Publications

March 2009 (Revised June 2010)
Case

Neck & Neck: Leveraging the Club Neck Information

Commercial Director Prado wonders how to leverage the loyalty card information to prepare the fall 2008 budget. The case discusses the value of subjective and objective information for profit-planning purposes. Spanish children's apparel retailer Neck & Neck uses... View Details

Keywords: Customer Relationship Management; Profit; Knowledge Use and Leverage; Marketing; Consumer Behavior; Retail Industry

19 Dec 2023
Research & Ideas

The 10 Most Popular Articles of 2023

People Get Ahead?Society seems to reward people with particular facial features. Research by Shunyuan Zhang and colleagues uses machine learning to analyze traits that people associate with charisma. The... View Details

Keywords: by Danielle Kost

Article

Why Am I Seeing This Ad? The Effect of Ad Transparency on Ad Effectiveness

By: Tami Kim, Kate Barasz and Leslie K. John

Given the increasingly specific ways marketers can target ads, many consumers and regulators are demanding ad transparency: disclosure of how consumers’ personal information was used to generate ads. We investigate how and why ad transparency impacts ad effectiveness.... View Details

Keywords: Digital Marketing; Customization and Personalization; Information; Trust; Performance Effectiveness

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28 Sep 2011
Research & Ideas

The Profit Power of Corporate Culture

creating effective cultures. A 2010 Conference Board study revealed that only 45 percent of US workers were satisfied with their jobs—the lowest level in the history of View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

Research Summary

Overview

By: Ayelet Israeli

Professor Israeli utilizes econometric methods and field experiments to study data driven decision making in marketing context. Her research focuses on data-driven marketing, with an emphasis on how businesses can leverage their own data, customer data, and market data... View Details

Keywords: Channel Management; Pricing; Pricing Policies; Online Marketing; E-commerce; Analytics; Econometrics; Field Experiments; Data Analytics; Artificial Intelligence; Value Of Data

01 Mar 2017
News

In My Humble Opinion: Arunma Oteh (MBA 1990)

assets. “Our leadership understands that you can bring innovation from the private sector and capital markets to solve the world’s most difficult challenges,” says Oteh. She... View Details

Keywords: Julia Hanna

01 Oct 2009
Working Paper Summaries

Systemic Risk and the Refinancing Ratchet Effect

Keywords: by Amir E. Khandani, Andrew W. Lo & Robert C. Merton; Construction; Real Estate

23 May 2011
Op-Ed

Leading and Lagging Countries in Contributing to a Sustainable Society

reporting is the combination in a single document of the material measures of financial and nonfinancial—environmental, social, and governance (ESG)—performance and View Details

Keywords: by Robert G. Eccles & George Serafeim

06 Jul 2009
What Do You Think?

Are You Ready to Manage in an Irrational World?

admission by Alan Greenspan that markets acted in ways he had not anticipated? The work shares several common counter-intuitive conclusions that: (1) human behavior is much... View Details

Keywords: by Jim Heskett

2017
Working Paper

The Importance of Unemployment Insurance as an Automatic Stabilizer

By: Marco Di Maggio and Amir Kermani

We assess the extent to which unemployment insurance (UI) serves as an automatic stabilizer to mitigate the economy's sensitivity to shocks. Using a local labor market design based on heterogeneity in local benefit generosity (defined as the percentage of household... View Details

Keywords: Unemployment Insurance; Automatic Stabilizers; Bartik Shocks; Aggregate Demand; System Shocks; Employment; Balance and Stability; Insurance; Volatility; Insurance Industry

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04 May 2009
Research & Ideas

What’s Next for the Big Financial Brands

headquarters reminds us that a brand is a precious asset. The value of any brand asset depends upon whether it has delivered on its past promises and is believed likely to do so View Details

Keywords: by John Quelch; Banking; Financial Services

06 Oct 2003
Research & Ideas

The Problem with Hedge Funds

rallies, while through the hedge fund a richer investor is free to go either long or short. The ordinary investor can make money in only one way—an up market—while View Details

Keywords: by D. Quinn Mills

2011
Article

The Consumer Psychology of Mail-in Rebates

By: John T. Gourville and Dilip Soman

Consumers who buy a product intending to use an accompanying mail-in rebate often do not redeem the rebate. To explain this behavior, we argue that consumers use an anchoring and adjustment approach to predicting the likelihood of redeeming a rebate. In keeping with... View Details

Keywords: Product Marketing; Consumer Behavior; Sales; Motivation and Incentives

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November 2008
Case

The StarNight Hotel Construction Bid: Real Time Competition on Schedule, Scope, and Cost

By: John D. Macomber

The case is intended for use with the HBS Educational Technology Group "Construction Bidding Simulation." Material that can be taught includes quantity survey methodology (from the case); analyzing preliminary estimated costs per building trade (from the discussion... View Details

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Construction; Cost; Contracts; Bids and Bidding; Real Estate Industry

27 Nov 2000
Research & Ideas

The Dynamics of Standing Still: Firestone Tire & Rubber and the Radial Revolution

U.S. market in the late 1960s, Firestone, along with most of the major American tire manufacturers, suffered costly setbacks and lost significant... View Details

Keywords: by Donald N. Sull; Manufacturing; Transportation

20 Jan 2022
Blog Post

Lessons Learned from My HBS Career Journey in Environmental Sustainability

second semester I worked with him to develop a market research report for a battery startup that he was advising. This, along with the conversations I had with CPD Career Coaches Oscar Mak and Ryan Kim,... View Details

Research Summary

Simultaneous Distinction, Democratization and Omnivorism Effects: A Longitudinal Analysis of Dynamic Symbolic Boundaries in Counterfeit Consumption Networks

Sociologists have long examined the interactive relationship between social structure, taste and power. This literature has overwhelmingly fallen into three, ostensibly competing, theoretical “camps”: Distinction, where high-status consumers use... View Details

2023
Working Paper

Design-Based Confidence Sequences: A General Approach to Risk Mitigation in Online Experimentation

By: Dae Woong Ham, Michael Lindon, Martin Tingley and Iavor Bojinov

Randomized experiments have become the standard method for companies to evaluate the performance of new products or services. In addition to augmenting managers’ decision-making, experimentation mitigates risk by limiting the proportion of customers exposed to... View Details

Keywords: Performance Evaluation; Research and Development; Analytics and Data Science; Consumer Behavior

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June 1991 (Revised May 1995)
Case

Jay Gould and the Coming of Railroad Consolidation

Concerns the role of Jay Gould in causing the creation of large regional rail systems after the Civil War in the United States. In class it will be used to show the inevitability of consolidation in that industry. View Details

Keywords: Rail Transportation; Industry Growth; Consolidation; Rail Industry; United States