Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(877)
- Faculty Publications (252)
- April 2016
- Teaching Note
Flipkart: Transitioning to a Marketplace Model
By: Sunil Gupta and Das Narayandas
In 2015, Sachin and Binny Bansal, co-founders of India's largest e-tailer, Flipkart, announced that the company would switch to a marketplace model and move its logistics arm into a separate company. At the time of the announcement, Snapdeal already claimed to be... View Details
- Article
Landing the First Job: The Value of Intermediaries in Online Hiring
By: Christopher Stanton and Catherine Thomas
Online markets for remote labor services allow workers and firms to contract with each other directly. Despite this, intermediaries—called outsourcing agencies—have emerged in these markets. This paper shows that agencies signal to employers that inexperienced workers... View Details
- March 2016
- Case
Residency Select or J3Personica?
By: William Kerr and Kathryn S. Roloff
Residency Select, LLC provides psychometric assessments for matching medical students to residency programs. After a series of successful pilots, founder Alan Friedman is considering whether to continue developing his offerings in this area, or whether to expand into... View Details
- February 2016 (Revised December 2016)
- Case
IMAX: Scaling Personalized Learning in India
By: John Jong-Hyun Kim, Michael Chu and Rachna Tahilyani
IMAX is a provider of comprehensive testing and personalized content across mid-range and low-cost private K-10 schools in India. It aims to improve learning outcomes by providing schools with an integrated product suite including textbooks, workbooks, assessments,... View Details
- January 2016
- Case
COFCO
By: David E. Bell and Natalie Kindred
In 2015, COFCO, China's state-owned agribusiness giant, was working to protect China's food security (a key national security priority) by extending its control of the global food system through overseas acquisitions. At the same time, COFCO sought to grow its market... View Details
Keywords: China; Consumer Products; Commodities; Commodity Trading; Grain Trade; Globalization; Internationalization; Mergers And Acquisitions; Foreign Acquisitions; COFCO; Frank Ning; Gaoning; Nidera; Noble; Competition; Branded Products; Food; Markets; Marketing; Business and Government Relations; Agribusiness; Animal-Based Agribusiness; Plant-Based Agribusiness; Policy; Trade; Goods and Commodities; Food and Beverage Industry; China
- January 2016 (Revised July 2017)
- Case
HourlyNerd
By: Jill Avery and Joseph Fuller
HourlyNerd, a two-sided marketplace platform for matching freelance consultants with small companies looking for help, struggles to define a growth plan for the future. The company, started as a class project in HBS' FIELD 3 course, is assessing three growth paths:... View Details
- November 2015 (Revised April 2018)
- Case
Flipkart (A): Transitioning to a Marketplace Model
By: Das Narayandas, Sunil Gupta and Rachna Tahilyani
In 2015, Sachin and Binny Bansal, co-founders of India’s largest e-commerce company, are wondering if it is time to move from a hybrid model to a full marketplace. While Amazon runs a hybrid model, Alibaba operates a marketplace. In addition, Flipkart has been losing... View Details
- Article
More Insurers, Lower Premiums: Evidence from Initial Pricing in the Health Insurance Marketplaces
By: Leemore S. Dafny, Jonathan Gruber and Christopher Ody
- September 2015 (Revised February 2023)
- Case
Emdeon's Acquisition of Change Healthcare: Innovating Transparency Solutions for Health Care Consumers
By: Regina E. Herzlinger, Jeet Guram and Aanchal Raj
Case describes acquisition of Change Healthcare, which provides health care cost and quality information, by Emdeon, a health information exchange, and discusses health care transparency. Emdeon is a billion-dollar company that has grown through acquisitions; at its... View Details
- 2015
- Working Paper
Stability, Strategy-Proofness, and Cumulative Offer Mechanisms
By: John William Hatfield, Scott Duke Kominers and Alexander Westkamp
We consider the setting of many-to-one matching with contracts, where firms may
demand multiple contracts but each worker desires at most one contract. We introduce
three novel conditions—observable substitutability, observable size monotonicity,... View Details
- 2015
- Other Teaching and Training Material
Competitive Strategies Marketing Reading
By: Jill Avery and Sunil Gupta
Core Curriculum Readings in Marketing cover the fundamental concepts, theories, and frameworks that business students must study.
This Reading illuminates the dynamics of companies in competition and offers a process for planning and executing marketing... View Details
This Reading illuminates the dynamics of companies in competition and offers a process for planning and executing marketing... View Details
Keywords: Competitive Strategy
- January 2015 (Revised October 2016)
- Case
onefinestay: Building a Luxury Experience in the Sharing Economy
By: Jill Avery, Anat Keinan and Liz Kind
onefinestay was a two-sided marketplace that offered high-end home rentals to travelers who sought a more authentic and local experience than a typical upscale hotel might provide. After five years of rapid growth, it was time to do a comprehensive analysis of the... View Details
Keywords: Luxury Goods; Brand Building; Brand Management; Hospitality; Hotels; Digital Marketing; Brand Positioning; Luxury Service; Airbnb; Sharing Economy; Collaborative Consumption; Disruptive Business Model; Travel; Alternatives To Hotel; Branding; Customer Service; Exceeding Consumer Expectations; Client Acquisition; Reputation Management; Word Of Mouth; 2-way Business Model; Marketing; Marketing Strategy; Brands and Branding; Luxury; Disruption; Business Model; Entrepreneurship; E-commerce; Accommodations Industry; Tourism Industry; Travel Industry; United Kingdom
- December 2014 (Revised November 2023)
- Case
Codecademy: Monetizing a Movement?
By: Jeffrey J. Bussgang and Lisa C. Mazzanti
Codecademy, an open-platform, online community for learning computer programming, launched in 2011. By 2014, the company had raised a total of $12.5 million in funding and was, on many fronts, an overwhelming success. However, there were still no revenues. The founders... View Details
Keywords: Entrepreneurial Management; Startup Management; Technology; Computer Programming; Coding; Online Education; Monetization; Online Communities; Marketplaces; Internet and the Web; Education; Entrepreneurship; Business Startups; Growth and Development Strategy; Technology Industry; Education Industry
- 2014
- Working Paper
Higher-Ambition CEOs Need Higher-Ambition Boards
By: Edward Ludwig, Elise Walton and Michael Beer
Over the past years, forward-looking CEOs have adopted a higher-ambition approach to strategy and leadership. These "higher-ambition CEOs" are driven by a sense of purpose that goes beyond achieving financial success. They aspire to build organizations that succeed in... View Details
- Article
Doing Business with Strangers: Reputation in Online Service Marketplaces
By: Antonio Moreno and Christian Terwiesch
Online service marketplaces allow service buyers to post their project requests and service providers to bid for them. To reduce the transactional risks, marketplaces typically track and publish previous seller performance. By analyzing a detailed transactional data... View Details
- Article
Positioning Brands Against Large Competitors to Increase Sales
By: Neeru Paharia, Jill Avery and Anat Keinan
We explore the effect of having a large dominant competitor and show the conditions under which focusing on a competitive threat, rather than hiding it, can actually help a brand. We demonstrate through lab and field studies that highlighting a large competitor's size... View Details
- November 2014
- Teaching Note
Marketing Marijuana in Colorado
By: John A. Quelch
The case, set in the middle of 2014, reviews the first six months of marketplace activity in Colorado, following the legalization of marijuana for recreational use and the expansion of marijuana retailing from medical dispensaries to recreational stores. The case... View Details
Keywords: Marketing Innovations; Retail Government Services; Public Health; Agribusiness; Customers; Goods and Commodities; Government and Politics; Health; Marketing; Society; Consumer Products Industry; Distribution Industry; Health Industry; Public Administration Industry; North and Central America
- 2014
- Working Paper
Hidden Substitutes
By: John William Hatfield and Scott Duke Kominers
In this paper, we show that preferences exhibiting some forms of complementarity
in fact have an underlying substitutable structure. Specifically, we show that some
preferences that are not substitutable in the setting of many-to-one matching with
contracts become... View Details
- Article
Analyzing Scrip Systems
By: Kris Johnson, David Simchi-Levi and Peng Sun
Scrip systems provide a nonmonetary trade economy for exchange of resources. We model a scrip system as a stochastic game and study system design issues on selection rules to match potential trade partners over time. We show the optimality of one particular rule in... View Details
- May 2014
- Article
Investment Incentives in Labor Market Matching
By: John William Hatfield, Fuhito Kojima and Scott Duke Kominers
We provide an illustration of how the design of labor market clearing mechanisms can affect incentives for human capital acquisition. Specifically, we extend the labor market matching model (with discrete transfers) of Kelso and Crawford (1982) to incorporate the... View Details