Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(1,055)
- Faculty Publications (246)
- Article
Product Positioning in a Two-Dimensional Vertical Differentiation Model: The Role of Quality Costs
By: Dominique Lauga and Elie Ofek
We study a duopoly model where consumers are heterogeneous with respect to their willingness to pay for two product characteristics and marginal costs are increasing with the quality level chosen on each attribute. We show that while firms seek to manage competition... View Details
Keywords: Duopoly and Oligopoly; Customers; Quality; Product Positioning; Competition; Management; Cost; Product
- July 2011
- Supplement
Assistant Professor Gyan Gupta and the Wet Noodle Class (B)
By: Dorothy Leonard
Professor Gupta has imposed two new policies on his class, midway through the term: 1) No use of Internet to locate additional information on the company in the case; 2) an increase in the percentage of grades attributed to class participation. He meets with rebellion... View Details
- Article
Naivete and Cynicism in Negotiations and Other Competitive Contexts
By: Chia-Jung Tsay, Lisa L. Shu and Max H. Bazerman
A wealth of literature documents how the common failure to think about the self-interests of others contributes to suboptimal outcomes. Yet sometimes, an excess of cynicism appears to lead us to over-think the actions of others and make negative attributions about... View Details
- May 2011 (Revised March 2012)
- Case
Nanda Home: Preparing for Life after Clocky
By: Elie Ofek and Jill Avery
Gauri Nanda, the inventor of Clocky, the alarm clock that rolls off the bed stand and forces its owner to find it, has to make critical decisions regarding the future of her nascent company. As sales of Clocky show signs of declining, she must decide whether to... View Details
- April 2011
- Article
Why Leaders Don't Learn from Success
By: Francesca Gino and Gary P. Pisano
We argue that for a variety of psychological reasons, it is often much harder for leaders and organizations to learn from success than to learn from failure. Success creates three kinds of traps that often impede deep learning. The first is attribution error or the... View Details
- 2011
- Article
Group Size and Incentives to Contribute: A Natural Experiment at Chinese Wikipedia
By: Michael Zhang and Feng Zhu
In this paper, we examine the causal relationship between group size and incentives to contribute in the setting of Chinese Wikipedia, the Chinese language version of an online encyclopedia that relies entirely on voluntary contributions. The group at Chinese Wikipedia... View Details
- 2011
- Working Paper
Naiveté and Cynicism in Negotiations and Other Competitive Contexts
By: Chia-Jung Tsay, Lisa L. Shu and Max Bazerman
A wealth of literature documents how the common failure to think about the self-interests of others contributes to suboptimal outcomes. Yet sometimes, an excess of cynicism appears to lead us to over-think the actions of others and make negative attributions about... View Details
- Article
Shadow of the Contract: How Contract Structure Shapes Inter-Firm Dispute Resolution
By: Fabrice Lumineau and Deepak Malhotra
This paper investigates how contract structure influences inter-firm dispute resolution processes and outcomes by examining a unique dataset consisting of over 150,000 pages of documents relating to 102 business disputes. We find that the level of contractual detail... View Details
- Article
Values, Purpose, Meaning, and Expectations: Why Culture and Context Matter
The "rational person" standard, based on assumptions of economic self-interest, has long prevailed in legal reasoning. But understanding of decision making, behavioral choices, and possibilities for action must be enlarged to include a variety of factors that give... View Details
- 2010
- Other Unpublished Work
Share Issuance and Factor Timing
By: Robin Greenwood and Samuel Hanson
We show that characteristics of stock issuers can be used to forecast important common factors in stocks returns such as those associated with book-to-market, size, and industry. Specifically, we use differences between the attributes of stock issuers and repurchasers... View Details
- July – August 2010
- Article
Are You Ignoring Trends That Could Shake Up Your Business?
By: Elie Ofek and Luc Wathieu
Virtually all managers in consumer businesses recognize major social, economic, and technological trends. But many do not consider the profound ways in which trends--especially those that seem unrelated to their core markets--influence consumers' aspirations,... View Details
- 2010
- Working Paper
Unraveling Results from Comparable Demand and Supply: An Experimental Investigation
By: Muriel Niederle, Alvin E. Roth and M. Utku Unver
Markets sometimes unravel, with offers becoming inefficiently early. Often this is attributed to competition arising from an imbalance of demand and supply, typically excess demand for workers. However this presents a puzzle, since unraveling can only occur when firms... View Details
- February 2010
- Article
The Optimal Taxation of Height: A Case Study of Utilitarian Income Redistribution
By: N. Gregory Mankiw and Matthew C. Weinzierl
Should the income tax include a credit for short taxpayers and a surcharge for tall ones? The standard Utilitarian framework for tax analysis answers this question in the affirmative. Moreover, a plausible parameterization using data on height and wages implies a... View Details
- Article
Market Reaction to and Valuation of IFRS Reconciliation Adjustments: First Evidence from the UK
By: Joanne Horton and George Serafeim
We investigate the market reaction to, and the value-relevance of, information contained in the mandatory transitional documents required by International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) 1 (2005). We find significant negative abnormal returns for firms reporting... View Details
- December 2009
- Article
Hiding the Evidence of Valid Theories: How Coupled Search Processes Obscure Performance Differences Among Organizations
By: Nicolaj Siggelkow and Jan Rivkin
Theorists argue that an organization's high-level choices, such as its organizational design or the attributes of its top management team, should influence its performance, yet empirical researchers have struggled to detect such influence. The impact of high-level... View Details
- October 2009
- Article
A Decision-making Perspective to Negotiation: A Review of the Past and a Look into the Future
By: Chia-Jung Tsay and Max Bazerman
Through the decision-analytic approach to negotiations, the past quarter century has seen the development of a better dialog between the descriptive and the prescriptive, as well as a burgeoning interest in the field for both academics and practitioners. Researchers... View Details
- October 2009
- Article
Shaping Online Consumer Choice by Partitioning the Web
By: Jolie M. Martin and Michael I. Norton
This research explores how partitioning attributes in online search interfaces changes the valuations of those attributes-and impacts subsequent choice-such that attributes that are displayed as separate categories tend to receive greater decision weight than... View Details
- 2009
- Working Paper
A Decision-making Perspective to Negotiation: A Review of the Past and a Look into the Future
By: Chia-Jung Tsay and Max H. Bazerman
Through the decision-analytic approach to negotiations, the past quarter century has seen the development of a better dialog between the descriptive and the prescriptive, as well as a burgeoning interest in the field for both academics and practitioners. Researchers... View Details
- July 2009
- Article
When Misconduct Goes Unnoticed: The Acceptability of Gradual Erosion in Others' Unethical Behavior
By: Francesca Gino and Max Bazerman
Four laboratory studies show that people are more likely to accept others' unethical behavior when ethical degradation occurs slowly rather than in one abrupt shift. Participants served in the role of watchdogs charged with catching instances of cheating. The watchdogs... View Details
- May 2009
- Article
Synchronicity and Firm Interlocks in an Emerging Market
By: Tarun Khanna and Catherine Thomas
Stock price synchronicity has been attributed to poor corporate governance and a lack of firm-level transparency. This paper investigates the association between different kinds of firm interlocks, control groups, and synchronicity in Chile. A unique data set... View Details