Publications

Summer 2025
Article

Dynamic Competition for Customer Memberships

By: Cristian Chica, Julian Jimenez-Cardenas and Jorge Tamayo

A competitive two-period membership (subscription) market is analyzed. Two symmetric firms charge a “membership” fee that allows consumers to buy products or services at a given unit price for both periods. Firms can choose between long- or short-term memberships. When... View Details

Keywords: Competitive Price Discrimination; Membership; Dynamic Competition; Competition; Price; Consumer Behavior; Business Model

2025
Working Paper

Trade and Industrial Policy in Supply Chains: Directed Technological Change in Rare Earths

By: Laura Alfaro, Harald Fadinger, Jay Schymik and Gede Virananda

Trade and industrial policies, while primarily intended to support domestic industries, may unintentionally stimulate technological progress abroad. We document this mechanism in the case of rare earth elements (REEs)—critical inputs for manufacturing at the knowledge... View Details

Keywords: Industrial Policy; Global Value Chains; Directed Technological Change; Input-output Linkages; Innovation; Trade; Metals and Minerals; Technological Innovation; Supply Chain; Technology Industry

2025
Working Paper

Management and Firm Dynamism

By: Nicholas Bloom, Jonathan S. Hartley, Raffaella Sadun, Rachel Schuh and John Van Reenen

We show better-managed firms are more dynamic in plant acquisitions, disposals, openings and closings in U.S. Census and international data. Better-managed firms also birth better-managed plants, and improve the performance of the plants they acquire. To explain these... View Details

Keywords: Management Practices; Productivity; Management Practices and Processes; Mergers and Acquisitions; Competition; Business or Company Management; Performance Productivity

April 2025
Case

Radical Transformation at Bayer: Dynamic Shared Ownership

By: Boris Groysberg and Gamze Yucaoglu

In 2023, Bill Anderson became CEO of Bayer AG, a 160-year-old life sciences giant looking to strengthen its pharma pipeline, manage debt, and cut through bureaucracy. His bold response: Dynamic Shared Ownership (DSO), a radical model replacing traditional hierarchies... View Details

Keywords: Human Resources; Business Strategy; Alignment; Innovation and Management; Organizational Structure; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Pharmaceutical Industry

April 2025
Article

Dynamic Silos: Increased Modularity and Decreased Stability in Intra-organizational Communication Networks During the COVID-19 Pandemic

By: Tiona Zuzul, Emily Cox Pahnke, Jonathan Larson, Christopher White, Patrick Bourke, Nicholas Caurvina, Neha Parikh Shah, Fereshteh Amini, Youngser Park, Joshua Vogelstein, Jeffrey Weston and Carey E. Priebe

Workplace communications around the world were drastically altered by COVID-19, related work-from-home orders, and the rise of remote work. To understand these shifts, we analyzed aggregated, anonymized metadata from over 360 billion emails within 4,361 organizations... View Details

Keywords: Remote Work; COVID-19; Communication Technology; Organizational Change and Adaptation

April 2025
Article

Transitioning Into Retirement: The Interplay of Self and Life Structure

By: Marcy Crary, Douglas T. (Tim) Hall, Kathy E. Kram, Teresa M. Amabile and Lotte Bailyn

This paper explores the psychological, social, and behavioral ways in which professionals end their corporate careers and reorient themselves and their lives in the transition from employment to retirement. Framed within life course theory, specifically the adult... View Details

Keywords: Retirement; Behavior; Transition; Identity

Find at Harvard

2025
Working Paper

Private Equity and Workers: Modeling and Measuring Monopsony, Implicit Contracts, and Efficient Reallocation

By: Kyle Herkenhoff, Josh Lerner, Gordon M. Phillips, Francisca Rebelo and Benjamin Sampson

We measure the real effects of private equity buyouts on worker outcomes by building a new database that links transactions to matched employer-employee data in the United States. To guide our empirical analysis, we derive testable implications from three theories in... View Details

Keywords: Monopsony; Market Power; Productivity; Private Equity; Employment; Wages; Employees

2025
Working Paper

How to Choose Among Technologies with Learning Curves: Making Better Investment Decisions

By: Christian Kaps and Arielle Anderer

Learning curves, the fact that technologies improve as a function of cumulative experience or investment, are desirable-think inexpensive solar panels or higher performing semiconductors. But, for firms that need to pick one technology among several candidates, such as... View Details

Keywords: Learning Curve; Technology; Innovation; Batteries; Energy Storage; Sequential Decision Making; TELCO; Exploration; Exploitation; Problems and Challenges; Cost vs Benefits; Technology Adoption; Battery Industry

SSRN

March 2025 (Revised May 2025)
Case

ING Türkiye: Flexible Work in a Competitive Banking Environment

By: Ashley Whillans and Nico Schaefer

This case explores ING Türkiye’s journey toward workplace flexibility within the traditionally conservative Turkish banking sector. Beginning with early remote work experiments in 2015 and culminating in the FlexING model, by 2024 ING Türkiye had positioned itself as a... View Details

March 2025
Case

The Changing Climate on Wall Street

By: Clayton S. Rose, Maxim Pike Harrell and Michael Norris

Increasing and conflicting regulatory requirements and political pressures regarding climate change tested the leaders of U.S. financial institutions, as they struggled to determine how best to comply while managing their business and its risks. In October 2024,... View Details

February 2025
Case

Luca de Meo at Renault Group (A)

By: Emily Truelove, Linda A. Hill and Lydia Begag

When Luca de Meo became CEO of Renault Group in 2020, the 122-year-old French automaker faced financial challenges and the double technological disruption of the automotive industry: the shift to electric vehicles (EVs) and the rise of software-defined vehicles (SDVs).... View Details

February 2025
Case

Luca de Meo at Renault Group (A) (Abridged)

By: Emily Truelove, Linda A. Hill and Lydia Begag

When Luca de Meo became CEO of Renault Group in 2020, the 122-year-old French automaker faced financial challenges and the double technological disruption of the automotive industry: the shift to electric vehicles (EVs) and the rise of software-defined vehicles (SDVs).... View Details

2025
Working Paper

Dynamic Personalization with Multiple Customer Signals: Multi-Response State Representation in Reinforcement Learning

By: Liangzong Ma, Ta-Wei Huang, Eva Ascarza and Ayelet Israeli

Reinforcement learning (RL) offers potential for optimizing sequences of customer interactions by modeling the relationships between customer states, company actions, and long-term value. However, its practical implementation often faces significant challenges.... View Details

Keywords: Dynamic Policy; Deep Reinforcement Learning; Representation Learning; Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment; Latent Variable Models; Customer Relationship Management; Customer Value and Value Chain; Foreign Direct Investment; Analytics and Data Science

SSRN

January 2025
Case

Untapped Global: Financing Africa's Missing Middle

By: Raymond Kluender and Emanuele Colonnelli

In November 2024, Jim Chu, founder and CEO of Untapped Global, faced mounting internal tensions over the company’s strategic direction. Untapped had developed a data-driven revenue-based financing (RBF) model to address the “missing middle” problem—the $5.2 trillion... View Details

January 2025
Case

Real Madrid Club de Fútbol

By: Anita Elberse, Juan Pasquín and Íñigo Pasquín

On June 1, 2024, Spanish soccer club Real Madrid captures its fifteenth Champions League title—more than double the tally of the nearest competitor. Under Florentino Pérez’s leadership, the club has now won six of the last eleven UEFA Champions League titles, and has... View Details

Keywords: Soccer; Football; Entertainment; Media; Talent Management; Superstars; General Management; Sports; Marketing; Recruitment; Competitive Strategy; Growth and Development Strategy; Sports Industry; Entertainment and Recreation Industry; Media and Broadcasting Industry

January 2025
Article

Overcoming Barriers to Employee Ownership: Insights from Small and Medium-Sized Businesses

By: John Guzek and Ashley Whillans

This research investigates the limited adoption of employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) among small-to-medium sized businesses (SMBs) in the U.S. Through interviews with 30 SMB owners across various industries, we identify the key barriers to ESOP adoption as lack of... View Details

Keywords: Profit Sharing; Employee Ownership; Management Practices and Processes; Compensation and Benefits; Small Business; Adoption; Employees

Find at Harvard

10 Dec 2024
Interview

A New Model for Funding Healthcare Innovation

By: Regina E. Herzlinger and Duke Rohlen

Ajax Health founder Duke Rohlen (HBS MBA 2001) and HBS Professor Regina Herzlinger join host Brian Kenny to discuss the key success factors for both start-up and established medical technology firms. The case “Ajax Health: A New Model for Medical Technology Innovation”... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Innovation and Invention; Business Model; Private Equity; Health Industry

December 2024
Article

Are Bankruptcy Professional Fees Excessively High?

By: Samuel Antill

Chapter 7 is the most popular bankruptcy system for U.S. firms and individuals. Chapter 7 professional fees are substantial. Theoretically, high fees might be an unavoidable cost of incentivizing professionals. I test this empirically. I study trustees, the most... View Details

Keywords: Insolvency and Bankruptcy; Motivation and Incentives; Policy

November 2024
Supplement

AlphaGo (C): Birth of a New Intelligence

By: Shikhar Ghosh and Shweta Bagai

This case, the final of a three-part series, explores DeepMind's pivotal transition from mastering games to solving real-world scientific challenges. In December 2020, DeepMind's AI system AlphaFold 2 achieved a breakthrough by solving protein folding—a 50-year-old... View Details

Keywords: Autonomy; Deep Learning; Drug Discovery; Healthcare Innovation; Neural Networks; Scientific Research; Technology Startup; AI and Machine Learning; Technological Innovation; Research and Development; Business Model; Business Strategy; Open Source Distribution; Technology Industry; United States