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Faculty & Research

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    • HBS Book

    Negotiation: The Game Has Changed

    By: Max Bazerman

    The world has changed dramatically in just the past few years—and so has the game of negotiation. COVID-19, Zoom, political polarization, the online economy, increasing economic globalization, and greater workplace diversity—all have transformed the who, what, where, and how of negotiation. Today, traditional negotiating tactics, while still effective, need to be tailored to vastly different situations and circumstances. In Negotiation: The Game Has Changed, legendary Harvard Business School professor Max Bazerman, a pioneer in the field of negotiation, shows you how to negotiate successfully today by adapting proven negotiation principles and strategies to the challenging new contexts you face—from negotiating across cultural and political differences to trying to reach an agreement over Zoom or during a supply chain crisis.

    • HBS Book

    Negotiation: The Game Has Changed

    By: Max Bazerman

    The world has changed dramatically in just the past few years—and so has the game of negotiation. COVID-19, Zoom, political polarization, the online economy, increasing economic globalization, and greater workplace diversity—all have transformed the who, what, where, and how of negotiation. Today, traditional negotiating tactics, while still...

    • Journal of Financial Economics 165 (March 2025).

    Optimal Illiquidity

    By: John Beshears, James J. Choi, Christopher Clayton, Christopher Harris, David Laibson and Brigitte C. Madrian

    We study the socially optimal level of illiquidity in an economy populated by households with taste shocks and present bias with naive beliefs. The government chooses mandatory contributions to accounts, each with a different pre-retirement withdrawal penalty. Collected penalties are rebated lump sum. When households have homogeneous present bias, β, the social optimum is well approximated by a single account with an early-withdrawal penalty of 1 − β. When households have heterogeneous present bias, the social optimum is well approximated by a two-account system: (i) an account that is completely liquid and (ii) an account that is completely illiquid until retirement.

    • Journal of Financial Economics 165 (March 2025).

    Optimal Illiquidity

    By: John Beshears, James J. Choi, Christopher Clayton, Christopher Harris, David Laibson and Brigitte C. Madrian

    We study the socially optimal level of illiquidity in an economy populated by households with taste shocks and present bias with naive beliefs. The government chooses mandatory contributions to accounts, each with a different pre-retirement withdrawal penalty. Collected penalties are rebated lump sum. When households have homogeneous present bias,...

    • Health Care Initiative

    Expert Patients’ Use of Avoidable Health Care

    By: Amitabh Chandra, Pragya Kakani and Simone Matecna

    We measure whether expert patients – those trained as physicians and nurses – have fewer emergency department visits and the reasons for these differences. Relative to similar patients physicians and nurses had 19.8% and 5.1% fewer ED visits, principally due to fewer avoidable visits. The differences in avoidable visits between physicians and other patients were largest for diagnoses commonly requiring prescriptions, which physicians often self-prescribed. Our results suggest that improving access to prescriptions for acute symptoms, more than improving patient education, may reduce avoidable health care.

    • Health Care Initiative

    Expert Patients’ Use of Avoidable Health Care

    By: Amitabh Chandra, Pragya Kakani and Simone Matecna

    We measure whether expert patients – those trained as physicians and nurses – have fewer emergency department visits and the reasons for these differences. Relative to similar patients physicians and nurses had 19.8% and 5.1% fewer ED visits, principally due to fewer avoidable visits. The differences in avoidable visits between physicians and...

    • Featured Case

    Blue Owl Financing of Ping Identity

    By: Victoria Ivashina and Srimayi Mylavarapu

    In the fall of 2022, Blue Owl Capital's investment committee evaluated a potential investment in the technology sector. The proposed transaction centered on Ping Identity Corporation (“Ping”), a fast-growing identity access management (IAM) software company that was being taken private by Thoma Bravo. Blue Owl was invited to play a leading role in an $875 million debt financing package to support the acquisition. Ping’s strong fundamentals made the opportunity appealing: the company operated in a high-growth market, generated the majority of its revenues from subscription-based services, and demonstrated significant growth in its product offerings and customer base. However, despite these strengths, Ping had yet to generate meaningful cash flow. This presented Blue Owl with a high-risk, high-reward scenario. The critical question for the team was whether Blue Owl should proceed with the transaction despite the risks, and whether the proposed deal structure offered adequate protection against potential downsides.

    • Featured Case

    Blue Owl Financing of Ping Identity

    By: Victoria Ivashina and Srimayi Mylavarapu

    In the fall of 2022, Blue Owl Capital's investment committee evaluated a potential investment in the technology sector. The proposed transaction centered on Ping Identity Corporation (“Ping”), a fast-growing identity access management (IAM) software company that was being taken private by Thoma Bravo. Blue Owl was invited to play a leading role in...

    • Featured Case

    Setting a CEO Agenda: Ole Rosgaard at Greif

    By: Krishna Palepu and Kerry Herman

    Since taking over as CEO of industrial packaging giant Greif, Ole Rosgaard has focused on growing the company and improving the perception of its value by the capital markets. He and his senior leadership team have made inroads to this end, including adjusting the company’s portfolio mix to higher-margin businesses and affirming and strengthening Greif’s strong culture. In partnership with the company’s board chair, Rosgaard worked to make changes to the board composition and board routines to create more board engagement with the company’s strategy and transformation. Have these efforts been enough?

    • Featured Case

    Setting a CEO Agenda: Ole Rosgaard at Greif

    By: Krishna Palepu and Kerry Herman

    Since taking over as CEO of industrial packaging giant Greif, Ole Rosgaard has focused on growing the company and improving the perception of its value by the capital markets. He and his senior leadership team have made inroads to this end, including adjusting the company’s portfolio mix to higher-margin businesses and affirming and strengthening...

    • HBS Working Paper

    Prices and Concentration: A U-shape? Theory and Evidence from Renewables

    By: Michele Fioretti, Junnan He and Jorge Tamayo

    We show that when firms compete via supply functions, transferring high-cost capacity to the largest, most efficient firm—thereby diversifying its production technologies while increasing concentration—can lower prices by prompting the leader to expand output and competitors to aggressively defend market shares. However, large transfers prove anticompetitive, as sizable capacity differences discourage price undercutting. Exploiting renewable intermittencies in Colombia’s electricity market, where firms are technology-diversified, we consistently find a U-shape relationship between prices and concentration. Counterfactually reallocating 30% of competitors’ high-cost capacities to the leader cuts prices 10%, while larger transfers raise them, revealing how capacity and efficiency influence market power.

    • HBS Working Paper

    Prices and Concentration: A U-shape? Theory and Evidence from Renewables

    By: Michele Fioretti, Junnan He and Jorge Tamayo

    We show that when firms compete via supply functions, transferring high-cost capacity to the largest, most efficient firm—thereby diversifying its production technologies while increasing concentration—can lower prices by prompting the leader to expand output and competitors to aggressively defend market shares. However, large transfers prove...

    • Working Paper

    Tracking the Short-Run Price Impact of U.S. Tariffs

    By: Alberto Cavallo, Paola Llamas and Franco Vazquez

    This paper examines the short-run impact of the 2025 U.S. tariffs on consumer prices using a unique integration of high-frequency retail pricing data, product-level country-of-origin information, and detailed tariff classifications. By linking daily prices from major U.S. retailers to Harmonized System (HS) codes and import origins, we construct custom price indices that isolate the direct effects of tariff changes across product categories and trading partners. Our analysis reveals rapid pricing responses, though their magnitude remains modest relative to the announced tariff rates and varies by country of origin. Both imported and domestic goods are affected, suggesting broader pricing and supply chain spillovers. These findings offer timely evidence for policymakers, businesses, and consumers navigating the immediate consequences of trade policy changes.

    • Working Paper

    Tracking the Short-Run Price Impact of U.S. Tariffs

    By: Alberto Cavallo, Paola Llamas and Franco Vazquez

    This paper examines the short-run impact of the 2025 U.S. tariffs on consumer prices using a unique integration of high-frequency retail pricing data, product-level country-of-origin information, and detailed tariff classifications. By linking daily prices from major U.S. retailers to Harmonized System (HS) codes and import origins, we construct...

Initiatives & Projects

Business History

The Business History Initiative seeks to facilitate learning from the past through innovative research and course development, employing global and interdisciplinary perspectives.
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Seminars & Conferences

May 21
  • 21 May 2025

Sarah Miller, Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan

May 22
  • 22 May 2025

Experimentation and Evaluation in Operations Workshop

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Recent Publications

Using Satellites and Phones to Evaluate and Promote Agricultural Technology Adoption: Evidence from Smallholder Farms in India

By: Shawn Cole, Tomoko Harigaya, Grady Killeen and Aparna Krishna
  • September 2025 |
  • Article |
  • Journal of Development Economics
This paper evaluates a low-cost, customized soil nutrient management advisory service in India. As a methodological contribution, we examine whether and in which settings satellite measurements may be effective at estimating both agricultural yields and treatment effects. The intervention improves self-reported fertilizer management practices, though not enough to measurably affect yields. Satellite measurements calibrated using OLS produce more precise point estimates than farmer-reported data, suggesting power gains. However, linear models, common in the literature, likely produce biased estimates. We propose an alternative procedure, using two-stage least squares. In settings without attrition, this approach obtains lower statistical power than self-reported yields; in settings with differential attrition, it may substantially increase power. We include a “cookbook'' and code that should allow other researchers to use remote sensing for yield estimation and program evaluation.
Citation
Related
Cole, Shawn, Tomoko Harigaya, Grady Killeen, and Aparna Krishna. "Using Satellites and Phones to Evaluate and Promote Agricultural Technology Adoption: Evidence from Smallholder Farms in India." Journal of Development Economics 176 (September 2025).

Outcome and Process Frames: Strategic Renewal and Capability Reprioritization at the Federal Bureau of Investigation

By: Ryan Raffaelli, Tiona Zuzul, Ranjay Gulati and Jan Rivkin
  • June 2025 |
  • Article |
  • Strategic Management Journal
[Research Summary]: Framing is critical for leaders who must build support for strategic renewal. While research has concentrated on renewal that replaces one set of capabilities with another, we explore a distinctive challenge: how leaders persuade stakeholders to endorse the reprioritization of resources toward a capability set that must coexist with an existing one. Moreover, while research has focused on how leaders build employee support for renewal, we examine how to persuade those overseeing resource allocation. Our study analyzes Director Robert Mueller's 12-year effort at the FBI—after the 9/11 terrorist attacks—to build up counterterrorism capabilities while maintaining existing law enforcement capabilities. We offer a novel distinction between outcome frames and process frames and discuss how each frame, sequenced properly, is relevant to strategic renewal. [Managerial Summary]: This study examines how leaders can build support for strategic renewal when an organization must develop new capabilities while maintaining existing ones. We analyze how FBI Director Robert Mueller, in the wake of 9/11, used strategic communication—or framing—to persuade members of Congress overseeing the FBI's budget to support the development of new counterterrorism capabilities alongside its traditional law enforcement mandate. We highlight two types of frames: outcome frames (focused on what the organization seeks to achieve) and process frames (emphasizing how the organization operates). Our findings reveal that sequencing these types of frames is essential. By using outcome frames to address immediate concerns and shifting to process frames to resolve longer-term tensions, leaders can build stakeholder support for complex resource reprioritization efforts.
Citation
Related
Raffaelli, Ryan, Tiona Zuzul, Ranjay Gulati, and Jan Rivkin. "Outcome and Process Frames: Strategic Renewal and Capability Reprioritization at the Federal Bureau of Investigation." Strategic Management Journal 46, no. 6 (June 2025): 1325–1362. (Lead article.)

Balancing Digital Safety and Innovation

By: Tomomichi Amano and Tomomi Tanaka
  • May–June 2025 |
  • Article |
  • Harvard Business Review
Designers of consumer-facing digital products have tended to focus on novelty and speed (“move fast and break things”). They’ve spent more effort on innovating than on anticipating how customers—and bad actors—might engage with products. But as digital products become a primary way in which consumers connect with others, pay for things, and store private information, that view needs to change. The authors contend that companies must embed safeguards into the core of their digital products—starting during the earliest parts of the design process. They must also establish a road map for continued improvement and a dialogue with customers. The safety-by-design model can facilitate innovation rather than constrain it by providing a principled approach to product development.
Citation
Purchase
Related
Amano, Tomomichi, and Tomomi Tanaka. "Balancing Digital Safety and Innovation." Harvard Business Review 103, no. 3 (May–June 2025): 120–127.

Ideation with Generative AI—In Consumer Research and Beyond

By: Julian De Freitas, G. Nave and Stefano Puntoni
  • June 2025 |
  • Article |
  • Journal of Consumer Research
The use of large language models (LLMs) in consumer research is rapidly evolving, with applications including synthetic data generation, data analysis, and more. However, their role in creative ideation—a cornerstone of consumer research—remains underexplored. Drawing on the human creativity literature, we propose that ideation with LLMs is facilitated by their productivity and semantic breadth, which are psychologically analogous to the dual pathways of persistence and flexibility in human ideation. Further, we distinguish between the utility of LLMs as key ideators versus humans as key ideators, conceptualized through the LLM ideation roles of Designer and Writer and of Interviewer and Actor. While LLMs excel in generating incremental improvements, their potential for groundbreaking innovation could be unlocked by leveraging their ability to prompt human creativity. This paper advances the theoretical and practical understanding of LLMs in ideation for consumer research, offering numerous practical strategies for integrating generative AI into research while emphasizing human-AI collaboration to achieve radical insights.
Citation
Purchase
Related
De Freitas, Julian, G. Nave, and Stefano Puntoni. "Ideation with Generative AI—In Consumer Research and Beyond." Journal of Consumer Research 51, no. 1 (June 2025): 18–31.

Social Security and Trends in Wealth Inequality

By: Sylvain Catherine, Max Miller and Natasha Sarin
  • Article |
  • Journal of Finance
Recent influential work finds large increases in inequality in the U.S. based on measures of wealth concentration that notably exclude the value of social insurance programs. This paper shows that top wealth shares have not changed much over the last three decades when Social Security is properly accounted for. This is because Social Security wealth increased substantially from $7.2 trillion in 1989 to $40.6 trillion in 2019 and now represents nearly 50% of the wealth of the bottom 90% of the wealth distribution. This finding is robust to potential changes to taxes and benefits in response to system financing concerns.
Citation
Purchase
Related
Catherine, Sylvain, Max Miller, and Natasha Sarin. "Social Security and Trends in Wealth Inequality." Journal of Finance 80, no. 3 (June 2025): 1497–1531.

Bed Bath & Beyond: The New Strategy to Drive Shareholder Value

By: Benjamin C. Esty and Edward A. Meyer
  • May 2025 |
  • Teaching Plan |
  • Faculty Research
Citation
Purchase
Related
Esty, Benjamin C., and Edward A. Meyer. "Bed Bath & Beyond: The New Strategy to Drive Shareholder Value." Harvard Business School Teaching Plan 725-434, May 2025.

Initial Financial Statements at Blank Corporation: Bridging Content and Commerce

By: Jung Koo Kang, Panje Jayden Kim and David Allen
  • May 2025 |
  • Case |
  • Faculty Research
This accounting case is intended to teach students how to compile an income statement, a balance sheet, and a cash flow statement. It focuses on Blank Corporation, an innovative South Korean company that bridged content and commerce by selling products directly through social media posts featuring video content that was designed to go viral. As Blank grows in 2016 and 2017, CEO Nam Dae-Kwang puts the company on a firmer footing, and begins to communicate with investors, by creating standard financial results.
Citation
Educators
Related
Kang, Jung Koo, Panje Jayden Kim, and David Allen. "Initial Financial Statements at Blank Corporation: Bridging Content and Commerce ." Harvard Business School Case 125-021, May 2025.

How to Build a Life: How to Take Charge of Your Family Inheritance

By: Arthur C. Brooks
  • May 15, 2025 |
  • Article |
  • The Atlantic
Citation
Related
Brooks, Arthur C. "How to Build a Life: How to Take Charge of Your Family Inheritance." The Atlantic (May 15, 2025).
More Publications

In The News

    • 13 May 2025
    • Washington Post

    April Inflation Rose Slightly, but at a Slower Annual Pace

    Re: Alberto Cavallo
    • 13 May 2025
    • Cold Call

    Mattel’s Barbie Playbook: Replicating Success Across the Company’s Portfolio

    Re: Elie Ofek
    • 09 May 2025
    • New York Times

    25 Questions to Bring You Closer to Your Mom

    Re: Alison Wood Brooks
    • 09 May 2025
    • Wired

    What Causes Supply Chain Issues?

    Re: Willy Shih
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The Case Method

Introduced by HBS faculty to business education in 1925, the case method is a powerful interactive learning process that puts students in the shoes of a leader faced with a real-world management issue and challenges them to propose and justify a resolution.
Today, HBS remains an authority on teaching by the case method. The School is also the world’s leading case-writing institution, with HBS faculty members contributing hundreds of new cases to the management curriculum a year via the School’s unique case development and writing process.
→Browse HBS Case Collection
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Faculty Positions

Harvard Business School seeks candidates in all fields for full time positions. Candidates with outstanding records in PhD or DBA programs are encouraged to apply.
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