Publications

17 Jul 2017
Working Paper Summaries

The Relevance of Broker Networks for Information Diffusion in the Stock Market

Keywords: by Marco Di Maggio, Francesco Franzoni, Amir Kermani, and Carlo Sommavilla

December 1982 (Revised June 1993)
Background Note

Economics: An Introduction and Vocabulary

Introduces students to some general tools of economics that will be useful in analyzing macroeconomic performance in a course on business, government, and the international economy. The four sections are: 1) the economy as a circular flow, 2) supply and demand, 3)... View Details

Keywords: Macroeconomics

October 2024
Technical Note

Prompt Engineering

By: Michael Parzen and Jo Ellery

This note covers the basics of prompt engineering, a key tool for making use of modern generative AI. We discuss the principles of prompt engineering and illustrate these principles with techniques for asking questions. We further list the types of prompts that can be... View Details

Keywords: Large Language Model; AI and Machine Learning

November 2010
Article

People Often Trust Eloquence More Than Honesty

By: Todd Rogers and Michael I. Norton

This article presents a dual interview based on a research study we conducted. Our study found that an artful dodger of questions was generally considered more likable than a person who answered the same questions directly but with less eloquence. We comment on the... View Details

Keywords: Research; Social Psychology; Communication; Perception; Business or Company Management; Government and Politics

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November 1999
Case

SUPERVALU, Inc.: Professional Development Program

By: Francis Aguilar

SUPERVALU examines the creation and implementation of a training program for attracting and retaining college graduates for the nation's largest wholesale food distribution company. It addresses: 1) program design and 2) the management of the design effort and program... View Details

Keywords: Selection and Staffing; Recruitment; Retention; Training; Organizational Culture; Design; Business or Company Management; Higher Education; Programs; Food and Beverage Industry; Distribution Industry

February 1996 (Revised April 1997)
Case

Partners HealthCare System, Inc. (A)

By: Gary P. Pisano and Maryam Golnaraghi

Focuses on the decision confronting senior administrators at the Brigham and Women's Hospital: whether to enter into an affiliation with the Massachusetts General Hospital. Requires students to analyze the complex institutional changes in the health environment and to... View Details

Keywords: Consolidation; Health Care and Treatment; Mergers and Acquisitions; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Change Management; Management Teams; Health Industry; Massachusetts

22 Aug 2014
News

The fumbles in Ferguson

07 Jan 2019
News

Top Ten Technology Books Of 2018

23 Nov 2022
Video

Introduction to the HBS Live Online Classroom

16 Jan 2024
Video

Hypothesis Testing in Business: Null vs. Alternative

Article

Learning by Thinking: The Role of Reflection in Individual Learning

By: Giada Di Stefano, Francesca Gino, Gary P. Pisano and Bradley R. Staats

It is common wisdom that practice makes perfect. And, in fact, we find evidence that when given a choice between practicing a task and reflecting on their previously accumulated practice, most people opt for the former. We argue in this paper that this preference is... View Details

Keywords: Learning; Cognition and Thinking; Practice; Experience and Expertise

October 2023 (Revised February 2024)
Case

Loris

By: Shunyuan Zhang, Das Narayandas, Stacy Straaberg and David Lane

In December 2022, Loris’s executive team considered their go-to-market strategy. Loris was an artificial intelligence (AI) software startup for the customer service industry with two products on the market: 1) Agent Assist which provided customer service agents (CSAs)... View Details

Keywords: Decisions; Growth and Development Strategy; Product Launch; Product Positioning; Business Strategy; Competitive Strategy; Business Startups; AI and Machine Learning; Applications and Software; Marketing Strategy; Sales; Technology Industry; United States

Research Summary

Paper - Commodity Chains: what can we learn from a business history of the rubber chain? (1870-1910)

The literature on the rubber boom applied a Marxist/Dependendist view of rubber production in the Brazilian Amazon. Even though a sizeable surplus was generated in the rubber chain, it was mostly appropriated by foreigners. This view is in tune with the Global... View Details

Research Summary

Winning Coalitions

By: James K. Sebenius

James K. Sebenius is examining the most effective ways to generate and sustain cooperation among a corporations many stakeholders. As the number of stakeholders grows, and management actions more often involve players outside the traditional chain of command and... View Details

2024
Working Paper

Behavioral Attenuation

By: Thomas Graeber, Benjamin Enke, Ryan Oprea and Jeffrey Yang

We report a large-scale examination of behavioral attenuation: due to information-processing constraints, the elasticity of people’s decisions with respect to economic fundamentals is generally too small. We implement more than 30 experiments, 20 of which were... View Details

Keywords: Decisions; Behavior; Cognition and Thinking; Behavioral Finance

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2023
Article

Estimating Causal Peer Influence in Homophilous Social Networks by Inferring Latent Locations.

By: Edward McFowland III and Cosma Rohilla Shalizi

Social influence cannot be identified from purely observational data on social networks, because such influence is generically confounded with latent homophily, that is, with a node’s network partners being informative about the node’s attributes and therefore its... View Details

Keywords: Causal Inference; Homophily; Social Networks; Peer Influence; Social and Collaborative Networks; Power and Influence; Mathematical Methods

2007
Article

Three Perspectives on Team Learning: Outcome Improvement, Task Mastery, and Group Process

By: Amy C. Edmondson, James R. Dillon and Kate Roloff

The emergence of a research literature on team learning has been driven by at least two factors. First, longstanding interest in what makes organizational work teams effective leads naturally to questions about how members of newly formed teams learn to work together... View Details

Keywords: Learning; Organizational Culture; Performance Improvement; Practice; Groups and Teams; Research; Adaptation; Cooperation

October 2011
Article

The Surprising Power of Age-Dependent Taxes

By: Matthew C. Weinzierl

This article provides a new, empirically driven application of the dynamic Mirrleesian framework by studying a feasible and potentially powerful tax reform: age-dependent labor income taxation. I show analytically how age dependence improves policy on both the... View Details

Keywords: Taxation; Policy; Age; Income; Mathematical Methods; Welfare; United States