Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(2,841)
- Faculty Publications (341)
- 2019
- Working Paper
Large-Scale Demand Estimation with Search Data
By: Tomomichi Amano, Andrew Rhodes and Stephan Seiler
In many online markets, traditional methods of demand estimation are difficult to implement because assortments are very large and individual products are sold infrequently. At the same time, data on consumer search (i.e., browsing) behavior are often available and are... View Details
- September 2018
- Article
Do Experts or Crowd-Based Models Produce More Bias? Evidence from Encyclopædia Britannica and Wikipedia
By: Shane Greenstein and Feng Zhu
Organizations today can use both crowds and experts to produce knowledge. While prior work compares the accuracy of crowd-produced and expert-produced knowledge, we compare bias in these two models in the context of contested knowledge, which involves subjective,... View Details
- August 2018 (Revised February 2019)
- Case
Shindigz
By: Frank Cespedes
Shindigz provides party and celebratory items for various occasions and events through its branded online channel, through third-party retail and wholesale channels, and external online marketplaces. The case focuses on pricing challenges facing a venture with an... View Details
- June 2018
- Case
The Grommet in 2018
By: Lynda M. Applegate, Karen Gordon Mills and Lena Goldberg
The Grommet, an online product launch platform, was at the brink of scaling its business. The Grommet's daily launch and sale of innovative consumer products, using personal videos created by product makers, had led to its initial success. In 2014, the company launched... View Details
- May 2018
- Case
Sagacity Tea: What Direction for Growth?
By: John A. Quelch and Amy Handlin
Kate Moran, CEO and cofounder of Sagacity Tea, a small, Vermont-based ready-to-drink tea brand, is considering a consumer-product group (CPG) broker's proposal for the product's launch in several cities along the East Coast of the United States. The commitments in the... View Details
- 2018
- Chapter
New Prospects for Organizational Democracy?: How the Joint Pursuit of Social and Financial Goals Challenges Traditional Organizational Designs
By: Julie Battilana, Michael Fuerstein and Michael Lee
For an extended period during the first half of the 20th century, industrial democracy was a vibrant movement, with ideological and organizational ties to a thriving unionism. In 2015, however, things look different. While there are instances of democracy in the... View Details
- May 2018
- Article
Using Online Prices for Measuring Real Consumption Across Countries
By: Alberto Cavallo, Erwin Diewert, Robert C. Feenstra, Robert Inklaar and Marcel P. Timmer
We show that online prices can be used to construct quarterly purchasing power parities (PPPs) with a closely matched set of goods and identical methodologies in a variety of developed and developing countries. Our results are close to those reported by the... View Details
- March 2018 (Revised September 2019)
- Case
Chewy.com (A)
By: Jeffrey F. Rayport and Matthew G. Preble
In late 2013, Ryan Cohen, cofounder and CEO of online pet products retailer Chewy.com, faces a “bet the company decision”—whether to stay with a third-party logistics provider (3PL) for all of its e-commerce fulfillment or to take the function in house. Cohen worries... View Details
- March 2018 (Revised July 2020)
- Case
Nectar (A)
By: Jeffrey F. Rayport and Thomas O. Jones
In late 2017, Nectar was a rapidly emerging player in the “bed-in-a-box” online market for direct-to-consumer foam memory mattresses. Barely a year old, it had achieved a revenue run rate of $85M and looked ahead to another year of blistering growth. The founding team... View Details
- March 2018
- Case
Lufax: FinTech and the Transformation of Wealth Management in China
By: Christopher J. Malloy, Lauren H. Cohen and Anthony K. Woo
This case examines the rise and competitive positioning of Lufax, an online marketplace headquartered in Shanghai, China, and a pioneer in the origination and trading of financial assets. The company had grown at a remarkable rate, and was awarded “Trading Platform of... View Details
- February 2018
- Case
Montes Calcados: A Step Ahead
By: James L. Heskett and James T. Kindley
Montes Calçados (MC) is a well-known "fast-fashion" Brazilian manufacturer of casual, but fashionable, shoes for women aged 18–35 in major cities worldwide. To boost its declining revenues, MC must evaluate two growth options: whether to expand distribution online (at... View Details
- November 2017 (Revised October 2018)
- Case
Brandless: Disrupting Consumer Packaged Goods
By: Jill Avery
Brandless, an online direct-to-consumer seller of upscale private-label consumer packaged goods, offered consumers a limited assortment of values-conscious products delivered directly to their homes with the simplicity of one fixed $3 price point that promised an... View Details
Keywords: Brand; Brand Management; Retailing; Retailing Industry; Private Label; Direct To Consumer Marketing; Ecommerce; Digital Marketing; Consumer Packaged Goods; Startup; Marketing; Marketing Strategy; Disruption; Food; Product Marketing; Marketing Channels; Consumer Behavior; Brands and Branding; Venture Capital; E-commerce; Consumer Products Industry; Consumer Products Industry; Consumer Products Industry; Consumer Products Industry; United States; North America
- October 2017 (Revised April 2019)
- Case
Eastern Bank: Innovating Through Eastern Labs
By: Karen Mills, Dennis Campbell and Aaron Mukerjee
Eastern Bank is a 200-year-old New England mutual bank with a community focus. Eastern specializes in small business lending, having made strategic investments to become the top SBA lender in New England in the midst of the Great Recession, when other banks were... View Details
- September 2017 (Revised June 2019)
- Case
Dianrong: Marketplace Lending, Blockchain, and 'The New Finance' in China
By: Christopher J. Malloy, Lauren H. Cohen and Anthony K. Woo
This case examines the strategic positioning of Dianrong, one of the largest online peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platforms in China, in its attempt to become a foundational player in the expansion of the FinTech sector in Asia. Dianrong had recently announced the... View Details
- September 19, 2017
- Article
After Equifax Breach, Companies Advised to Review Open-Source Software Code
By: Ben DiPietro and Lou Shipley
It doesn’t make much sense: At a time when high-powered automated trading systems can execute stock sales in real time, some companies that rely on open-source software to help to run their businesses track their open-source use on spread sheets on paper.
Lou... View Details
Lou... View Details
- 2017
- Article
Agricultural Insurance and Economic Development
By: Shawn A. Cole and Wentao Xiong
This article provides a review of recent research on agricultural insurance (AI) in developing countries. Agricultural producers face a variety of significant risks; historically, only government-subsidized products have achieved widespread adoption. A recent... View Details
- Article
Channel Integration, Sales Dispersion, and Inventory Management
By: Santiago Gallino, Antonio Moreno and Ioannis Stamatopoulos
We study the effects of the introduction of cross-channel functionalities on the overall sales dispersion of retailers and the implications of these effects for inventory management. To do that, we analyze data from a leading U.S. retailer who introduced a... View Details
- June 2017 (Revised October 2017)
- Case
Becton Dickinson: Innovation and Growth (A)
By: Raffaella Sadun, Michael Beer and James Weber
In late 2015, CEO Vince Forlenza was reviewing Becton Dickinson’s transformation efforts designed to enable the company to innovate and grow in a changing environment. Becton Dickinson had been a successful medical device company for over 100 years. In recent years,... View Details
Keywords: Transformation; Change Management; Innovation Leadership; Mergers and Acquisitions; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Culture; Organizational Design; Strategy; Growth and Development Strategy; Medical Devices and Supplies Industry; Health Industry; Manufacturing Industry; United States
- Article
Repositioning and Cost-Cutting: The Impact of Competition on Platform Strategies
By: Robert Seamans and Feng Zhu
Organizational structures are increasingly complex. In particular, more firms today operate as multi-sided platforms. In this paper, we study how platform firms use repositioning and cost-cutting in response to competition, elucidate external and internal factors that... View Details
- 2018
- Working Paper
Opportunistic Returns and Dynamic Pricing: Empirical Evidence from Online Retailing in Emerging Markets
By: Chaithanya Bandi, Antonio Moreno, Donald Ngwe and Zhiji Xu
We investigate how dynamic pricing can lead to higher operational costs through more product returns in the online retail industry. Dynamic pricing has been widely applied by many online retailers. Research has shown that, in response to dynamic pricing, some customers... View Details