choose to live in a preferred geographic location. While traditional work-from-home (WFH) programs offer the worker temporal flexibility, work-from-anywhere (WFA) programs... View Details
- March 2021 (Revised April 2021)
- Case
Making Impact Investing Markets: IFC (A)
By: Shawn A. Cole, John Masko and T. Robert Zochowski
In 2017, the International Finance Corporation (IFC) faced the first big investment decision in its new Scaling Solar project. Founded in 1956, IFC was an international investment body with national governments as shareholders, whose mission was to promote economic... View Details
Keywords: Impact Investing; Development Economics; Developing Countries and Economies; Renewable Energy; Climate Change; Environmental Sustainability; Borrowing and Debt; Credit; Equity; Bonds; Financing and Loans; Growth and Development; Emerging Markets; Non-Governmental Organizations; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Investment; Decision Making; Financial Services Industry; Energy Industry; Zambia
- March 2021 (Revised August 2024)
- Case
Hotwire.com: Navigating Through Turbulence
By: Jeffrey F. Rayport, Manny de Zarraga and Eric Levine
On September 10, 2001, after speaking at an industry conference at New York’s World Trade Center, Hotwire co-founder Spencer Rascoff boarded a flight from Newark to San Francisco. After returning home, Rascoff awoke the next morning to a phone call informing him that... View Details
Keywords: September 11; Corporate Entrepreneurship; Business Growth and Maturation; Disruption; Decisions; Job Cuts and Outsourcing; Growth Management; Digital Platforms; Problems and Challenges; Risk and Uncertainty; Expansion; Internet and the Web; Leading Change; Leadership Style; Air Transportation Industry; Tourism Industry; San Francisco
- March 2021 (Revised January 2023)
- Case
The Trouble with TCE
By: Vincent Pons, Rafael Di Tella and Galit Goldstein
Trichloroethylene, or TCE, was a chemical used by tens of thousands of businesses in the United States. It was an affordable tool for many. Yet, TCE had been associated with important health risks, including cancer and autoimmune disease. TCE potentially posed other... View Details
- March 2021
- Case
Dasra: From Strategic Philanthropy to Field Building
By: V. Kasturi Rangan and Tanya Bijlani
Dasra, a pioneer in the Indian Strategic Philanthropy space founded by a husband and wife team, had grown and evolved with the fast changing philanthropy scene in India. By 2017 it had managed to raise nearly $100 million of new capital for NGOs and Nonprofits in... View Details
- 2021
- Chapter
Dis-Atlanticism: The West in an Era of Global Fragmentation
By: Rawi Abdelal and Ulrich Krotz
BOOK ABSTRACT: Is the EU a Success or a Failure? Should It Stay or Should It Go? Britain and the EU. The Big Waste or Essential to Feed Europe? The Common Agricultural Policy. Observers of the European Union could be forgiven in thinking that since its inception the EU... View Details
- 2021
- White Paper
Working to Learn: Despite a Growing Set of Innovators, America Struggles to Connect Education and Career
By: Joseph B. Fuller, Rachel Lipson, Jorge Encinas, Tessa Forshaw, Alexis Gable and J.B. Schramm
In the wake of COVID-19 and growing inequality, America needs more pathways that bridge education and career. New research from the Project on Workforce at Harvard draws on data from New Profit's Postsecondary Initiative for Equity to identify opportunities for the... View Details
- February 2021 (Revised July 2022)
- Case
Sarah Breedlove: Changing the World
By: Robert Simons and Max Saffer
This case describes the rise of Sarah Breedlove, who later called herself Madam C.J. Walker, from the cotton fields of Louisiana to the head of a successful, nationwide beauty company providing opportunity and hair care products to Black women. The case describes how... View Details