Faculty & Research

• HBS Book

The huge public challenges we face are daunting. At the same time, many of us have come to accept the notion that government can't do new things or solve tough challenges—it's too big and slow and bureaucratic. Not so. Entrepreneurial savvy in government is growing, transforming the public sector's response to big problems at all levels. The key is a shift from a mindset of "Probability Government"—overly focused on safe solutions and mimicking "best" practices—to "Possibility Government."

• Journal of Financial Economics 139, no. 2 (February 2021): 389–404.

Multiple borrowing—a borrower obtains overlapping loans from multiple lenders—is a common phenomenon in many credit markets. We build a highly tractable, dynamic model of multiple borrowing and show that, because overlapping creditors may impose default externalities on each other, expanding financial access by introducing more lenders may severely backfire.

• Health Care Initiative

In 2019, the co-founders of the Swedish medical start-up 1928 Diagnostics, CEO Dr. Kristina Lagerstedt and COO Dr. Susanne Staaf, had to pick the right business model to commercialize their novel technology to hospitals and health care providers. Developed in partnership with research hospitals to help fight the global antibiotic resistance crisis, the firm’s cloud-based technology platform helped partners identify resistant genes and mutations in bacteria more quickly and accurately, allowing for easier outbreak cluster tracking in support of hospital infection control management, as well as better diagnostics and antibiotic selection. By 2019, they had raised $5 million, employed 16 people, and had their tool deployed at 24 partner sites in 10 different countries.

• Featured Case

Zameer Kassam Fine Jewelry (ZKFJ) designs custom engagement rings that tell the story of a couple’s relationship. The case describes the company’s process for engaging clients, which has historically been a relatively offline, high-touch experience. Obliged by social-distancing guidelines with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, Zameer Kassam and his team had been forced to take many facets of the business online. Although clients still seemed delighted by their rings, Kassam wondered what might be being lost for his clients and employees in this new virtual medium. On the other hand, perhaps there were aspects of the process that could be improved through online delivery? Such a transition could represent an opportunity to grow the business.

• Featured Case

In 2019, Egon Zehnder chair Jill Ader and CEO Edilson Camara faced a critical question: how should the global executive search firm approach its burgeoning advisory service offering? Since 2003, the firm’s advisory practice had grown as a conglomeration of grassroots experiments driven by the enthusiasm of some partners and the needs of some markets. Yet, in 2019, partners’ attitudes toward the practice varied greatly, with some viewing advisory as a natural extension of search that would position Egon Zehnder for future growth, and others perceiving it as a risky distraction from the firm’s core business. Ader and Camara believed the time was ripe for EZ partners to develop a shared perspective on the future of the practice within the firm.

• HBS Working Knowledge

Low-income customers turn to payday lenders and check cashers for basic financial needs when traditional banks push them out of the system through high overdraft fees and other penalties. Reducing overdraft fees improves consumers’ overall financial health and access to cheaper credit.

• HBS Working Paper

A rich literature finds that individuals avoid information, even information that is instrumental to their choices. A common hypothesis posits that individuals strategically avoid information to hold particular beliefs or to take certain actions--such as behaving selfishly--with lower image costs. Building off of the classic "moral wiggle room" design, this paper provides the first direct test of whether individuals avoid information because of image concerns. We analyze data from 4,626 experimental subjects. We find that image concerns play a role in driving information avoidance, but a role that is substantially smaller than the common approach in the literature would suggest.