Publications

March 2022 (Revised April 2022)
Teaching Note

Spotify's Audio-First Strategy: Leading the Podcasting Market

By: Hong Luo and Carol Lin

Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 721-439. Within 15 years, CEO Daniel Ek had led Spotify from an ambitious startup to a multi-billion dollar company that had transformed the music industry. As part of Spotify’s next phase of growth, the platform would invest heavily in... View Details

Keywords: Business Startups; Growth and Development Strategy; Business Divisions; Customer Relationship Management; Revenue; Music Industry

Article

How Institutional Investors Frame Their Losses: Evidence on Dynamic Loss Aversion from Currency Portfolios

By: Kenneth A. Froot, John Arabadjis, Sonya Cates and Stephen Lawrence

Currency investors exhibit a tendency to cut risk by pairing both longs and shorts following losses and a weaker tendency to add risk following gains. By differentiating between position level, portfolio level, and aggregate cross-portfolio losses in currency... View Details

Keywords: Loss Aversion; Decision Choices and Conditions; Currency; Investment; Risk Management; Behavioral Finance

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October 2020
Case

Michael Phelps: 'It's Okay to Not Be Okay'

By: Boris Groysberg, Carin-Isabel Knoop and Michael Norris

In 2020, Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian of all time, with 28 medals in various swimming events, was now retired. As he looked back on his 20+ year athletic career, he considered what had gone into making him the greatest of all time—the highs and lows,... View Details

Keywords: Mental Health; Talent and Talent Management; Training; Health; Success; Performance Improvement; Personal Development and Career; Family and Family Relationships; Sports; Competition; Sports Industry; United States; Baltimore; Arizona; Sydney; Athens; Beijing; London

Asim Ijaz Khwaja is the Director of the Center for International Development and the Sumitomo-Foundation for Advanced Studies on International Development Professor of International Finance and Development at the Harvard Kennedy School, and co-founder of the View Details

December 2022 (Revised January 2025)
Case

Akooda: Charging Toward Operational Intelligence

By: Christopher Stanton and Mel Martin

The Akooda case describes the challenges confronting founder and CEO Yuval Gonczarowski (MBA ‘17) in 2022 as he attempts to boost sales. Launched in November 2020, Akooda was an AI company that mined 20 different sources of digital data, from tools like Slack, Google... View Details

Keywords: Data Mining; Productivity; Monitoring; Data Analysis; AI and Machine Learning; Knowledge Management; Operations; Problems and Challenges; Employee Relationship Management; Information Technology Industry; Technology Industry; Information Industry; Boston; Israel

Carliss Y. Baldwin is the William L. White Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. She studies the process of design and its impact of design architecture on firm strategy, platforms, and business ecosystems. With Kim Clark, she authored... View Details

Keywords: computer; electronics; software

April 2021
Supplement

Buy Online, Pickup in Store: CEO Supplement

By: Antonio Moreno, Santiago Gallino and Amy Klopfenstein

In April 2019, Sylvarella CEO Sylvia Coparella must assess the impact of the company’s Buy Online, Pickup in Store (BOPS) program on her company’s overall sales. To do so, she must review analyses of both e-commerce and brick-and-mortar sales data and compare the... View Details

Keywords: Operations; Service Delivery; Logistics; Infrastructure; Distribution Channels; Order Taking and Fulfillment; Analysis; Retail Industry; Apparel and Accessories Industry; United States; Canada

2017
Article

Handgun Waiting Periods Reduce Gun Deaths

By: Michael Luca, Deepak Malhotra and Christopher Poliquin

Handgun waiting periods are laws that impose a delay between the initiation of a purchase and final acquisition of a firearm. We show that waiting periods, which create a “cooling off” period among buyers, significantly reduce the incidence of gun violence. We estimate... View Details

Keywords: Gun Policy; Gun Violence; Waiting Period; Injury Prevention; Policy; Safety; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; United States

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September 2011
Case

AXA Private Equity: The Diana Investment

By: Michael J. Roberts and William A. Sahlman

The case focuses on an investment made by AXA Private Equity, a French manufacturer of food ingredients. The investment is made at the height of the financial markets, and financed with significant debt. Soon thereafter, the financial crisis impacted the company's... View Details

Keywords: Private Equity; Ethics; Investment; Financial Crisis

2007
Working Paper

How Is Foreign Aid Spent? Evidence from a Natural Experiment

By: Eric D. Werker, Faisal Z. Ahmed and Charles Cohen

We use oil price fluctuations to construct a new instrument to test the impact of transfers from wealthy OPEC nations to their poorer Muslim allies. The instrument identifies plausibly exogenous variation in foreign aid. We investigate how aid is spent by tracking its... View Details

Keywords: International Finance; Energy Sources; Energy Industry; Asia

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September 1991 (Revised September 2010)
Case

Dore-Dore

By: Janice H. Hammond and Audris Wong

Dore-Dore, a French manufacturer of socks and children's knitwear, has just converted a portion of its knitwear operations to a flexible modular system to allow faster response and greater flexibility. The case provides an opportunity to assess the changes in knitwear... View Details

Keywords: Order Taking and Fulfillment; Logistics; Production; Performance Productivity; Apparel and Accessories Industry; France

20 Apr 2023
Blog Post

Tackle the First 90 Days of Your Next Role: A 5 Step Process for Success on the Job

specifically related to how that will impact the imperatives for your new role. What you share and when will be up to your discretion. Unless you have significant concerns about the finding, best practice has been to share an anonymized... View Details

30 Mar 2021
Working Paper Summaries

Whose Job Is It Anyway? Co-Ethnic Hiring in New US Ventures

Keywords: by Sari Pekkala Kerr and William R. Kerr

23 Oct 2018
Working Paper Summaries

Opportunistic Returns and Dynamic Pricing: Empirical Evidence from Online Retailing in Emerging Markets

Keywords: by Chaithanya Bandi, Antonio Moreno, Donald Ngwe, and Zhiji Xu; Service

04 Oct 2016
News

Now arriving: Internet of Things

Video

HBS Fellowships: Making Dreams a Reality

Research Summary

By: Rosabeth M. Kanter

Rosabeth Moss Kanter's current research topics include: leadership for the digital age, including the circumstances that empower leaders to create change; leadership of turnarounds and other significant changes of direction; and the role, legitimacy, and impact of the... View Details

February 2004
Case

Bradman and Tendulkar, LLC

By: Ananth Raman and Vishal Gaur

An investment firm is trying to project inventory turns for Radio Shack, a chain of consumer electronics stores. The investment firm has access to public financial data but not to internal operational metrics. It needs to project inventory turns because inventory... View Details

Keywords: Forecasting and Prediction; Cash Flow; Demand and Consumers; Distribution Channels; Mathematical Methods; Valuation