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Publications
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- Faculty Publications (797)
- June 2020 (Revised August 2020)
- Case
Majid Al Futtaim Retail Geographic Expansion: Brick or Click?
By: Juan Alcácer and Alpana Thapar
This case illustrates the challenges that retailers face when they aggressively pursue geographical growth by expanding both their physical store network and their online presence. It features Majid Al Futtaim (MAF) Retail, a franchisee of Carrefour hypermarkets in the... View Details
- June 2020 (Revised July 2023)
- Case
Time Out: The Evolution from Media to Markets
By: Kate Barasz and Eva Ascarza
In February 2020, Time Out’s chief executive officer Julio Bruno is evaluating the strategic direction of the company. Over the span of five decades, Time Out — the global media and entertainment brand — had gone from a self-published counterculture publication in... View Details
- 2020
- Article
Inconvenient Truths: Interpreting the Origins of the Internet
By: Shane Greenstein
A conventional economic narrative provides intellectual underpinnings for governments to subsidize research and development ("R&D") that coordinates risky research to benefit many in society. This essay compares this narrative with the origins and invention of the... View Details
- May 2020 (Revised August 2022)
- Teaching Note
Direct to Consumer Brands
By: Sunil Gupta
In recent years, we have seen a dramatic rise of direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands. Many of these brands, such as Dollar Shave Club, Harry’s, Glossier, and Allbirds, entered mature markets dominated by established companies, and yet they grew rapidly to attain valuations... View Details
- April 30, 2020
- Article
Leading Your Team Past the Peak of a Crisis
In the middle of a crisis, everything looks like a failure. But it’s possible to come out the other end with a strong company—and often with a plan for growth. Companies with a people-first culture can succeed by paying attention to three things: establishing clear... View Details
- April 29, 2020
- Article
The Case for AI Insurance
By: Ram Shankar Siva Kumar and Frank Nagle
When organizations place machine learning systems at the center of their businesses, they introduce the risk of failures that could lead to a data breach, brand damage, property damage, business interruption, and in some cases, bodily harm. Even when companies are... View Details
- April 2020 (Revised May 2020)
- Case
NTT DOCOMO's Race to 5G
By: Juan Alcácer, Horst Melcher and Akiko Kanno
The case, based on extensive interviews with NTT DOCOMO’s technology leaders, focuses on the opportunities and challenges that NTT DOCOMO faces with the launch of infrastructure and services for 5G wireless telecommunication technology. With higher data rates and... View Details
- April 2020 (Revised February 2023)
- Case
GitLab and the Future of All-Remote Work (A)
By: Prithwiraj Choudhury and Emma Salomon
GitLab is arguably one of the world’s largest “all-remote” companies. Started in 2011 and with more than 1,000 employees at present, it has no physical offices and all employees, including the entire C-Suite, work remotely from all parts of the world. The case... View Details
- April 2020
- Article
Digital Emotion Contagion
By: Amit Goldenberg and James J. Gross
People spend considerable time on digital media, and during this time they are often exposed to others’ emotion expressions. This exposure can lead their own emotion expressions to become more like others’ emotion expressions, a process we refer to as digital emotion... View Details
- 2021
- Working Paper
Hunting for Talent: Firm-Driven Labor Market Search in the United States
By: Ines Black, Sharique Hasan and Rembrand Koning
This article analyzes the phenomenon of firm-driven labor market search—or outbound recruiting—where recruiters are increasingly “hunting for talent” rather than passively relying on workers to search for and apply to job vacancies. Our research methodology leverages... View Details
- Spring 2020
- Article
The Basic Economics of Internet Infrastructure
By: Shane Greenstein
The internet's structure and operations remain invisible to most economists. What determines the economic value of internet infrastructure and the incentives to improve it? What are the open research questions for the most salient policy issues? This article reviews... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Working (From Home) During a Crisis: Online Social Contributions by Workers During the Coronavirus Shock
By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Wesley W. Koo and Xina Li
Prior research has documented that during mortality-related crises workers face psychic costs and are motivated to make social contributions. In addition, management practices that encourage workers to make social contributions during a crisis create value for firms.... View Details
- March 2020 (Revised April 2020)
- Case
CarTrade
By: Rajiv Lal and Shreya Ramachandran
Vinay Sanghi, the founder and CEO of CarTrade, had been trying different business strategies to keep the company, which he founded in 2010 as an online marketplace for used and new cars, profitable and on track for growth. In a crowded and disorganized dealer... View Details
- March 2020
- Case
Sizmek Chapter 11: Surviving Walled Gardens in Their Ad Tech Empire
By: Ayelet Israeli, Danilo Tauro and Sarah Gulick
This case provides a post-mortem of the advertising technology (adtech) company Sizmek. Sizmek grew via multiple acquisitions, with the vision of becoming an integrated adtech company that could leverage AI to buy digital media, while creating and serving display and... View Details
- March 2020 (Revised May 2020)
- Case
Redefining Mogul
By: Ethan C. Rouen
Tiffany Pham taught herself to code and created a technology platform, Mogul, with the goal of providing girls and women around the world with information and opportunities. After several years Mogul had reached more than 146 million women around the world and had... View Details
Keywords: Women; Inclusion; Technology; Branding; Social Impact; Entrepreneurship; Internet and the Web; Information; Knowledge Dissemination; Gender; Diversity; Brands and Branding; Expansion; Strategy; Media; Personal Development and Career; Technology Industry; Media and Broadcasting Industry; United States
- March 2020 (Revised January 2022)
- Case
Michelin: Building a Digital Service Platform
By: Sunil Gupta and Christian Godwin
Michelin, a tire company with over a century of experience, attempts to develop a digital service platform for its fleet and dealer customers. The case focuses on the challenges of bringing a large, well-established company into the digital age. Concerned about the... View Details
- March 2020 (Revised August 2020)
- Case
Culture at Google
By: Nien-hê Hsieh, Amy Klopfenstein and Sarah Mehta
Beginning in 2017, technology (tech) company Google faced a series of employee-relations issues that threatened its unique culture of innovation and open communication. Issues included protests surrounding Google’s contracts with the U.S. government, restrictions of... View Details
Keywords: Human Resources; Employee Relationship Management; Recruitment; Retention; Resignation and Termination; Labor; Working Conditions; Employment; Labor Unions; Wages; Law; Lawsuits and Litigation; Rights; Ethics; Values and Beliefs; Fairness; Organizations; Organizational Culture; Mission and Purpose; Social Psychology; Attitudes; Behavior; Conflict Management; Trust; Motivation and Incentives; Prejudice and Bias; Power and Influence; Information Technology; Internet and the Web; Information Infrastructure; Society; Social Issues; Culture; Civil Society or Community; Demographics; Diversity; Ethnicity; Gender; Race; Technology Industry; North and Central America; United States; California
- March 2020
- Module Note
Business Model Transformation in the Platform Age
By: Feng Zhu
Although some digital platforms are highly successful, most firms today are still traditional product- or service-based firms. To take advantage of the opportunities created by platform business models, traditional firms can work with existing platforms to become their... View Details
- March 2020
- Case
Aereo
By: Thomas R. Eisenmann and Jacey Taft
Aereo aimed to disrupt television program distribution by providing consumers access to local broadcast TV programming using offsite antennas, cloud-based DVRs, and an Internet connection. With Aereo, consumers could “cut the cord” and avoid the high cost of a cable TV... View Details
- March–April 2020
- Article
Building A Culture of Experimentation
By: Stefan Thomke
Why don’t organizations test more? After examining this question for several years, I can tell you that the central reason is culture. As companies try to scale up their experimentation capacity, they often find that the obstacles are not tools and technology but... View Details