Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(2,068)
- Faculty Publications (422)
- February 2020 (Revised April 2021)
- Case
StockX: The Stock Market of Things
By: Chiara Farronato, John J. Horton, Annelena Lobb and Julia Kelley
Founded in 2015 by Dan Gilbert, Josh Luber, and Greg Schwartz, StockX was an online platform where users could buy and sell unworn luxury and limited-edition sneakers. Sneaker resale prices often fluctuated over time based on supply and demand, creating a robust... View Details
Keywords: Markets; Auctions; Bids and Bidding; Demand and Consumers; Consumer Behavior; Analytics and Data Science; Market Design; Digital Platforms; Market Transactions; Marketplace Matching; Supply and Industry; Analysis; Price; Product Marketing; Product Launch; Apparel and Accessories Industry; Fashion Industry; North and Central America; United States; Michigan; Detroit
- 2020
- Book
Experimentation Works: The Surprising Power of Business Experiments
By: Stefan Thomke
Don’t fly blind. See how the power of experiments works for you. When it comes to improving customer experiences, trying out new business models, or developing new products, even the most experienced managers often get it wrong. They discover that intuition,... View Details
- January 2020 (Revised April 2020)
- Teaching Note
Brandless: Disrupting Consumer Packaged Goods
By: Jill Avery
Brandless, an online direct-to-consumer seller of upscale private-label consumer packaged goods (CPG), offered consumers a limited assortment of values-conscious products delivered directly to their homes with the simplicity of one fixed $3.00 price point that promised... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Reinventing Retail: The Novel Resurgence of Independent Bookstores
By: Ryan Raffaelli
This study examines how community-based brick-and-mortar retailers can achieve sustained market growth in the face of online and big box retail competition. The appearance of Amazon.com in 1995 led to a significant decline in the number of independent bookstores in the... View Details
- January 2020 (Revised January 2025)
- Case
Freelancer, Ltd.
By: Christopher Stanton, Karim R. Lakhani, Jennifer L. Hoffman, Jin Hyun Paik and Nina Cohodes
Over the course of the 2010s, the rapid advancement of mobile technologies and the rise of online freelancing platforms seemed to portend a radical transformation of labor markets into on-demand, flexible talent pools. Even though several Fortune 500... View Details
- January 2020 (Revised October 2021)
- Case
Zara: An Integrated Store and Online Model (A)
By: Antonio Moreno
In 2010, amidst the growth of ecommerce and the emergence of new, purely online, fashion players, Zara launched its first online store, Zara.com. Since then, Zara’s online business had grown at a fast pace. By 2018, 12% of Inditex Group’s total sales came from the... View Details
Keywords: Stores; Integration; Operations; Business Model; Strategy; E-commerce; Retail Industry; Fashion Industry; Europe
- January 2020
- Case
The June Oven
By: Leonard A. Schlesinger and Christian Godwin
The June Oven was a smart oven which was capable of identifying food and cooking it accordingly. This type of smart oven represented the next step in the long history of oven and stove development. Due to the widespread use of traditional ovens, the market for the June... View Details
Keywords: Business Ventures; Trends; Customers; Design; Entrepreneurship; Food; Goods and Commodities; Innovation and Invention; Marketing; Brands and Branding; Demand and Consumers; Distribution; Product Development; Sales; Information Technology; Internet and the Web; Applications and Software; Consumer Products Industry; Retail Industry; Technology Industry; Electronics Industry; Manufacturing Industry; United States
- December 2019
- Case
Walmart Ecommerce (B): Omnichannel Pursuits
By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Karen Elterman
This case is an abridged version (part 2 of 2) of "Walmart's Omnichannel Strategy: Revolution or Miscalculation?" HBS Case No. 720-370. The (B) case describes Walmart’s omnichannel strategy in 2018 as it battled Amazon for online retail market share. Walmart aimed to... View Details
- December 2019
- Article
The Impact of Increasing Search Frictions on Online Shopping Behavior: Evidence from a Field Experiment
By: Donald Ngwe, Kris J. Ferreira and Thales Teixeira
Many online stores are designed such that shoppers can easily access any available discounted products. We propose that deliberately increasing search frictions by placing small obstacles to locating discounted items can improve online retailers’ margins and even... View Details
- November 2019 (Revised September 2022)
- Case
TripAdvisor: An Itinerary for Growth
By: Jeffrey F. Rayport, Spencer Rascoff and Susie L. Ma
In 2019, TripAdvisor was one of the best-known and most-trafficked online travel sites. For nearly 20 years, its founder and CEO Steve Kaufer had steered TripAdvisor through many phases of growth and profitability, but recently the company’s growth had started to slow.... View Details
- November 2019 (Revised April 2020)
- Case
Purple Innovation, Inc.: The Online to Offline Marketing Challenge
By: Elie Ofek and Nakisha Williams
This case focuses on Purple Innovation Inc. (Purple), a company that started out in the Direct to Consumer (DTC) mattress space. In late 2018, after a successful launch and IPO with sales predominantly originating from its website, Purple was looking to sustain its... View Details
- 2019
- Book
Operations in an Omnichannel World
By: Santiago Gallino and Antonio Moreno
The world of retailing has changed dramatically in the past decade. Sales originating at online channels have been steadily increasing, and even for sales transacted at brick-and-mortar channels, a much larger fraction of sales is affected by online channels in... View Details
- October 2019
- Case
Kaspi.kz IPO
By: Victoria Ivashina and Esel Çekin
This case follows Kaspi.kz, a private equity (Baring Vostok) co-owned retail bank in Central Asia that evolved into a fintech, payments and e-commerce company. It provides insights into private equity financing, portfolio company management, and initial public offering... View Details
- October 2019 (Revised August 2020)
- Case
Souqalmal: The Choice Is Yours (A)
By: V.G. Narayanan and Alpana Thapar
This case describes how Ambareen Musa, Founder and CEO of Souqalmal, a Dubai-based online comparison aggregator of banking and insurance products launched her business in 2011 and rapidly grew it over next couple of years. However, by 2017, the Mauritian entrepreneur... View Details
- September 2019 (Revised June 2020)
- Case
2U: Higher Education Rewired
By: Yael Grushka-Cockayne and Karim R. Lakhani
In its 2019 Partner Symposium, 2U, an online program management provider (OPM), showcased its new vision: “Career. Curriculum. Continuum. A construct for lifelong learning in the 21st century.” 2U, founded in 2008 and went public in 2014, was looking to expand beyond... View Details
- September 2019 (Revised November 2019)
- Case
Pinduoduo
Founded in 2015 by serial entrepreneur, Colin Huang, Pinduoduo Inc. (PDD) had become China’s fastest-growing e-commerce platform in history. PDD pioneered a new approach to online shopping that allowed shoppers to share products, invite friends to form shopping teams,... View Details
- 2019
- Working Paper
Soul and Machine (Learning)
By: Davide Proserpio, John R. Hauser, Xiao Liu, Tomomichi Amano, Alex Burnap, Tong Guo, Dokyun Lee, Randall Lewis, Kanishka Misra, Eric Schwarz, Artem Timoshenko, Lilei Xu and Hema Yoganarasimhan
Machine learning is bringing us self-driving cars, improved medical diagnostics, and machine translation, but can it improve marketing decisions? It can. Machine learning models predict extremely well, are scalable to “big data,” and are a natural fit to rich media... View Details
- September 2019
- Article
The Persistence of Broadband User Behavior: Implications for Universal Service and Competition Policy
By: Andre Boik, Shane Greenstein and Jeffrey Prince
In several markets, firms compete not for consumer expenditure but consumer attention. We examine user priorities over the allocation of their time, and interpret that behavior in light of salient tensions in policy discussions over universal service, data caps, and... View Details
- August 2019
- Case
Preserving Trust at Care.com (A)
By: Krishna G. Palepu and Julia Kelley
Care.com was an online platform designed to match caregivers with individuals seeking care for themselves, others, and pets, through job postings, caregiver profiles, and directories of local day care centers. In March 2019, the Wall Street Journal had just published a... View Details
- August 2019
- Case
Walmart's Omnichannel Strategy: Revolution or Miscalculation?
By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Karen Elterman
This case describes Walmart's omnichannel strategy in 2018 as it battled Amazon for online retail market share. The case discusses Walmart's early forays into online retail, as well as its 2018 strategy, which aimed to integrate Walmart's enormous brick and mortar... View Details