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- 2025
- Working Paper
Transferability MATTRs: Towards Understanding Antecedents of Strategic Licensing
By: Dafna F. Bearson and Maria P. Roche
This paper examines the antecedents of firms’ decisions to license intellectual property
(IP). We propose a conceptual framework emphasizing two critical factors: (1) transferability,
which we define as the ease of moving knowledge embodied in inventions across
firm... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Crossing the Design-Use Divide: How Process Manipulation Shapes the Design and Use of AI
By: Rebecca Karp
Existing literature often separates research on the design of innovations from their implementation and use, neglecting the role of selection—how organizations choose which innovations to implement. Although scholars suggest scientific approaches for selecting novel... View Details
- October 2024
- Case
Parexel: Scaling Up and Industry Dynamics
By: Regina E. Herzlinger and Ben Creo
Through the lens of biopharmaceutical contract research organization (CRO) PAREXEL, this case traces the evolution of the firm as it reinvents itself in response to the transformation of the CRO sector from a small, secondary cluster of firms into a major player with... View Details
- October 2024
- Article
Strategic Decision Making at Platform Transitions: The Case of Nokia (2010-2011).
By: Timo O. Vuori and Michael Tushman
We studied Nokia’s decision to adopt the Windows platform in 2011 to induce new theory on the emotional dynamics of incumbent firms’ strategic decision making at platform transitions. We find that platform companies’ entry into an established industry activates a... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Determinants of Top-Down Sabotage
By: Hashim Zaman and Karim R. Lakhani
We investigate the conditions that motivate managers to impede the growth of talented subordinates due to fears of future competition for their own positions. Our research expands on existing tournament and contest theory literature that considers peer-to-peer sabotage... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Smaller than We Thought? The Effect of Automatic Savings Policies
By: James J. Choi, David Laibson, Jordan Cammarota, Richard Lombardo and John Beshears
Medium- and long-run dynamics undermine the effect of automatic enrollment and default savings-rate auto-escalation on retirement savings. Our analysis of 401(k) plans incorporates the facts that employees frequently leave firms (often before matching contributions... View Details
- May 2024
- Background Note
Net Revenue Retention: Unpacking the Dynamics of Customer Monetization
By: Elie Ofek, Barak Libai and Eitan Muller
Firms and investors alike are beginning to recognize the importance of tracking how revenues from existing customers are evolving over time and to appreciate the value in understanding what might explain changes in these revenues. Consequently, in addition to looking... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
The Efficiency of Patent Litigation
By: Samuel Antill, Murat Alp Celik, Xu Tian and Toni M. Whited
How efficient is the U.S. patent litigation system? We quantify the extent to which the litigation system shapes innovation using a novel dynamic model, in which heterogeneous firms innovate and face potential patent lawsuits. We show that the impact of a litigation... View Details
- May 2024 (Revised March 2025)
- Case
Hakluyt: From Corporate Intelligence to Trusted Advisors
By: Joseph B. Fuller and Lena Duchene
Established in 1995 by a group of ex-British intelligence officers, Hakluyt & Company (Hakluyt) was a corporate advisory firm that generated insights by leveraging a unique blend of internal expertise and a global network of well-connected individuals. Since 2019, the... View Details
Keywords: Business Growth and Maturation; Business Model; Talent and Talent Management; Capital Structure; Cash Flow; Corporate Finance; Equity; Stock Shares; Corporate Governance; Business History; Compensation and Benefits; Recruitment; Leadership Style; Growth Management; Management Succession; Organizational Culture; Performance Evaluation; Networks; Partners and Partnerships; Business Strategy; Competitive Advantage; Transformation; Consulting Industry; Europe; United Kingdom; England; London
- 2021
- Working Paper
Quantifying the Value of Iterative Experimentation
By: Iavor I Bojinov and Jialiang Mao
Over the past decade, most technology companies and a growing number of conventional firms have adopted online experimentation (or A/B testing) into their product development process. Initially, A/B testing was deployed as a static procedure in which an experiment was... View Details
- March 2024
- Article
How Foes Become Allies: The Shifting Role of Business in Climate Politics
By: Irja Vormedal and Jonas Meckling
Firms often oppose costly public policy reforms—but under what conditions may they
come to support such reforms? Previous scholarship has taken a predominantly static
approach to the analysis of business positions. Here, we advance a dynamic theory of
change in... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Much Ado About Nothing? Overreaction to Random Regulatory Audits
By: Samuel Antill and Joseph Kalmenovitz
Regulators often audit firms to detect non-compliance. Exploiting a natural experiment in the lobbying industry, we show that firms overreact to audits and this response distorts prices and reduces welfare. Each year, federal regulators audit a random sample of... View Details
- 2023
- Chapter
Inflation and Misallocation in New Keynesian Models
By: Alberto Cavallo, Francesco Lippi and Ken Miyahara
The New Keynesian framework implies that sluggish price adjustment results in a distorted allocation of resources. We use a simple model to quantify these unobservable distortions, using data that depict the price-setting behavior of firms, specifically the frequency... View Details
- May 2023
- Technical Note
Dynamic Pricing: Timing is Everything
By: Elie Ofek
This note provides a comprehensive exposition to the topic of dynamic pricing (whereby the fee customers are charged is time-dependent). It covers the motivation for firms to engage in dynamic pricing, provides a typology of the main formats dynamic pricing can take,... View Details
- April 2023
- Article
The Real Exchange Rate, Innovation and Productivity
By: Laura Alfaro, Alejandro Cuñat, Harald Fadinger and Yanping Liu
We evaluate manufacturing firms' responses to changes in the real exchange rate (RER) using detailed firm-level data for a large set of countries for the period 2001-2010. We uncover the following stylized facts about regional variation of manufacturing firms'... View Details
- December 2022
- Article
I Don't 'Recall': The Decision to Delay Innovation Launch to Avoid Costly Product Failure
By: Byungyeon Kim, Oded Koenigsberg and Elie Ofek
Innovations embody novel features or cutting-edge components aimed at delivering desired customer benefits.
Oftentimes, however, we observe the need to recall new products shortly after their introduction. Indeed, a firm
may rush an innovation to market in an attempt... View Details
- Fall 2022
- Article
China's Political Economy and International Backlash: From Interdependence to Security Dilemma Dynamics
By: Margaret Pearson, Meg Rithmire and Kellee Tsai
Contrary to expectations that economic interdependence might lessen security conflict between China and the U.S. and its allies, much of the contestation between China and several OECD countries has focused on firms and economic links. This paper explains the... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
The Political Polarization of Corporate America
By: Vyacheslav Fos, Elisabeth Kempf and Margarita Tsoutsoura
U.S. executives are increasingly segregating by political party. We establish this new fact using
political affiliations from voter registration records for top executives of S&P 1500 firms between
2008 and 2022. We identify key drivers of this trend, including... View Details
- April 2022
- Teaching Note
Tempur Sealy International (A, B & C)
By: Benjamin C. Esty and Daniel Fisher
Teaching Note for HBS Case Nos. 718-422, 718-423, and 718-424. The cases explore the long-term relationship between Tempur Sealy (TPX, a mattress manufacturer) and Mattress Firm (MFRM, a bedding retailer and TPX's largest customer). For almost 20 years, the firms... View Details
Keywords: Porter's 5 Forces; Bargaining Power; Buyer Power; Customer Power; Supplier Power; Negotiations; Value Capture; Private Equity; Consumer Durables; Consumer Discretionary; Mattresses; B-2-B; Industry Dynamics; Leadership; Compensation; Corporate Strategy; Business Strategy; Value Creation; Competition; Cooperation; Distribution; Negotiation; Industry Structures; Customers; Relationships; Distribution Industry; Manufacturing Industry; Retail Industry; Consumer Products Industry; United States; South Africa
- February 2022
- Case
NFX Capital and Moov Technologies
By: Scott Duke Kominers and Nicole Tempest Keller
In July 2019, James Currier, a general partner at San Francisco-based NFX Ventures, was considering a seed stage investment of $1.5 million in Moov Technologies, a B2B marketplace for used industrial equipment. NFX was a venture capital firm focused on seed-stage... View Details