Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(999)
- Faculty Publications (437)
- 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
- 2016
- Working Paper
The Reference Wars: Encyclopedia Britannica's Decline and Encarta's Emergence
By: Shane Greenstein
The experience of Encyclopædia Britannica provides the canonical example of the decline of an established firm at the outset of the digital age. Competition from Microsoft's Encarta in 1993 led to sharp declines in the sales of books, which led to the distressed sale... View Details
- February 2016 (Revised May 2016)
- Case
Astroscale, Space Debris, and Earth's Orbital Commons
By: Matthew Weinzierl, Angela Acocella and Mayuka Yamazaki
An engineer and technology entrepreneur, Nobu Okada, had turned a mid-life crisis into a bold—some would say quixotic—quest to prevent a tragedy of the commons at the global scale. Namely, Okada believed the accumulation of debris in near-Earth orbital space posed a... View Details
- November 2015
- Case
Rubicon Global
By: William A. Sahlman and Hunter Ashmore
The case describes Rubicon Global, a startup that aimed to disrupt the waste management industry. The company started with a bold idea: create a cloud-based, full-service waste management company providing low-cost, highly efficient, and environmentally friendly... View Details
- October 2015
- Teaching Note
Molycorp: Financing the Production of Rare Earth Minerals (A)
By: Benjamin C. Esty and E. Scott Mayfield
Molycorp, the western hemisphere's only producer of rare earth minerals, was in the middle of a $1 billion capital expenditure project in its effort to become a vertically integrated supplier of rare earth minerals, oxides, and metals. Yet it had just reported lower... View Details
Keywords: Convertible Debt; Uncertainty; Competition; Startup; China; Supply ＆ Demand; Growth; Rare Earth Minerals; Discounted Cash Flows; Mining; Payoff Diagrams; Option Pricing; Capital Budgeting; Capital Structure; Cash Flow; Financial Strategy; Market Entry and Exit; Vertical Integration; Valuation; Metals and Minerals; Mining Industry; Industrial Products Industry; Canada; California
- October 2015 (Revised September 2016)
- Technical Note
Flight: Now without Humans Aboard
By: Mitchell Weiss, Karim Lakhani, HT Kung and Kerry Herman
This note provides an overview of the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, or drones) industry in September 2015. UAVs offered many potential applications in industries as diverse as aerial imaging and photography, agriculture, construction, infrastructure inspection and... View Details
- 2015
- Article
International Trade, Multinational Activity, and Corporate Finance
By: C. Fritz Foley and Kalina Manova
An emerging new literature brings unique ideas from corporate finance to the study of international trade and investment. Insights about differences in the development of financial institutions across countries, the role of financial constraints, and the use of... View Details
- Article
How Local Context Shapes Digital Business Abroad
By: William R. Kerr
This article identifies how digital businesses need to be adapted to the local environment in which they are being applied. Core ideas include the development of strong barriers to entry, the types of network effects encountered, and the localization of business... View Details
- May–June 2015
- Article
Dead Weight: How Greece Wound up Trapped in the European Union
By: Debora L. Spar
In the early 1990s, Greece fell far afield of the economic criteria laid out by the Maastricht Treaty, the EU's founding document. In 1999, when the European monetary union was launched, Greece failed to meet the criteria again, but managed to squeeze into the body two... View Details
- March 2015 (Revised December 2015)
- Case
Coffee Wars in India: Café Coffee Day 2015
By: David B. Yoffie and Rachna Tahilyani
This case is an update of "Coffee Wars in India: Café Coffee Day 2013." It explores Café Coffee Day's progress after Starbuck's entry into India and the decisions it faces in 2015. View Details
- March 2015 (Revised September 2016)
- Case
Terrapin Laboratory
By: Richard G. Hamermesh and Joseph B. Fuller
Describes the formation and rapid growth of a drug testing company. The company needs to decide whether to enter the painkiller testing market, in addition to growing its drug treatment center business. The associated teaching materials provide students the opportunity... View Details
- February 2015
- Supplement
MedCath Corporation (C)
By: Regina E. Herzlinger, Kevin Schulman and F. Fallon Upke
MedCath is a horizontally integrated chain of heart hospitals that partners with local cardiologists. It claims that its focus leads to better and cheaper results than those of an everything-for-everybody general hospital. Community hospitals generally vehemently... View Details
- Article
Spatial Determinants of Entrepreneurship in India
By: Ejaz Ghani, William R. Kerr and Stephen O'Connell
We analyze the spatial determinants of entrepreneurship in India in the manufacturing and services sectors. Among general district traits, quality of physical infrastructure and workforce education are the strongest predictors of entry, with labor laws and household... View Details
- Article
Deregulation, Misallocation, and Size: Evidence from India
By: Laura Alfaro and Anusha Chari
This paper examines the impact of the deregulation of compulsory industrial licensing in India on firm size dynamics and reallocation of resources within industries. Following deregulation, resource misallocation declines, and the left-hand tail of the firm size... View Details
- October 2014 (Revised October 2015)
- Case
Mobileye: The Future of Driverless Cars
By: David B. Yoffie
Mobileye was an Israeli company, officially headquartered in The Netherlands, which was a Tier 2 supplier to the global automobile industry. After 15 years of building a leading technology for autonomous driving systems, Mobileye emerged in 2014 as one of the most... View Details
- September 2014 (Revised September 2015)
- Case
Doing Business in Morocco
By: Jill Avery, Tonia Junker and Daniela Beyersdorfer
This case examines the challenges and opportunities of doing business in Morocco. It highlights Morocco's ongoing economic transformation in the decades leading up to 2014 in the context of its historical, political, and cultural background. The case summarizes some of... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Fire Sales of Safe Assets
By: Gabor Pinter, Emil Siriwardane and Danny Walker
We use trade-level data to study price pressure effects in the UK gilt market from September to October 2022. During this period, forced sales by liability-driven investment funds (LDIs) led to price discounts on the order of 10%, accounting for roughly half the total... View Details
- September 2014 (Revised June 2016)
- Case
Whole Foods: The Path to 1,000 Stores
By: David F. Drake, Ryan W. Buell, Melissa Barton, Taylor Jones, Katrina Keverian and Jeffrey Stock
The case examines the operations strategy of Whole Foods, one of the largest natural grocery chains in the United States. In late 2013, Whole Foods was expanding rapidly, with a publicly-stated goal of growing from 351 to 1,000 domestic stores by 2022. It was also... View Details
- September 2014
- Case
FormPrint Ortho500
By: Frank V. Cespedes and Alisa Zalosh
The Senior Vice President of FormPrint's Medical Products business unit is considering issues raised by the upcoming introduction of a new 3D printing system, the Ortho500, which could print custom exoskeletal orthopedic splints, braces, and casts that conformed to a... View Details
- June 2014 (Revised October 2015)
- Case
Molycorp: Financing the Production of Rare Earth Minerals (A)
By: Benjamin C. Esty and E. Scott Mayfield
Molycorp, the western hemisphere's only producer of rare earth minerals, was in the middle of a $1 billion capital expenditure project in its effort to become a vertically integrated supplier of rare earth minerals, oxides, and metals. Yet it had just reported lower... View Details
Keywords: Convertible Debt; Uncertainty; Competition; Startup; China; Supply ＆ Demand; Growth; Rare Earth Minerals; Discounted Cash Flows; Mining; Payoff Diagrams; Option Pricing; Capital Budgeting; Capital Structure; Cash Flow; Financial Strategy; Market Entry and Exit; Vertical Integration; Valuation; Metals and Minerals; Mining Industry; Industrial Products Industry; Canada; California