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- February 2025
- Article
Improving Customer Compatibility with Tradeoff Transparency
By: Ryan W. Buell and MoonSoo Choi
Through a large-scale field experiment with 393,036 customers considering opening a credit card account with a nationwide retail bank, we investigate how providing transparency into an offering’s tradeoffs affects subsequent rates of customer acquisition and long-run... View Details
- November 29, 2023
- Article
To Earn Trust, Climate Alliances Need to Improve Transparency
By: Peter Tufano, Chris Thomas, Knut Haanaes, Matteo Gasparini, Robert Eyres and Christopher Chapman
Businesses are increasingly joining together as part of climate alliances to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels. But these alliances raise antitrust issues: When competitors collaborate, it can come at the expense of customers or workers. To mitigate... View Details
- 2022
- Article
OpenXAI: Towards a Transparent Evaluation of Model Explanations
By: Chirag Agarwal, Satyapriya Krishna, Eshika Saxena, Martin Pawelczyk, Nari Johnson, Isha Puri, Marinka Zitnik and Himabindu Lakkaraju
While several types of post hoc explanation methods have been proposed in recent literature, there is very little work on systematically benchmarking these methods. Here, we introduce OpenXAI, a comprehensive and extensible opensource framework for evaluating and... View Details
- July 2021
- Article
Information Transparency, Multihoming, and Platform Competition: A Natural Experiment in the Daily Deals Market
By: Hui Li and Feng Zhu
Platform competition is shaped by the likelihood of multi-homing (i.e., complementors or consumers adopt more than one platform). To take advantage of multi-homing, platform firms often attempt to motivate their rivals’ high-performing complementors to adopt their own... View Details
- July–August 2021
- Article
Surfacing the Submerged State: Operational Transparency Increases Trust in and Engagement with Government
By: Ryan W. Buell, Ethan Porter and Michael I. Norton
Problem definition: As trust in government reaches historic lows, frustration with government performance approaches record highs.
Academic/practical relevance: We propose that in co-productive settings like government services, peoples’ trust and... View Details
- March 2021
- Article
Last Place Aversion in Queues
By: Ryan W. Buell
This paper documents the effects of last place aversion in queues and its implications for customer experiences and behaviors as well as for operating performance. An observational analysis of customers queuing at a grocery store, and four online studies in which... View Details
- February 2021
- Article
How Transparency into Internal and External Responsibility Initiatives Influences Consumer Choice
By: Ryan W. Buell and Basak Kalkanci
Amid growing calls for transparency and social and environmental responsibility, companies are employing different strategies to improve consumer perceptions of their brands. Some pursue internal initiatives that reduce their negative social or environmental impacts... View Details
- January 2021 (Revised October 2021)
- Case
eToro: Building the World's Largest Social Trading Network
By: Elie Ofek and Danielle Golan
Social trading platform eToro was preparing for the launch of its expanded offering in the U.S. The company faced critical decisions regarding product-market fit, go-to-market strategy, positioning and monetization. Moreover, it faced the challenge of how best to make... View Details
- September 2019 (Revised February 2020)
- Teaching Note
Commonwealth Bank of Australia: Unbanklike Experimentation
By: Ryan W. Buell and Leslie K. John
Email mking@hbs.edu for a courtesy copy.
This Teaching Note explains the theory of the case and teaching plan for the case: Commonwealth Bank of Australia: Unbanklike Experimentation (619-018). In August 2017,... View Details
This Teaching Note explains the theory of the case and teaching plan for the case: Commonwealth Bank of Australia: Unbanklike Experimentation (619-018). In August 2017,... View Details
- March–April 2019
- Article
Operational Transparency: Make Your Processes Visible to Customers and Your Customers Visible to Employees
By: Ryan W. Buell
Conventional wisdom holds that the more contact an operation has with its customers, the less efficiently it will run. But when customers are partitioned away from the operation, they are less likely to fully understand and appreciate the work going on behind the... View Details
- 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
- 2019
- Working Paper
Relative Performance Transparency: Effects on Sustainable Choices
By: Ryan W. Buell, Shwetha Mariadassou and Yanchong Zheng
We study how transparency into the levels and changes of relative sustainability performance affects consumer choices. Our work considers two forms of transparency: process transparency, in which customers receive information about the company's sustainability... View Details
- October 2018 (Revised February 2020)
- Case
Commonwealth Bank of Australia: Unbanklike Experimentation
By: Ryan W. Buell and Leslie K. John
Email mking@hbs.edu for a courtesy copy.
In August 2017, Commonwealth Bank of Australia was looking for ways to differentiate itself from competing banks and was also trying to improve the financial well-being of... View Details
In August 2017, Commonwealth Bank of Australia was looking for ways to differentiate itself from competing banks and was also trying to improve the financial well-being of... View Details
- March 2018 (Revised March 2018)
- Teaching Note
OpenInvest
By: Boris Vallee and Caitlin Reimers Brumme
Founded by a team of hedge fund and NGO alumni, OpenInvest launched its platform in 2015 to enable retail investors to tailor their portfolio to their personal values in an automated way, for instance by screening out weapon manufacturers stocks or overweighting LGBTQ... View Details
- February 2018 (Revised August 2018)
- Case
OpenInvest
By: Shawn Cole, Boris Vallée and Nicole Tempest Keller
Founded by a team of hedge fund and NGO alumni, OpenInvest launched its platform in 2015 to enable retail investors to tailor their portfolios to their personal values in an automated way, for instance by screening out weapons manufacturers stocks or overweighting... View Details
- October 2017 (Revised April 2018)
- Case
Improving Worker Safety in the Era of Machine Learning (A)
By: Michael W. Toffel, Dan Levy, Jose Ramon Morales Arilla and Matthew S. Johnson
Managers make predictions all the time: How fast will my markets grow? How much inventory do I need? How intensively should I monitor my suppliers? Which potential customers will be most responsive to a particular marketing campaign? Which job candidates should I... View Details
- June 2017
- Article
Creating Reciprocal Value Through Operational Transparency
By: Ryan W. Buell, Tami Kim and Chia-Jung Tsay
We investigate whether organizations can create value by introducing visual transparency between consumers and producers. Although operational transparency has been shown to improve consumer perceptions of service value, existing theory posits that increased contact... View Details
- September 2016 (Revised March 2020)
- Teaching Note
Fasten: Challenging Uber and Lyft with a New Business Model
By: Feng Zhu
Fasten, a new ridesharing start-up in Boston, entered the scene in September 2015 hoping its unique vision of transparency for both driver and passenger and strategy to keep riders' fares low and charge drivers a flat $0.99 fee per ride, as opposed to the 20%–30%... View Details
- May 2016 (Revised March 2020)
- Case
Fasten: Challenging Uber and Lyft with a New Business Model
By: Feng Zhu and Angela Acocella
Fasten, a new ridesharing start-up in Boston, entered the scene in September 2015 hoping its unique vision of transparency for both driver and passenger and strategy to keep riders' fares low and charge drivers a flat $0.99 fee per ride as opposed to the 20-30%... View Details
- March 2016
- Supplement
Trouble at Tessei
By: Ethan Bernstein and Ryan W. Buell
In 2005, Teruo Yabe is asked to revive Tessei, the 669-person JR-East subsidiary responsible for cleaning its Shinkansen ("bullet") trains. Operational mistakes, customer complaints, safety issues, and employee turnover are at or near all-time highs, even as the... View Details
Keywords: Service Management; Employee Engagement; Employee Motivation; Leadership And Managing People; Quality Improvement; Efficiency; Japan; Operational Transparency; Employee Coordination; Transparency; Leadership; Service Delivery; Service Operations; Employees; Quality; Transportation Industry; Japan