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- January 2025
- Case
A Tiger in the Tank: Exxon Sues Investors
By: Clayton S. Rose, Sarah Sasso and James Weber
In June 2024, investors were trying to make sense of ExxonMobil’s (Exxon) lawsuit against two impact investors, Arjuna Capital (Arjuna) and Follow This, that had just been dismissed by the U.S. District Court of Northern Texas. Exxon’s suit challenged the rights of two... View Details
Keywords: Disruption; Talent and Talent Management; Customer Satisfaction; Decision Making; Demographics; Ethics; Corporate Accountability; Employees; Recruitment; Retention; Leadership; Crisis Management; Risk Management; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Mission and Purpose; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Civil Society or Community; Social Issues; Adaptation; Investment Activism; Lawsuits and Litigation; Business and Shareholder Relations; Medical Devices and Supplies Industry; Health Industry; Energy Industry; United States; Netherlands; Norway
- January 2025
- Case
Constitutional Fiction: John Miller & the Legitimacy of Family Constitutions
By: Lauren Cohen, Octavian Graf Pilati and Sophia Pan
John Miller sat reviewing his family’s Constitution, grappling with how best to implement and enforce its provisions. Designed to prevent ambiguity in governance, the Family Constitution set out core values and guidelines to promote harmony and cohesion among family... View Details
Keywords: Conflict Resolution; Perspective Taking; Liabilities; Family Business; Family Ownership; Business Growth and Maturation; Alignment; Cooperation; Attitudes; Behavior; Cognition and Thinking; Conflict Management; Conflict of Interests; Power and Influence; Perception; Trust; Perspective; Motivation and Incentives; Happiness; Identity; Goals and Objectives; Legal Liability; Contracts; Fairness; Values and Beliefs; Governance Controls; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Family and Family Relationships; Manufacturing Industry; Germany
- December 2024
- Technical Note
Ethical Analysis: Conflicts of Interest
By: Nien-hê Hsieh and Matthew Souba
This note briefly outlines a working definition of what constitutes a conflict of interest, the challenges in negotiating such conflicts, and how individuals and organizations can address them. View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Priceless: How to Create, Trade, and Protect What Matters Most
By: Debora L. Spar
This article explores the concept of the "sacred economy," a realm of human interactions and exchanges that transcends traditional market dynamics. It illustrates the emotional and relational aspects of human connections that cannot be quantified or traded like... View Details
- March 2024
- Article
Being Together in Place as a Catalyst for Scientific Advance
By: Eamon Duede, Misha Teplitskiy, Karim R. Lakhani and James Evans
The COVID-19 pandemic necessitated social distancing at every level of society, including universities and research institutes, raising essential questions concerning the continuing importance of physical proximity for scientific and scholarly advance. Using customized... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Warnings and Endorsements: Improving Human-AI Collaboration Under Covariate Shift
By: Matthew DosSantos DiSorbo and Kris Ferreira
Problem definition: While artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms may perform well on data that are representative of the training set (inliers), they may err when extrapolating on non-representative data (outliers). These outliers often originate from covariate shift,... View Details
- October 2023 (Revised July 2024)
- Case
Nelson Mandela: Changing the World
By: Robert Simons and Shirley Sun
This case traces the rise of Nelson Mandela from his tribal home in South Africa to president of the country. Rejecting expectations that he would be a tribal leader, Mandela instead dedicates his life to fighting Apartheid. After peaceful approaches fail, he joins... View Details
- September 2023
- Technical Note
Note on Family Constitutions
Less than half of family businesses will survive generational transfer. While sometimes this is due to operating company issues, in many cases it is because of conflict within the family. Many families create and adopt a family constitution to proactively mitigate... View Details
- June 2023
- Article
Can Purpose Foster Stakeholder Trust in Corporations
By: Ranjay Gulati and Franz Wohlgezogen
As part of institutional changes toward more responsible capitalism, firms increasingly articulate a purpose beyond simply profit as a central tenet of their governance. Management scholarship has noted the potential advantages of such purpose-focus for stakeholder... View Details
- March 2023
- Article
Attracting the Sharks: Corporate Innovation and Securities Class Action Lawsuits
By: Elisabeth Kempf and Oliver Spalt
This paper provides novel evidence suggesting that securities class action lawsuits, a central pillar of the U.S. litigation and corporate governance system, can constitute an obstacle to valuable corporate innovation. We first establish that valuable innovation output... View Details
- February 2023 (Revised June 2023)
- Case
Doing Business in Santiago, Chile
By: Willis Emmons, Leonard A. Schlesinger and Ruth Costas
The case uses the example of the opening of the first IKEA furniture store in Chile – which is operated by Chilean group Falabella – to discuss the opportunities and challenges of doing business in the country. It gives readers an overview of Chile’s economic... View Details
- August 2022
- Case
Negotiating Peace in Colombia
By: Deepak Malhotra and Cody Smith
This case follows the protracted armed conflict between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), tracing it from its origins over 50 years ago, through the private and public negotiations that ultimately resulted in the 2016... View Details
- August 2022
- Article
What Makes a Good Image? Airbnb Demand Analytics Leveraging Interpretable Image Features
By: Shunyuan Zhang, Dokyun Lee, Param Vir Singh and Kannan Srinivasan
We study how Airbnb property demand changed after the acquisition of verified images (taken by Airbnb’s photographers) and explore what makes a good image for an Airbnb property. Using deep learning and difference-in-difference analyses on an Airbnb panel dataset... View Details
- February 15, 2022
- Article
How Managers Can Build a Culture of Experimentation
By: Frank V. Cespedes and Neil Hoyne
Testing in business presents qualitatively different challenges than those in clinical trials and most scientific research. There are very few opportunities for randomized control experiments in a changing, competitive market. Yet, change and competition make testing a... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
The Disagreement Problem in Explainable Machine Learning: A Practitioner's Perspective
By: Satyapriya Krishna, Tessa Han, Alex Gu, Javin Pombra, Shahin Jabbari, Steven Wu and Himabindu Lakkaraju
As various post hoc explanation methods are increasingly being leveraged to explain complex models in high-stakes settings, it becomes critical to develop a deeper understanding of if and when the explanations output by these methods disagree with each other, and how... View Details
- October 2021 (Revised February 2022)
- Case
Green Hydrogen in Chile
By: Tarun Khanna, Jenyfeer Martínez Buitrago and Mariana Cal
In 2020, the Chilean government wants to promote green hydrogen, a technology with high potential to help mitigate climate change. President Sebastián Piñera, aware of the country's advantages to produce green hydrogen competitively, asks Energy Minister Juan Carlos... View Details
Keywords: COVID-19 Pandemic; Decision Making; Alternative Energy; Renewable Energy; Climate Change; Environmental Sustainability; Green Technology; Financial Instruments; Energy Policy; Government Administration; Strategy; Government and Politics; Social Issues; Energy Industry; Latin America; South America; Chile
- September 15, 2021
- Article
Improving Deconvolution Methods in Biology Through Open Innovation Competitions: An Application to the Connectivity Map
By: Andrea Blasco, Ted Natoli, Michael G. Endres, Rinat A. Sergeev, Steven Randazzo, Jin Hyun Paik, N.J. Maximilian Macaluso, Rajiv Narayan, Xiaodong Lu, David Peck, Karim R. Lakhani and Aravind Subramanian
A recurring problem in biomedical research is how to isolate signals of distinct populations (cell types, tissues, and genes) from composite measures obtained by a single analyte or sensor. Existing computational deconvolution approaches work well in many specific... View Details
- Article
The Harmonization of Lending Standards within Banks through Mandated Loan-Level Transparency
By: Jung Koo Kang, Maria Loumioti and Regina Wittenberg-Moerman
We explore whether the introduction of transparent reporting rules increases credit standard harmonization within a bank. We exploit the new loan-level reporting rules imposed on banks that borrow from the European Central Bank using repurchase agreements... View Details
- Article
What Is Your Status Portfolio? Higher Status Variance across Groups Increases Interpersonal Helping but Decreases Intrapersonal Well-being
By: Catarina R. Fernandes, Siyu Yu, Taeya M. Howell, Alison Wood Brooks, Gavin J. Kilduff and Nathan C. Pettit
Individuals belong to multiple groups across various domains of life, which in aggregate constitute a portfolio of potentially distinct levels of experienced status. We propose a two-factor model for assessing the effects of an individual’s status portfolio, based on... View Details
- May 2021 (Revised September 2021)
- Case
Accounting for Bitcoin at Tesla
By: Charles C.Y. Wang and Siyu Zhang
On February 8, 2021, Tesla revealed, through its 10-K filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), that it had purchased $1.5 billion of Bitcoin, totaling 7.5% of the company’s cash, and that it planned to accept payments in the cryptocurrency soon. These... View Details