Publications

October 2008 (Revised June 2011)
Case

JetBlue Airways: Managing Growth

By: Robert S. Huckman and Gary P. Pisano

Considers the situation facing David Barger, President and CEO of JetBlue Airways, in May 2007 as he addresses the airline's need to slow its growth rate in the response to increasing fuel costs and the effects of major operational crisis for the airline in February... View Details

Keywords: Growth and Development Strategy; Growth Management; Operations; Performance Capacity; Performance Efficiency; Competitive Strategy; Air Transportation Industry

October 1992 (Revised August 1994)
Case

Allied-Signal: Managing the Hazardous Waste Liability Risk

By: Richard H.K. Vietor and Edward Prewitt

Allied-Signal, Inc., one of the world's oldest chemical companies and today a diversified conglomerate, is liable for clean-up costs of old hazardous waste sites. These costs are substantial: reserves grew to nearly $500 million in 1991. Attempting to avoid further... View Details

Keywords: Wastes and Waste Processing; Environmental Sustainability; Programs; Cost Management; Policy; Government Legislation; Factories, Labs, and Plants; Governance Compliance; Legal Liability; Chemical Industry; United States; Europe

Disease management programs aim to reduce cost by improving the quality of care for chronic diseases. Evidence of their effectiveness is mixed. Reducing health care spending sufficiently to cover program costs has proved particularly challenging. This study uses a... View Details

2003
Book

Management Accounting

By: A. Atkinson, R. S. Kaplan and M. Young

Keywords: Cost Accounting

March 1, 2021
Article

Transitioning to Clean Energy Transportation Services: Life-cycle Cost Analysis for Vehicle Fleets

By: Stephen Comello, Gunther Glenk and Stefan Reichelstein

Comprehensive global decarbonization requires that transportation services cease to rely on fossil fuels for power generation. This paper develops a generic, time-driven life-cycle cost model for mobility services to address two closely related questions central to the... View Details

January 2021 (Revised June 2021)
Supplement

Eaton Corporation: Portfolio Transformation and The Cost of Capital (Abridged)

By: Benjamin C. Esty, E. Scott Mayfield and Daniel Fisher

In 2000, Eaton Corporation was a broadly diversified industrial conglomerate. But its strategy was evolving and its focus was narrowing around “power management” and more recently on “intelligent power,” the use of digitally enabled products and services designed to... View Details

Keywords: Mergers and Acquisitions; Business Conglomerates; Business Divisions; Cost of Capital; Corporate Finance; Value; Valuation; Industrial Products Industry; United States; Denmark; Republic of Ireland

2023
Article

Probabilistically Robust Recourse: Navigating the Trade-offs between Costs and Robustness in Algorithmic Recourse

By: Martin Pawelczyk, Teresa Datta, Johannes van-den-Heuvel, Gjergji Kasneci and Himabindu Lakkaraju

As machine learning models are increasingly being employed to make consequential decisions in real-world settings, it becomes critical to ensure that individuals who are adversely impacted (e.g., loan denied) by the predictions of these models are provided with a means... View Details

Keywords: AI and Machine Learning; Decision Choices and Conditions; Mathematical Methods

16 May 2016
HBS Case

Food Safety Economics: The Cost of a Sick Customer

Business School and Professor in Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Even though Chipotle’s supply chain is shorter, with fewer intermediaries between supplier and restaurant, the use of local... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman; Food & Beverage

June 2009 (Revised May 2010)
Background Note

A Note on Cost Reduction in Financially Troubled Organizations

By: Paul W. Marshall

This note discusses methods for reducing costs, particularly labor costs, in a financially distressed organization. View Details

Keywords: Financial Crisis; Entrepreneurship; Cost Management; Financial Condition; Labor; Crisis Management

1992
Book

Implementing Activity-Based Cost Management: Moving from Analysis to Action

By: Robert S. Kaplan, Robin Cooper, Larry Maisel, Eileen Morrissey and Ronald M. Oehm

Keywords: Activity Based Costing and Management

Awards

Academy of Management. Business Policy and Strategy Division. Distinguished Student Paper Award

Winner of the 2006 Distinguished Student Paper Award from the Academy of Management for "The Cost of High-powered Incentives: Salesperson Gaming in Enterprise Software." View Details

Article

Strategic Management of Product Recovery

By: Michael W. Toffel

Manufacturers of an expanding range of durable products are facing regulatory and market pressures to manage the products they manufactured upon their end of life (EOL). In part, this attention is motivated by a growing number of countries—especially across Europe and... View Details

Keywords: Product; Environmental Sustainability; Cost Management; Government Legislation; Logistics; Risk and Uncertainty; Strategy; Europe; Asia; United States

1998
Chapter

Risk-Taking Incentives and the Cost of Insurance Company Failures

By: Brian J. Hall

Keywords: Insurance; Insolvency and Bankruptcy; Risk and Uncertainty; Risk Management; Motivation and Incentives; Insurance Industry

January 1998
Article

Tradeoffs within Costing Systems between Incentives and Measurement Objectives

By: M. Alles, S. Datar and M. Gupta

Keywords: System; Motivation and Incentives; Measurement and Metrics; Goals and Objectives

2018
Working Paper

Detecting Anomalies: The Relevance and Power of Standard Asset Pricing Tests

By: Malcolm Baker, Patrick Luo and Ryan Taliaferro

The two standard approaches for identifying capital market anomalies are cross-sectional coefficient tests, in the spirit of Fama and MacBeth (1973), and time-series intercept tests, in the spirit of Jensen (1968). A new signal can pass the first test, which we label a... View Details

Keywords: Investment Management; Anomalies; Portfolio Construction; Transaction Costs; Investment; Management; Asset Pricing; Market Transactions; Cost

January 2021 (Revised June 2021)
Case

Eaton Corporation: Portfolio Transformation and the Cost of Capital (Abridged)

By: Benjamin C. Esty, E. Scott Mayfield and Daniel Fisher

In 2000, Eaton Corporation was a broadly diversified industrial conglomerate. But its strategy was evolving and its focus was narrowing around “power management” and more recently on “intelligent power,” the use of digitally enabled products and services designed to... View Details

Keywords: Mergers and Acquisitions; Business Conglomerates; Business Divisions; Cost of Capital; Corporate Finance; Value; Valuation; Industrial Products Industry; United States; Denmark; Republic of Ireland

16 Jan 2019
News

What is the true cost of caregiving on the workforce?

30 May 2005
Research & Ideas

Germany’s Pioneering Corporate Managers

When you think about which countries have produced the greatest management innovations, the United States and Japan are likely to top your list. But it was Germany in the late 1800s and early 1900s that was a cauldron of innovative and... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

October 1994
Case

Olympus Optical Company, Ltd. (B): Functional Group Management

Documents the emergence of the functional group management system at Olympus's camera manufacturing facility. This system increases the pressure on the work force to decrease costs and improve output by treating the facility's 10 autonomous groups as profit centers,... View Details

Keywords: Cost Management; Performance Improvement; Manufacturing Industry; Japan