Publications
Publications
Show Results For
- All HBS Web
(306)
- Faculty Publications (57)
Page 1 of 57
Results →
- 2025
- Working Paper
The Invention of Corporate Governance
By: Yueran Ma and Andrei Shleifer
The analysis of corporate governance begins with a central feature of modern capitalism—the separation of ownership and control in large corporations—first empirically documented by Berle and Means (1932). Such separation entails several agency problems reflecting... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Second- versus Third-party Audit Quality: Evidence from Global Supply Chain Monitoring
By: Maria R. Ibanez, Ashley Palmarozzo, Jodi L. Short and Michael W. Toffel
Capitalizing on the superior credibility and flexibility and potential lower cost of external assessments, many global buyers are relying less on their own employee (“second-party”) auditors and more on third-party auditors to monitor and prevent environmental and... View Details
- March 2023
- Article
Not from Concentrate: Collusion in Collaborative Industries
By: Jordan M. Barry, John William Hatfield, Scott Duke Kominers and Richard Lowery
The chief principle of antitrust law and theory is that reducing market concentration—having more, smaller firms instead of fewer, bigger ones—reduces anticompetitive behavior. We demonstrate that this principle is fundamentally incomplete.
In many... View Details
In many... View Details
Keywords: Antitrust; Antitrust Law; Antitrust Theory; Law And Economics; Collusion; Collaboration; Collaborative Industries; Regulation; ＂Repeated Games＂; IPOs; Initial Public Offerings; Underwriters; Real Estate; Real Estate Agents; Realtors; Syndicated Markets; Syndication; Brokers; Market Concentration; Competition; Law; Economics; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Game Theory; Initial Public Offering
- February 2022
- Case
Business Roundtable 2019 Statement: A New Paradigm or Business as Usual?
By: Charles C.Y. Wang and Amram Migdal
This note focuses on the antecedents of, reactions to, and clarifications about The Business Roundtable’s August 19, 2019, “Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation.” The note includes background information on corporate governance as practiced in the United States in... View Details
- May 2021
- Case
The International Space Station, Principal-Agent Problems, and NASA's Quest to Keep Humans in Space
By: Matthew Weinzierl and Mehak Sarang
In building the International Space Station (ISS), NASA opened the door to the development of a robust in-space economy in low-Earth Orbit, and yet the decision to build the station, and continue to extend its lifetime, placed a huge burden on NASA’s Human Spaceflight... View Details
- February 2021
- Article
A Dynamic Theory of Multiple Borrowing
By: Daniel Green and Ernest Liu
Multiple borrowing—a borrower obtains overlapping loans from multiple lenders—is a common phenomenon in many credit markets. We build a highly tractable, dynamic model of multiple borrowing and show that, because overlapping creditors may impose default externalities... View Details
- November 2020 (Revised April 2021)
- Case
Roll-Ups and Surprise Billing: Collisions at the Intersection of Private Equity and Patient Care
By: Trevor Fetter and Kira Seiger
This case describes the increasing investment by private equity (PE) firms in patient care and other healthcare services. The case focuses on investments in physician staffing firms and roll-up strategy investments in physician practice management (PPM). Included in... View Details
Keywords: Business Ventures; Acquisition; Mergers and Acquisitions; Business Model; Change; Disruption; Fluctuation; Trends; Customers; Customer Value and Value Chain; Ethics; Fairness; Finance; Equity; Insurance; Private Equity; Geography; Geographic Scope; Health; Health Care and Treatment; Markets; Demand and Consumers; Supply and Industry; Industry Structures; Ownership; Ownership Type; Private Ownership; Relationships; Agency Theory; Business and Community Relations; Business and Shareholder Relations; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Networks; Strategy; Competition; Consolidation; Expansion; Integration; Horizontal Integration; Vertical Integration; Value; Value Creation; Health Industry; Insurance Industry; United States
- 2020
- Working Paper
Collusion in Brokered Markets
By: John William Hatfield, Scott Duke Kominers and Richard Lowery
The U.S. residential real estate agency market presents a puzzle for economic theory: commissions on real estate transactions have remained high for decades even though entry is frequent and costs are low. We model the real estate agency market, and other brokered... View Details
- 2018
- Working Paper
Design Rules, Volume 2: How Technology Shapes Organizations: Chapter 5 Complementarity
The purpose of this chapter is to relate the theory of task networks and technology set forth in previous chapters to theories of firm boundaries from economics and management. Complementary goods have more value when used together than separately. Complementarity may... View Details
Keywords: Complementarity
- March 2018
- Teaching Note
ISRO: Explore Space or Exploit CubeSats?
ISRO, India’s space agency, established to address domestic challenges with space technology, is one of the six largest space agencies in the world. Through its 59 missions, ISRO has launched numerous satellites for communication, disaster management, navigation,... View Details
- June 2017 (Revised September 2021)
- Case
Sales Misconduct at Wells Fargo Community Bank
Set in early 2017, this case examines widespread sales misconduct at Wells Fargo Community Bank. Wells Fargo's governance and controls are described in the lead up to the September 2016 announcement that Wells Fargo had settled with regulators for $185 million in... View Details
Keywords: Corporate Governance; Governance Controls; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Governing and Advisory Boards; Executive Compensation; Lawsuits and Litigation; Crisis Management; Mission and Purpose; Organizational Design; Business and Community Relations; Business and Government Relations; Crime and Corruption; Business Organization; Business Model; Ethics; Corporate Accountability; Governance Compliance; Policy; Compensation and Benefits; Resignation and Termination; Laws and Statutes; Legal Liability; Business or Company Management; Risk Management; Business Processes; Organizational Culture; Organizational Structure; Failure; Agency Theory; Business and Shareholder Relations; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Risk and Uncertainty; Salesforce Management; Public Opinion; Banking Industry; North and Central America
- June 2017
- Article
The Social Trajectory of a Finance Professor and the Common Sense of Capital
By: Marion Fourcade and Rakesh Khurana
This paper traces the career of Michael Jensen, a Chicago finance PhD turned Harvard Business School professor to reveal the intellectual and social conditions that enabled the emergence and institutionalization of what we call the “neoliberal common sense of capital,”... View Details
- 2017
- Chapter
Corporate Moral Agency, Positive Duties, and Purpose
By: Nien-hê Hsieh
A long-standing question in business ethics is whether business enterprises are themselves moral agents with distinct moral responsibilities. To date, the debate about corporate moral agency has focused on responsibility for past wrongdoing that involves violating... View Details
- Article
The Error at the Heart of Corporate Leadership
By: Joseph L. Bower and Lynn S. Paine
Agency theory, a new model of governance promulgated by academic economists in the 1970s, is behind the idea that corporate managers should make shareholder value their primary concern and that boards should ensure they do. The theory regards shareholders as owners of... View Details
- March 2017
- Article
Institutional Ownership and Corporate Tax Avoidance: New Evidence
By: Mozaffar N. Khan, Suraj Srinivasan and Liang Tan
We provide new evidence on the agency theory of corporate tax avoidance (Slemrod, 2004; Crocker and Slemrod, 2005; Chen and Chu, 2005) by showing that increases in institutional ownership are associated with increases in tax avoidance. Using the Russell index... View Details
- July–August 2016
- Article
Minimum Advertised Pricing: Patterns of Violation in Competitive Retail Markets
By: Ayelet Israeli, Eric Anderson and Anne Coughlan
Manufacturers in many industries frequently use vertical price policies, such as minimum advertised price (MAP), to influence prices set by downstream retailers. Although manufacturers expect retail partners to comply with MAP policies, violations of MAP are common in... View Details
- Article
Landing the First Job: The Value of Intermediaries in Online Hiring
By: Christopher Stanton and Catherine Thomas
Online markets for remote labor services allow workers and firms to contract with each other directly. Despite this, intermediaries—called outsourcing agencies—have emerged in these markets. This paper shows that agencies signal to employers that inexperienced workers... View Details
- 2019
- Working Paper
Self-Interest: The Economist's Straitjacket
By: Robert Simons
This paper examines contemporary economic theories that focus on the design and management of business organizations. In the first part of the paper, a taxonomy is presented that describes the different types of economists interested in this subject—market economists,... View Details
Keywords: Self-interest; Economist; Moral Philosophers; Regulation; Capture; Organization Design; Economy Theory; Organization Theory; Management Theory; Commitment; Controls; Governance; Customers; Conflict of Interests; Business or Company Management; Competition; Organizational Design; Business Education; Agency Theory; Economics; Theory; Boundaries
- October 2015
- Article
The Multinational Firm and Geopolitics: Europe, Russian Energy, and Power
By: Rawi Abdelal
Multinational firms unavoidably exert influence over politics through power that is generated by both structure and process. While both political economy and management scholars address international firms, neither field has an adequate understanding of the reciprocal... View Details
- January 2015
- Article
Are Incentives Without Expertise Sufficient? Evidence from Fortune 500 Firms
By: Emilie R. Feldman and Cynthia A. Montgomery
Agency theory predicts that incentives will align agents' interests with those of principals. However, the resource-based view suggests that to be effective, the incentive to deliver must be paired with the ability to deliver. Using Fortune 500 boards as an... View Details