Publications

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March 2024
Article

Do Safety Management System Standards Indicate Safer Operations? Evidence from the OHSAS 18001 Occupational Health and Safety Standard

By: Kala Viswanathan, Matthew S. Johnson and Michael W. Toffel

Problem definition: Given the enormous disruptions and costs of occupational injuries, companies and buyers are increasingly looking to voluntary occupational health and safety standards to improve worker safety. Yet because these standards only require... View Details

Keywords: Occupational Health; Occupational Safety; Program Evaluation; Safety Performance; Injuries; OHSAS 18001; ISO 45001; Working Conditions; Safety; Standards

2024
Working Paper

Does Private Equity Have Any Business Being in the Health Care Business?

By: Nori Gerardo Lietz and Zirui Song

Private Equity (“PE”) has come under increased scrutiny by the press, academics, and policymakers, as well as the public, for its investments in health care delivery. This scrutiny has been exacerbated by recent high profile hospital bankruptcies following PE... View Details

Keywords: Private Equity; Government Administration; Acquisition; Health Industry

SSRN

April 2019 (Revised April 2021)
Case

Wayfair

By: Jeffrey F. Rayport, Susie L. Ma and Matthew G. Preble

In 2016 Niraj Shah and Steve Conine, founders of online home goods retailer Wayfair, are faced with a decision about how to improve user experience on their e-commerce sites. A key driver of consumer interest and conversion to purchase in the home category is visual... View Details

Keywords: Visual Assets; Corporate Entrepreneurship; Decision Making; Business or Company Management; Growth Management; Innovation and Invention; Operations; Strategy; Technology; Retail Industry; Service Industry; United States; Massachusetts

27 Mar 2018
First Look

First Look at New Research, March 27, 2018

having the most material ESG issues, as well as investors anticipating proprietary and political costs as a result of the mandated disclosures. Overall, the results are consistent with the equity market perceiving that this disclosure... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

23 Jan 2024
Research & Ideas

How to Keep Employees Productive: Support Caregivers

workers between the ages of 26 and 35 and about 30 percent between the ages of 36 and 45 say that caregiving negatively affected their career. Businesses in the United States incur more than $1 trillion in costs annually due to turnover.... View Details

Keywords: by Kara Baskin

November 2003 (Revised November 2015)
Case

Brazil at the Wheel

By: Geoffrey Jones

Taught in the second-year MBA elective on the Evolution of Global Business. Examines the costs and benefits of the Brazilian government's policies to encourage foreign multinationals to develop an automobile industry during the 1950s. A combination of incentives and... View Details

Keywords: Foreign Direct Investment; Multinational Firms and Management; Policy; Government and Politics; Business History; Business and Government Relations; Auto Industry; Brazil

11 Nov 2021
News

How to Increase Prices Without Losing Customers, According to a Harvard Lecturer

22 Jun 2020
News

On Track: Health Care, Patient Data, and Provider Performance

11 Dec 2017
News

There’s a medical ‘land grab’ underway as hospitals try to get larger

Case Problems in Finance

The leading volume of finance cases used worldwide, Case Problems in Finance presents real business situations that pose debatable alternative courses of action. The cases contain problems that can be narrowed but not always settled by the usual techniques... View Details

January 23, 2023
Article

Digital Public Health Interventions at Scale: The Impact of Social Media Advertising on Beliefs and Outcomes Related to COVID Vaccines

By: Susan Athey, Kristen Grabarz, Michael Luca and Nils Wernerfelt

Public health organizations increasingly use social media advertising campaigns in pursuit of public health goals. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of about $40 million of social media advertisements that were run and experimentally tested on Facebook and... View Details

Keywords: COVID-19 Pandemic; Public Health; Vaccines; Social Media; Advertising; Power and Influence; Health Care and Treatment

September–October 2020
Article

Managing Churn to Maximize Profits

By: Aurelie Lemmens and Sunil Gupta

Customer defection threatens many industries, prompting companies to deploy targeted, proactive customer retention programs and offers. A conventional approach has been to target customers either based on their predicted churn probability or their responsiveness to a... View Details

Keywords: Churn Management; Defection Prediction; Loss Function; Stochastic Gradient Boosting; Customer Relationship Management; Consumer Behavior; Profit

SSRN

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March 2018 (Revised March 2018)
Supplement

Sandlands Vineyards

By: Benjamin C. Esty and Greg Saldutte

Approximately 80% of the wineries in the US breakeven or lose money. An even greater percentage lose money on an economic basis (i.e., after a charge for the cost of equity). Tegan Passalacqua is a successful, young, Californian winemaker who specializes in making... View Details

Article

Lessons from England's Health Care Workforce Redesign: No Quick Fixes

By: Richard Bohmer and Candace Imison

In 2000 the English National Health Service (NHS) began a series of workforce redesign initiatives that increased the number of doctors and nurses serving patients, expanded existing staff roles and developed new ones, redistributed health care work, and invested in... View Details

Keywords: Health Care; Work Force Management; United Kingdom

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September 1995 (Revised March 1996)
Case

HCL America

Shows students how a custom software programming company takes advantage of differences between the United States and India in the cost of skilled labor (software engineers) to give its customers rare expertise and lower prices. Asks students to examine the company... View Details

Keywords: Marketing Strategy; Service Delivery; Software; Information Technology Industry; United States; India

July 2016
Case

Cataumet Boats, Inc.

By: W. Earl Sasser and Mark Davis

Jaime Giancola, an MBA student, has recently completed an operations management course in which aggregate production planning (APP) was one of the topics. She believes that her family's business, Cataumet Boats, which her grandparents started and which her mother and... View Details

Keywords: Business or Company Management; Family Business; Production; Cost Management; Transportation; Customer Satisfaction

May 2017
Teaching Note

Promontory, Inc. (Brief Case)

By: Frank V. Cespedes and Amy Handlin

Teaching Note for HBS No. 917-535. The Promontory teaching note covers a) how and why buying processes in Promontory’s market generate the array of selling approaches illustrated in the case; b) the impact of incremental sales increases on the firm’s cost structure and... View Details

Keywords: Sales; Salesforce Management; Marketing Strategy