Consumer Credit - Publications - Faculty & Research

19 Apr 2004
Research & Ideas

Birth of the American Salesman

and services that supported sales managers, including trade journals and popular magazines about salesmen and sales management. The creation of methods of sales management also opened up new branches of academic inquiry, such as marketing, View Details

Keywords: by Laura Linard

09 Jan 2020
Book

Rethinking Business Strategy in the Age of AI

a traditional business—the gym—into an $8 billion digital offering that pulled in more than $700 million in revenue during the last fiscal year. Foley credits the magic of today’s technology, including software, data, and communication... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

20 Dec 2017
Lessons from the Classroom

How to Design a Better Customer Experience

shares the details with others in today’s super-connected consumer world. “We forget that the things that really stick, the things people talk about years later, are not the average experiences, but the outliers on the other end of the... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman; Health; Entertainment & Recreation

06 Dec 2016
First Look

December 6, 2016

originating catalyst for the Industrial Revolution and modern capitalism casts new light on American credit markets, practices of offshore investment, and understandings of human capital. Rather than seeing slavery as outside the... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

08 Aug 2005
Research & Ideas

A Balanced Scorecard Approach To Measure Customer Profitability

provides customers with a menu of options representing variations from the standard order, such as a customized product or service, special packaging, expedited delivery, or extended credit terms. Each menu item has a price that at least... View Details

Keywords: by Robert S. Kaplan

23 Jun 2008
Research & Ideas

Innovative Ways to Encourage Personal Savings

have legs—and whether they generate new savings. On the credit side, I think the presentation of information to credit card borrowers may influence the way they use their credit. We are currently working on... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Financial Services

17 Nov 2009
First Look

First Look: Nov. 17

large borrowers fell by 47% during the peak period of the financial crisis (fourth quarter of 2008) relative to the prior quarter and by 79% relative to the peak of the credit boom (second quarter of 2007). New lending for real investment... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

23 Jul 2013
First Look

First Look: July 23

reviews for their competitors. Such review fraud undermines the trustworthiness of consumer reviews and constitutes a major risk factor for review sites. In this paper, we investigate review fraud on the popular View Details

Keywords: Anna Secino

06 Oct 2003
Research & Ideas

The Problem with Hedge Funds

gets punctured in a spectacular bust. Instead, market averages will not move very much, while value is consumed in the hedge funds as they speculate up and down, long and short, on the movement of prices in the markets. During the bubble,... View Details

Keywords: by D. Quinn Mills

01 Jun 2015
Research & Ideas

The Surprising Benefits of Oversharing

performed in the lab, Luca extrapolates the findings to apply to consumers (receivers), who want to know the true quality of a product, while sellers (senders) hide it from them. "Customers were not inferring the worst, and sellers... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

23 Nov 2020
Research & Ideas

COVID Was Supposed to Increase Bankruptcies. Instead, They've Gone Down.

Bankruptcy filings in the United States were expected to soar during this year’s economic recession, induced by COVID-19. Instead, they dropped 27 percent year-over-year through August, driven by an unexpected drop in consumer and small... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne

28 Oct 2014
First Look

First Look: October 28

http://hbr.org/product/Whole-Foods--the-Path-to-/an/615019-PDF-ENG Harvard Business School Case 915-001 Pivots and Incentives at LevelUp LevelUp's mobile payments service lets users scan a smartphone barcode rather than swipe a credit... View Details

Keywords: Carmen Nobel

30 Jan 2020
Research & Ideas

The Upside of Highlighting a Product's Downsides

Administration. “Those who choose the offering will engage with it more.” Equally important, the researchers found that in this context, identifying negatives prominently had an “insignificant effect” on customer acquisition rates. Trade-off transparency at a View Details

Keywords: by Danielle Kost

26 Nov 2001
Research & Ideas

How Toyota Turns Workers Into Problem Solvers

quality, low cost, short lead-time and flexible production. And Toyota's operating system—the Toyota Production System—had been widely credited for Toyota's sustained leadership in manufacturing performance. Furthermore, Toyota had been... View Details

Keywords: by Sarah Jane Johnston; Manufacturing; Transportation; Auto

25 Jan 2010
Research & Ideas

A Macroeconomic View of the Current Economy

government spending, and consumer spending—consumer spending being the biggest—the United States consistently spends more than 100 percent of its GDP (as high as 106 percent in 2005 and 2006). But of course we produce only 100 percent of... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

05 Mar 2012
Research & Ideas

Is JC Penney’s Makeover the Future of Retailing?

tree. Johnson (HBS MBA'84) comes to Penney after more than a decade of leading Apple's retail effort, where his innovations included the Genius Bar. Johnson is also credited with making Target chic. This makes his launching of the new... View Details

Keywords: by Kim Girard; Retail

11 Oct 2006
What Do You Think?

How Do We Respond to the “Dependency Ratio” Dilemma?

economic success to the dependency ratio, something that can be predicted years in advance based on what we know now about demographic trends. For example, they credit Ireland's economic success in part to a greatly-improved dependency... View Details

Keywords: by Jim Heskett

10 Jan 2022
Research & Ideas

How to Get Companies to Make Investments That Benefit Everyone

behavior. In fact, the code responsible for creating many consumer electronics is widely available and is often used as a springboard for developers to further innovate, sharing ideas and crafting new products for all to use. Everyone... View Details

Keywords: by Lane Lambert

15 Jun 2007
Research & Ideas

Remembering Alfred Chandler

Podcast with: Interviewer: Running Time: Alfred D. Chandler Jr., the Pulitzer Prize-winning scholar whom many credited with founding the discipline of business history, died at age 88 on May 9, 2007. His work is legendary, but so too was... View Details