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Publications
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- April 2025
- Article
Serving with a Smile on Airbnb: Analyzing the Economic Returns and Behavioral Underpinnings of the Host’s Smile
By: Shunyuan Zhang, Elizabeth Friedman, Kannan Srinivasan, Ravi Dhar and Xupin Zhang
Non-informational cues, such as facial expressions, can significantly influence judgments and interpersonal impressions. While past research has explored how smiling affects business outcomes in offline or in-store contexts, relatively less is known about how smiling... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
New Product Diffusion Within Retailers: The Effect of Managerial Quality on Rollout
By: Tomomichi Amano and Jorge Tamayo
Retailers are key intermediaries through which consumers encounter innovation in the form of new products. How are these products rolled out within retailers? We observe significant variation in the availability of new products across stores in a large retail chain in... View Details
- February 2025
- Case
Managing Complexity at mymuesli
By: Thomas Graeber and Stacy Straaberg
In April 2009, direct-to-consumer e-commerce muesli brand mymuesli faced a flood of customer questions. The breakfast cereal startup enabled users to order personalized muesli on its website by choosing from 75 organic ingredients for a total of 566 quadrillion... View Details
- February 2025
- Case
Doing Business in Kigali, Rwanda
By: Andy Zelleke, Martin A. Sinozich, Julianne Bliss and Choetsow Tenzin
Rwanda’s transformation from a post-genocide recovery effort to one of Africa’s fastest-growing economies presents a compelling case for investors and business leaders. With an ambitious Vision 2050 strategy, Kigali has emerged as a regional hub for trade, innovation,... View Details
- January 2025
- Case
Arsenal Capital Partners’ Refinancing of Pinnacle
By: Victoria Ivashina and Srimayi Mylavarapu
Arsenal Capital Partners’ portfolio company, Pinnacle, a leading producer of high-performance adhesive technologies, has experienced rapid growth under Arsenal’s ownership. Over just two years, Pinnacle's EBITDA increased from $13.5 million to $60 million. By mid-2021,... View Details
- January 2025
- Case
Duolingo: On a 'Streak'
By: Jeffrey F. Rayport, Nicole Tempest Keller and Nicole Luo
In December 2024, Severin Hacker, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Duolingo, reflected on the remarkable evolution of the language-learning app he helped launch in 2011. As the #1 most downloaded education app in the world, Duolingo had over 100 million... View Details
- January 2025
- Case
Intuition Robotics: An AI Companion for Older Adults
By: Amit Goldenberg, Elie Ofek and Orna Dan
Intuition Robotics, a startup that makes an AI companion robot to alleviate older adults’ loneliness, debates whether to pursue a B2C model or B2G route. If it opts for the government vertical, it must determine how to negotiate a favorable deal. Two weeks after... View Details
- January 2025 (Revised March 2025)
- Case
Hunter Point Capital
By: Josh Lerner, John D. Dionne and Srimayi Mylavarapu
In the spring of 2023, Hunter Point Capital faced a pivotal decision that could define its trajectory as a new player in the growing GP stakes business. As the firm neared completion of three high-profile GP stakes investments, consuming nearly a third of its initial... View Details
- Working Paper
AI in Disguise—How AI-generated Ads' Visual Cues Shape Consumer Perception and Performance
By: Yannick Exner, Jochen Hartmann, Oded Netzer and Shunyuan Zhang
Generative AI’s recent advancements in creating content have offered vast potential to transform the advertising industry. This research investigates the impact of generative AI-enabled visual ad creation on real-world advertising effectiveness. For this purpose, we... View Details
- January 2025
- Case
Driving Efficiency and Sustainability at P&G China
By: Feng Zhu, Philip Kuai and Billy Chan
P&G China’s business had reached new heights thanks to the explosive growth of e-commerce in the country, but the rapidly
increasing volume of shipments to customers had created operational and environmental challenges in terms of packaging waste,
shipping... View Details
- January 2025
- Case
Apax Partners: Deciding Whether to Bid for Trader Corp.
By: Benjamin C. Esty and Edward A. Meyer
Apax Partners’ investment committee was schedule to meet on March 21, 2011, to decide whether to invest in Trader Corporation, a Canadian classified advertising business for used automobiles with both print (magazines) and digital (website) distribution. What made this... View Details
Keywords: Value Creation; Network Effects; Private Equity; Growth Management; Digital Marketing; Business Strategy; Competitive Advantage; E-commerce; Valuation; Competition; Digital Platforms; Digital Strategy; Digital Transformation; Transition; Advertising Industry; Auto Industry; Information Industry; Canada; United Kingdom; New York (state, US); New York (city, NY)
- November–December 2024
- Article
How to Avoid the Agility Trap
By: Jianwen Liao and Feng Zhu
Agility is all the rage in strategy circles these days. According to conventional wisdom, organizations should rapidly react to technological advances, new market dynamics, and shifting consumer preferences. But in practice this is nearly impossible to pull off,... View Details
- November–December 2024
- Article
Scaling Up Transformational Innovations
By: Peter Koen, Ananya Sheth, Mike DiPaola and Linda A. Hill
For large companies operating in mature sectors—such as Procter & Gamble in consumer goods, Apple in consumer electronics, and Adobe in cloud software—driving growth is a perennial challenge. Growth through acquisition is always an option, but companies often quickly... View Details
- November 2024
- Case
Demond Martin and WellWithAll
By: Hise Gibson, Archie L. Jones and Ai-Ling Jamila Malone
This case study chronicles the transformative entrepreneurial path of Demond Martin, co-founder and CEO of WellWithAll, a health and wellness startup. Motivated by a pivotal life experience and deep concern for racial health inequities, Martin transitions from a... View Details
Keywords: Customers; Diversity; Ethnicity; Race; Health; Recruitment; Leadership Style; Management Style; Marketing; Brands and Branding; Marketing Strategy; Product Marketing; Product Launch; Product Positioning; Organizational Culture; Mission and Purpose; Relationships; Trust; Business Strategy; Competition; Competitive Strategy; Competitive Advantage; Investment; Consumer Products Industry; Consumer Products Industry; Consumer Products Industry; United States; Chicago; Boston; Atlanta; North Carolina; District of Columbia
- November 2024
- Case
Dr. Bombay Ice Cream
By: William R. Kerr, Alexis Brownell and Michael Liu
This case examines the creation, launch, and rapid growth of Dr. Bombay Ice Cream, a joint venture between Happi Co., a consumer packaged goods incubator, and entertainment mogul Snoop Dogg, with his son, Cordell Broadus. The brand was inspired by a Bored Ape Yacht... View Details
- November 2024
- Case
Innovation at Master Kong Beverages
By: David E. Bell and Shu Lin
Hong-Chen Wei (HBS MBA 2014), Chairman of KSF Beverage Holding Co., Ltd. (KSFB), was steering the company toward the premium segment with the launch of “InheriTea,” a premium, sugar-free tea product. Traditionally, KSFB’s flagship brand, Master Kong, catered to the... View Details
Keywords: Consumer Behavior; Trends; Behavior; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Product Launch; Product Development; Segmentation; Organizational Culture; Product Positioning; Consumer Products Industry; Consumer Products Industry; Consumer Products Industry; Consumer Products Industry; Asia; China
- November 2024
- Supplement
Epic Games: Nineteen Eighty-Fortnite (B)
By: Andy Wu and Ronald Wang
In a significant ruling on April 24, 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld portions of the district court’s decision against Epic Games back in September 2021. However, Apple’s anti-steering provisions, which restricted app developers from... View Details
- November 2024 (Revised December 2024)
- Case
Moonfare and the Democratization of Private Equity
By: Victoria Ivashina and Srimayi Mylavarapu
Founded in 2016, Moonfare headquartered in Europe, was a pioneer in the “democratization” of private equity investments. Historically, private equity was accessible only to institutional investors like pension funds, endowments, sovereign wealth funds, and large family... View Details
- November 2024
- Article
Price Discounts and Cheapflation During the Post-Pandemic Inflation Surge
By: Alberto Cavallo and Oleksiy Kryvtsov
We study how within-store price variation changes with inflation, and whether households exploit it to attenuate the inflation burden. We use micro price data for food products sold by 91 large multi-channel retailers in ten countries between 2018 and 2024. Measuring... View Details
- 2024
- Article
Supply and Demand and the Term Structure of Interest Rates
By: Robin Greenwood, Samuel Hanson and Dimitri Vayanos
We survey the growing literature emphasizing the role that supply-and-demand forces play in shaping the term structure of interest rates. Our starting point is the Vayanos and Vila (2009, 2021) model of the term structure of default-free bond yields, which we present... View Details