Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(2,125)
- Faculty Publications (303)
- January–February 2018
- Article
Some Customers Would Rather Leave Without Saying Goodbye
By: Eva Ascarza, Oded Netzer and Bruce G.S. Hardie
We investigate the increasingly common business setting in which companies face the possibility of both observed and unobserved customer attrition (i.e., “overt” and “silent” churn) in the same pool of customers. This is the case for many online-based services where... View Details
- December 2017 (Revised June 2021)
- Case
Tesla's Bid for SolarCity (A)
By: Charles C.Y. Wang and Raaj Zutshi
In October 2016, Tesla asked its shareholders to ratify their $2.4 billion bid for SolarCity. Tesla had announced a series of large projects in the preceding months including the unveiling of the Model 3, the new Solar Roof, and pushing forward the opening of the... View Details
- January 2018
- Supplement
Jumia Nigeria PowerPoint Supplement
Founded in 2012, Jumia Nigeria, a startup effort by Germany-based Rocket Internet, aimed to become an African Amazon. The company entered the nascent market and immediately enjoyed an uptick in consumer spending fueled by the strength of Nigeria’s oil-based economy. By... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
The Real Exchange Rate, Innovation and Productivity
By: Laura Alfaro, Alejandro Cuñat, Harald Fadinger and Yanping Liu
We evaluate manufacturing firms' responses to changes in the real exchange rate (RER) using detailed firm-level data for a large set of countries for the period 2001–2010. We uncover the following stylized facts about regional variation of manufacturing firms'... View Details
- October 2017 (Revised October 2022)
- Case
Jumia Nigeria: from Retail to Marketplace (A)
By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Namrata Arora
Founded in 2012, Jumia Nigeria, a startup effort by Germany-based Rocket Internet, aimed to become an African Amazon. The company entered the nascent market and immediately enjoyed an uptick in consumer spending fueled by the strength of Nigeria’s oil-based economy. By... View Details
- 2017
- Working Paper
Biased Beliefs About Random Samples: Evidence from Two Integrated Experiments
By: Daniel J. Benjamin, Don A. Moore and Matthew Rabin
This paper describes results of a pair of incentivized experiments on biases in judgments about random samples. Consistent with the Law of Small Numbers (LSN), participants exaggerated the likelihood that short sequences and random subsets of coin flips would be... View Details
- 2017
- Book
Entering StartUpLand: An Essential Guide to Finding the Right Job
Many professionals aspire to work for startups. Executives from large companies view them as models to help them adapt to today's dynamic innovation economy, while freshly minted MBAs see magic in founding something new. Yes, startups look magical, but they can also be... View Details
- September 2017
- Article
The Real Effects of Capital Controls: Firm-Level Evidence from a Policy Experiment
By: Laura Alfaro, Anusha Chari and Fabio Kanczuk
Emerging-market governments adopted capital control taxes to manage the massive surge in foreign capital inflows in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Theory suggests that the imposition of capital controls can drive up the cost of capital and curb... View Details
- 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