Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(2,125)
- Faculty Publications (287)
- August 2017 (Revised December 2018)
- Case
Tamarin App: Natural Language Processing
By: Srikant M. Datar and Caitlin N. Bowler
In this case, students explore the challenges of using sentiment analysis to monitor and understand public perception around a software application, Tamarin SEO App. Technical topics include building a filtering classifier using naive Bayes and sentiment analysis This... View Details
- Article
Kill or Die: Moral Judgment Alters Linguistic Coding of Causality
By: Julian De Freitas, Peter DiScioli, Jason Nemirow, Maxim Massenkoff and Steven Pinker
What is the relationship between the language people use to describe an event and their moral judgments?
We test the hypothesis that moral judgment and causative verbs rely on the same underlying mental
model of people’s actions. Experiment 1a finds that participants... View Details
- 2017
- Working Paper
Rethinking Measurement of Pay Disparity and its Relation to Firm Performance
By: Ethan Rouen
I develop measures of firm-level pay disparity and examine their relation to firm accounting performance. Using comprehensive compensation data for a large sample of firms, I find no statistically significant relation between the ratio of CEO-to-mean employee... View Details
- July 2017 (Revised March 2019)
- Technical Note
The Future of Mobility: Economic, Environmental, and Social Implications
By: George Serafeim and David Freiberg
This technical note explores how advancements in technology are fundamentally transforming how consumers interact with mobility. Transformation is being driven by three independent trends: the emergence of affordable electric vehicles, the development of autonomous... View Details
Keywords: Oil ＆ Gas; Automobile Manufacturing; Technological And Scientific Innovation; Mobility; Inequality; Electric Vehicles; Ride-sharing; Ambidexterity; Transformation; Disruption; Change; Technological Innovation; Transportation; Equality and Inequality; Auto Industry; Technology Industry; Transportation Industry; Distribution Industry
- Article
Third-Party Punishment as a Costly Signal of High Continuation Probabilities in Repeated Games
By: Jillian J. Jordan and David G. Rand
Why do individuals pay costs to punish selfish behavior, even as third-party observers? A large body of research suggests that reputation plays an important role in motivating such third-party punishment (TPP). Here we focus on a recently proposed reputation-based... View Details
- May 2017
- Teaching Note
Partners Group: Ain't No Mountain High Enough
Partners Group (PG), a Swiss-based PE manager, initiated a series of strategic shifts and evolved from a predominately fund-of-funds manager into a large, multi-asset class PE firm focused on direct investments. PG was the first PE firm to go public in 2006. A number... View Details
- Article
Statistical Physics of Human Cooperation
By: Matjaž Perc, Jillian J. Jordan, David G. Rand, Zhen Wang, Stefano Boccaletti and Attila Szolnoki
Extensive cooperation among unrelated individuals is unique to humans, who often sacrifice personal benefits for the common good and work together to achieve what they are unable to execute alone. The evolutionary success of our species is indeed due, to a large... View Details
- April 2017
- Case
Yushan Bicycles: Learning to Ride Abroad
By: Christopher A. Bartlett and Paul S. Myers
Yushan Bicycles, one of Taiwan's leading bicycle manufacturers, is pursuing an international expansion strategy by increasing demand for its range of traditional and electric bicycles and shifting its product mix toward higher-margin models sold through specialty... View Details
- January 2017 (Revised October 2023)
- Case
Classtivity: Payal's Pirouette
By: Jeffrey J. Bussgang and Olivia Hull
A few months after launching a new fitness technology product, the small staff of New York startup Classtivity gathers on a Saturday in April 2013 to take stock. With one successful pivot under its belt, Classtivity is finally generating revenue and enthusiasm among... View Details
Keywords: Product Pivot; Boutique Fitness; Fitness Industry; Market Sizing; Consumer Technology; Bundling; Subscription Model; Two-sided Marketplace; ClassPass; Entrepreneurship; Venture Capital; Business Startups; Transition; Customer Focus and Relationships; Technological Innovation; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Customer Value and Value Chain; Marketing Strategy; Failure; Business Strategy; Technology Industry; Health Industry; New York (city, NY)
- January 2017
- Article
Contract Design and Stability in Many-to-Many Matching
By: John William Hatfield and Scott Duke Kominers
We develop a model of many-to-many matching with contracts that subsumes as special cases many-to-many matching markets and buyer/seller markets with heterogeneous and indivisible goods. In our setting, substitutable preferences are sufficient to guarantee the... View Details
- 2016
- Working Paper
Populism and the Return of the 'Paranoid Style': Some Evidence and a Simple Model of Demand for Incompetence as Insurance Against Elite Betrayal
By: Rafael Di Tella and Julio J. Rotemberg
We present a simple model of populism as the rejection of “disloyal” leaders. We show that adding the assumption that people are worse off when they experience low income as a result of leader betrayal (than when it is the result of bad luck) to a simple voter choice... View Details
Keywords: Corruption; Betrayal; Populism; Incompetence; Literacy; Crime and Corruption; Income; Ethics; Political Elections; Race; Residency
- 2016
- Working Paper
Historical Change and the Competitive Advantage of Firms: Explicating the 'Dynamics' in the Dynamic Capabilities Framework
By: Geoffrey Jones and R. Daniel Wadhwani
This working paper aims to deepen the scholarly dialogue between strategy and history. It does so by examining how historical models of change can contribute to theory and research on the competitive advantage of firms during periods of rapid innovation. Focusing on... View Details
- October 2016 (Revised February 2017)
- Teaching Note
Alvogen
By: Daniel Isenberg, William R. Kerr and Alexis Brownell
Alvogen is an Icelandic pharmaceutical company that makes and sells generic drugs. Founder and CEO Robert Wessman is deciding whether to take on private equity investors willing to buy out all shareholders, merge with a large and publicly-traded US pharmaceutical... View Details
- October 2016 (Revised April 2018)
- Case
DataXu: Selling Ad Tech
By: Frank V. Cespedes, John Deighton, Lisa Cox and Olivia Hull
DataXu served marketers by buying digital advertising for brands using its demand-side platform. It sought a way to build a more predictable revenue stream in the very transactional media marketplace, and hoped that two new marketing analytics products would give it a... View Details
- September 2016
- Case
Partners Group: Ain't No Mountain High Enough
By: Nori Gerardo Lietz and Ricardo Andrade
Partners Group (PG), a Swiss-based PE manager, initiated a series of strategic shifts and evolved from a predominately fund-of-funds manager into a large, multi-asset class PE firm focused on direct investments. PG was the first PE firm to go public in 2006. A number... View Details
- September 2016
- Article
Do Display Ads Influence Search?: Attribution and Dynamics in Online Advertising
By: Pavel Kireyev, Koen Pauwels and Sunil Gupta
As firms increasingly rely on online media to acquire consumers, marketing managers feel comfortable justifying higher online marketing spending by referring to online metrics such as click-through rate (CTR) and cost per acquisition (CPA). However, these standard... View Details
- July 2016
- Article
Taxation, Corruption, and Growth
By: Philippe Aghion, Ufuk Akcigit, Julia Cagé and William R. Kerr
We build an endogenous growth model to analyze the relationships between taxation, corruption, and economic growth. Entrepreneurs lie at the center of the model and face disincentive effects from taxation but acquire positive benefits from public infrastructure.... View Details
- 2016
- Working Paper
The Empirical Economics of Online Attention
By: Andre Boik, Shane Greenstein and Jeffrey Prince
In several markets, firms compete not for consumer expenditure but instead for consumer attention. We model and characterize how households allocate their scarce attention in arguably the largest market for attention: the Internet. Our characterization of household... View Details
- 2017
- Working Paper
Management as a Technology?
By: Nicholas Bloom, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen
Are some management practices akin to a technology that can explain firm and national productivity, or do they simply reflect contingent management styles? We collect data on core management practices from over 11,000 firms in 34 countries. We find large cross-country... View Details
- May 2016 (Revised June 2017)
- Case
India's Amul: Keeping Up with the Times
By: Rohit Deshpandé, Tarun Khanna, Namrata Arora and Tanya Bijlani
Amul is an Indian dairy cooperative founded in 1947—eight months before India's independence from British rule—and owned by over three million farmers in the state of Gujarat. It is India's largest food product marketing organization, selling 46 products, including... View Details