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2025
Working Paper

The Limits of Insurance Demand and the Growing Protection Gap

By: Parinitha Sastry, Tess Scharlemann, Ishita Sen and Ana-Maria Tenekedjieva

In a world with rising risk, how much are U.S. households willing to pay for homeowners insurance, and what does their demand imply for the future of insurance markets? We provide the first estimates of household willingness to pay for homeowners insurance and the... View Details

Keywords: Climate Change; Risk and Uncertainty; Insurance; Personal Finance; Consumer Behavior; Mortgages

July, 2024
Article

Consumer Protection in an Online World: An Analysis of Occupational Licensing

By: Chiara Farronato, Andrey Fradkin, Bradley Larsen and Erik Brynjolfsson

We study the demand and supply implications of occupational licensing using transaction-level data from a large online platform for home improvement services. We find that demand is more responsive to a professional's reviews than to the professional's... View Details

Keywords: Occupational Licensing; Consumer Protection; Perception; Experience and Expertise; Public Opinion; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Demand and Consumers

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2024
Working Paper

What Makes Players Pay? An Empirical Investigation of In-Game Lotteries

By: Tomomichi Amano and Andrey Simonov

In 2020, gamers spent more than $15 billion on loot boxes, lotteries of virtual items in video games. Paid loot boxes are contentious. Game producers argue that loot boxes complement the gameplay and expenditures on loot boxes reflect players’ enjoyment of the game.... View Details

Keywords: Consumer Behavior; Policy; Games, Gaming, and Gambling; Product Design; Ethics; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Video Game Industry

May 2024
Case

Net Protections (A)

By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell, Nobuo Sato and Akiko Kanno

In Case A, set in early 2017, Net Protections (NP) is the largest Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) fintech service in Japan and is experiencing a slowdown in growth of its core product, NP Atobarai. Launched in 2002 as non-membership service, the NP Atobarai product has given... View Details

Keywords: Product Positioning; Demand and Consumers; E-commerce; Customers; Business Model; Financial Services Industry; Japan

January 2024 (Revised February 2024)
Course Overview Note

Managing Customers for Growth: Course Overview for Students

By: Eva Ascarza

Managing Customers for Growth (MCG) is a 14-session elective course for second-year MBA students at Harvard Business School. It is designed for business professionals engaged in roles centered on customer-driven growth activities. The course explores the dynamics of... View Details

Keywords: Customer Relationship Management; Decision Making; Analytics and Data Science; Growth Management; Telecommunications Industry; Technology Industry; Financial Services Industry; Education Industry; Travel Industry

2025
Working Paper

Enhancing Treatment Effect Prediction on Privacy-Protected Data: An Honest Post-Processing Approach

By: Ta-Wei Huang and Eva Ascarza

As firms increasingly rely on customer data for personalization, concerns over privacy and regulatory compliance have grown. Local Differential Privacy (LDP) offers strong individual-level protection by injecting noise into data before collection. While... View Details

Keywords: Targeted Intervention; Conditional Average Treatment Effect Estimation; Differential Privacy; Honest Estimation; Post-processing; Analytics and Data Science; Consumer Behavior; Marketing

2023
Book

Deeply Responsible Business: A Global History of Values-Driven Leadership

By: Geoffrey Jones

Corporate social responsibility has entered the mainstream, but what does it take to run a successful purpose-driven business? This book examines leaders who put values alongside profits to showcase the challenges and upside of deeply responsible business. Should... View Details

January 2023
Supplement

Apple: Privacy vs. Safety (B)

By: Henry McGee, Nien-hê Hsieh and Christian Godwin

In 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the globe, Apple and Google partnered to develop a contact tracing application that would collect information about users infected with the disease and notify those who they had been in contact with. While Apple/Google’s... View Details

September–October 2022
Article

Should Your Company Sell on Amazon?: Reach Comes at a Price

By: Ayelet Israeli, Leonard A. Schlesinger, Matt Higgins and Sabir Semerkant

Selling on Amazon allows brands to reach millions of consumers—but that exposure comes with costs. They include smaller margins, more competition, the risk of commoditization, and less knowledge about customers. In this article, the authors present a scorecard to... View Details

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September 2022 (Revised January 2025)
Case

The Pokémon Company: Evolving into an Everlasting Brand

By: Tomomichi Amano and Masaki Nomura

Super Bowl 50, the fiftieth annual championship game of the American National Football League played in February 2016, featured 52 commercials, and brands spent more than six million dollars each for a 30-second commercial slot. Surprisingly, the commercial that... View Details

Keywords: Advertising; Brands and Branding; Marketing Strategy; Consumer Behavior; Growth and Development Strategy; Video Game Industry; Japan

August 2022
Article

The Bulletproof Glass Effect: Unintended Consequences of Privacy Notices

By: Aaron R. Brough, David A. Norton, Shannon L. Sciarappa and Leslie K. John

Drawing from a content analysis of publicly traded companies’ privacy notices, a survey of managers, a field study, and five online experiments, this research investigates how consumers respond to privacy notices. A privacy notice, by placing legally enforceable limits... View Details

Keywords: Choice; Purchase Intent; Privacy; Privacy Notices; Warnings; Assurances; Information Disclosure; Trust; Consumer Behavior; Spending; Decisions; Information; Communication

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Article

The Economic Consequences of Bankruptcy Reform

By: Tal Gross, Raymond Kluender, Feng Liu, Matthew J. Notowidigdo and Jialan Wang

A more generous consumer bankruptcy system provides greater insurance against financial risks but may also raise the cost of credit. We study this trade-off using the 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (BAPCPA), which increased the costs of... View Details

Keywords: Bankruptcy; Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention And Consumer Protection Act; Borrowing and Debt; Credit

January 2021 (Revised May 2021)
Case

Amazon Shopper Panel: Paying Customers for Their Data

By: Eva Ascarza and Ayelet Israeli

This case introduces a new Amazon program that has consumers upload their receipts from transactions outside of Amazon, in exchange for money. Through the discussion, the case aims to explore issues in customers’ privacy in the digital age, the value of customers’ own... View Details

Article

Soul and Machine (Learning)

By: Davide Proserpio, John R. Hauser, Xiao Liu, Tomomichi Amano, Burnap Alex, Tong Guo, Dokyun (DK) Lee, Randall Lewis, Kanishka Misra, Eric Schwarz, Artem Timoshenko, Lilei Xu and Hema Yoganarasimhan

Machine learning is bringing us self-driving cars, medical diagnoses, and language translation, but how can machine learning help marketers improve marketing decisions? Machine learning models predict extremely well, are scalable to “big data,” and are a natural fit to... View Details

Keywords: Machine Learning; Marketing Applications; Knowledge; Technological Innovation; Core Relationships; Marketing; Applications and Software

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June 2019
Article

Debt Traps? Market Vendors and Moneylender Debt in India and the Philippines

By: Dean Karlan, Sendhil Mullainathan and Benjamin Roth

A debt trap occurs when someone takes on a high-interest rate loan and is barely able to pay back the interest, and thus perpetually finds themselves in debt (often by refinancing). Studying such practices is important for understanding financial decision-making of... View Details

Keywords: Borrowing and Debt; Household; Personal Finance; Decision Making; Behavior; India; Philippines

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July 2018 (Revised July 2018)
Teaching Note

Argentina Power—Don’t Cry for Me Argentina

By: Nori Gerardo Lietz and Sayiddah Fatima McCree

Teaching Note for HBS No. 218-041. This case concerns a complex potential energy infrastructure investment in Argentina by a global conglomerate shortly after Mauricio Macri (“Macri”) became President of Argentina in 2015. The central issues are (i) why was a country... View Details

Keywords: Argentina; Argentine Exceptionalism; Infrastructure Finance; Investing; Finance; Inflation and Deflation; Government and Politics; Energy Generation; Infrastructure; Utilities Industry; Energy Industry; Financial Services Industry; Argentina; South America

May 2018 (Revised February 2019)
Case

The Powers That Be (Internet Edition): Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft

By: Jeffrey F. Rayport, Julia Kelley and Nathaniel Schwalb

As of early 2018, five U.S. technology companies—Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft—were among the largest companies in the world. Similarly, three Chinese technology firms—Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent, or BAT—had emerged as global players due in part to the... View Details

Keywords: Internet and the Web; Business Ventures; Customers; Analytics and Data Science; Safety; Corporate Strategy; Competitive Strategy; Technology Industry

November 2017
Case

The 'Wonder Drug' That Killed Babies

By: Joshua Lev Krieger, Tom Nicholas and Matthew Preble

In the early 1960s, a popular drug taken by patients worldwide for a range of maladies was found to cause severe birth defects and other health problems in babies born to mothers who had taken it during a certain stage of fetal development. As many as 10,000 children... View Details

Keywords: Regulation; Business and Government Relations; Business and Community Relations; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Product Marketing; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Business History; Health; Government Legislation; Corporate Accountability; Ethics; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Pharmaceutical Industry; Public Administration Industry; United States; United Kingdom; Australia; Germany; Europe

January 2016
Case

COFCO

By: David E. Bell and Natalie Kindred

In 2015, COFCO, China's state-owned agribusiness giant, was working to protect China's food security (a key national security priority) by extending its control of the global food system through overseas acquisitions. At the same time, COFCO sought to grow its market... View Details

May 2015 (Revised May 2017)
Case

Colgate-Palmolive Company: Marketing Anti-Cavity Toothpaste

By: John A. Quelch and Margaret L. Rodriguez

In October 2013, Colgate-Palmolive Company, the world's leading oral care company, was about to launch its new Colgate® Maximum Cavity Protection™ plus Sugar Acid Neutralizer™ toothpaste in Brazil. Oral care category accounted for 46 percent of Colgate's $17.4 billion... View Details

Keywords: New Product Management; Consumer Segmentation; Global Marketing; Corporate Social Responsibility; Healthcare; Sustainability; Health Care and Treatment; Environmental Sustainability; Marketing; Segmentation; Product Development; Product Launch; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Product Positioning; Consumer Products Industry; Brazil; United States

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