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  • January 2018 (Revised May 2018)
  • Case

AT&T Managing Technological Change and the Future of Telephone Operators in the 20th Century

By: Daniel P. Gross and William R. Kerr
By the 1930s, AT&T dominated the American phone industry, serving 10 million telephones and employing over 100,000 switchboard operators. But beginning in the mid-1910s, the company began changing from manually operated switchboards to mechanical switching systems that... View Details
Keywords: AT＆T; Bell Telephone; Phone Lines; Phone Operators; Mechanical Switching; Layoffs; Technological Change; Transition; History; Innovation and Invention; Technological Innovation; Information Technology; Disruption; Change Management; Communications Industry; Telecommunications Industry; United States
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  • May 2018
  • Teaching Note

AT&T: Managing Technological Change and the Future of Telephone Operators in the 20th Century

By: Daniel P. Gross and William R. Kerr
Teaching Note for HBS No. 718-486. View Details
Keywords: AT＆T; Bell Telephone; Phone Lines; Phone Operators; Mechanical Switching; Layoffs; Technological Change; Transition; History; Innovation and Invention; Technological Innovation; Information Technology; Disruption; Change Management; Communications Industry; Telecommunications Industry; United States
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  • 2020
  • Working Paper

Why Do Firms Automate Production, and How Do They Adjust? Evidence from the Bell Telephone System over the 20th Century

By: Daniel P. Gross and James J. Feigenbaum
Over the course of the 20th century, AT&T's operating companies replaced telephone operators with mechanical switching and dial telephones. Yet it took AT&T 30 years from the invention of the technology to begin using it, and another 60 years to finish installing it... View Details
Keywords: Employment; Labor; Technology Adoption; Technology Networks; History; Telecommunications Industry; United States
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  • 2017
  • Article

Frictions or Mental Gaps: What's Behind the Information We (Don't) Use and When Do We Care?

By: Benjamin Handel and Joshua Schwartzstein
Consumers suffer significant losses from not acting on available information. These losses stem from frictions such as search costs, switching costs, and rational inattention, as well as what we call mental gaps resulting from wrong priors/worldviews, or relevant... View Details
Keywords: Information; Consumer Behavior
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  • September 2002 (Revised October 2002)
  • Case

Managing Knowledge and Learning at NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)

By: Dorothy A. Leonard and David Kiron
Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) faces a serious loss of knowledge--both because of the "faster, better, cheaper" mandate for Mars missions and from the retirement of key personnel. An extensive knowledge management system for NASA/JPL includes formal knowledge-capture... View Details
Keywords: Knowledge Management; Knowledge Dissemination; Leadership Development; Internet and the Web; Risk and Uncertainty; Organizational Culture; Retirement; Human Resources; Human Capital
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  • Working Paper

The Returns to Skills During the Pandemic: Experimental Evidence from Uganda

By: Livia Alfonsi, Vittorio Bassi, Imran Rasul and Elena Spadini
The Covid-19 pandemic represents one of the most significant labor market shocks to the world economy in recent times. We present evidence from a field experiment to understand whether and why skilled and unskilled workers were differentially impacted by the shock, in... View Details
Keywords: COVID-19 Pandemic; System Shocks; Labor; Competency and Skills; Development Economics; Uganda
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  • 03 Jul 2018
  • First Look

New Research and Ideas, July 3, 2018

beginning in the mid-1910s, the company began changing from manually operated switchboards to mechanical switching systems that were faster and more cost-effective and did not require human operators. By the... View Details
Keywords: Dina Gerdeman
  • 31 Jan 2012
  • First Look

First Look: Jan. 31

negative emotions, lower intrinsic motivation, and less favorable perceptions of the organization-with negative consequences for performance. These actions include signaling low expectations for innovation; switching strategic direction... View Details
Keywords: Sean Silverthorne & Carmen Nobel
  • 11 Nov 2014
  • First Look

First Look: November 11

http://hbr.org/2014/11/how-not-to-cut-health-care-costs/ar/1 November 2014 Harvard Business Review How Smart, Connected Products Are Transforming Competition By: Porter, Michael E., and James E. Heppelmann Abstract—Information technology is revolutionizing products.... View Details
Keywords: Sean Silverthorne
  • Web

Business, Government & the International Economy - Faculty & Research

gender by political elites, it does not influence broader political outcomes like policy preferences or far-right voting. These findings reveal the sequence and mechanisms behind the distributional consequences of labor market... View Details
  • 18 May 2010
  • First Look

First Look: May 18

role of the American Economic Association (AEA) in the market and focuses in particular on two mechanisms adopted in recent years at the suggestion of our committee. First, job market applicants now have a signaling service to send an... View Details
Keywords: Martha Lagace
  • 18 Apr 2018
  • First Look

First Look at New Research and Ideas, April 18, 2018

labels (vs. text warning labels, calorie labels, and no labels), provided insight into psychological mechanisms driving effectiveness, and assessed consumer sentiment. Study 1 indicated that graphic warning labels reduced the share of... View Details
Keywords: Sean Silverthorne
  • Web

Students on the Job Market - Doctoral

Next, I show that investors also display this biased reaction to news, with stock returns reacting less negatively to negative surprises from male-led companies relative to their female-led peers on earnings announcement days. I then shed light on the underlying View Details
  • 12 Feb 2018
  • Research & Ideas

Customers at the Back of the Line Are Anxious—Can You Keep Them from Leaving?

how much jockeying for position there was,” he says. Customers regularly switched lines to try and decrease their wait time. Significantly, though, once someone got in line behind them, they tended to stay put. In fact, of the 71... View Details
Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Retail; Service
  • 10 Mar 2015
  • First Look

First Look: March 10

education in local communities? To switch to renewable power? All of these actions might improve social welfare, and some of them might improve profitability, but they are very different, and the business case for each of them is... View Details
Keywords: Carmen Nobel
  • Web

Behavioral Finance & Financial Stability

research here . More Info Large banks and small firm lending By: Victoria Ivashina & Vitaly Bord OCT 2021 The contraction in bank credit supply was a core propagation mechanism of the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2007–2009. What are... View Details
  • Web

FAQ - MBA

for candidates with backgrounds in mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and computer science. Well-qualified candidates with backgrounds in other engineering disciplines and related technical fields are welcome to apply if they... View Details
  • Web

Finance - Faculty & Research

mechanism that amplifies interest rate volatility. I find strong support for these predictions in the time series of US government bond returns. 2014 Working Paper Financial Repression in the European Sovereign Debt Crisis By: Bo Becker... View Details
  • 13 Mar 2023
  • Research & Ideas

What Would It Take to Unlock Microfinance's Full Potential?

Bulletin: When they have a grace period, how do people use that time and capital differently? Rigol: Giving people more time up front allows them to better match the cash flows of their business with their repayment obligations. If you are a tailor and you’re View Details
Keywords: by Jen McFarland Flint; Financial Services
  • Web

Advisory Board - Entrepreneurship

company Excara and switched to selling enterprise software for managing product content. In 2002, he started two nonprofits in response to the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church. He is currently acting VP of Product Strategy for... View Details