Faculty & Research

• HBS Book

Democracy is often described in two opposite ways, as either wonderfully resilient or dangerously fragile. Curiously, both characterizations can be correct, depending on the context. When Democracy Breaks aims to deepen our understanding of what separates democratic resilience from democratic fragility by focusing on the latter. The volume’s collaborators—experts in the history and politics of the societies covered in their chapters—explore eleven episodes of democratic breakdown, ranging from ancient Athens to Weimar Germany to present-day Turkey, Russia, and Venezuela.

• Journal of Marketing Research (JMR) 61, no. 5 (October 2024): 872–890.

Past customer spending in a category is generally a positive signal of future customer spending. We show that there exist “canary categories” for which the reverse is true. Purchases in these categories are a signal that customers are less likely to return to that retailer. We demonstrate the robustness of this finding at two retailers. We propose an explanation for the existence of canary categories and then develop a stylized model that illustrates four contributing factors: the probability a customer finds their favorite brand, customers’ willingness to substitute brands, the cost and attractiveness of visiting other stores, and expectations about future brand availability.

• Health Care Initiative

Today’s innovations rely on scientific discoveries of the past, yet only some corporate R&D builds directly on scientific output. In this paper, we analyze U.S. patents to investigate how firms generate value by building on prior art “closer” to science. We show that patent value is decreasing in distance-to-science. Overall, we find a science premium within firms ranging from 5.0% and 18.3%. If we allow for firm sorting into different modes of R&D based on their relative advantage, i.e., when we do not control for firm fixed effects, we find an even larger science premium: patents building directly on scientific publications are 4.0%–42.3% more valuable than patents in the same technology that are not directly based on science.

• Featured Case

In November 2021, Kerem Kerimoğlu, Coca Cola İçecek (CCI) Group Supply Chain Development Director, is alarmed by a news headline revealing a shortage of Turkish truck drivers impacting Europe. This crisis quickly affects CCI's distribution as third-party logistics companies struggle to provide trucks and drivers. Kerimoğlu urgently contacts Cem Yurdum, the Group's Supply Chain Logistics Manager, to address the escalating problem and devise immediate solutions. The challenge: finding a resolution as drivers continue to leave Türkiye for Europe.

• Featured Case

Headquartered in Singapore, DBS Bank, one of Asia's leading financial services groups, embarked on a multi-year digital transformation under CEO Piyush Gupta in 2014. It was then that DBS also began experimenting with AI to drive value for the business and customers. As the bank scaled the use of AI, it developed an internal P-U-R-E framework for ethical AI governance. In 2022, DBS started experimenting with Generative AI use cases. It had to consider how best to leverage its existing capabilities and adapt its governance frameworks in deploying Gen AI to drive additional value while managing emergent risks.

• HBS Working Paper

The growing participation of women in the labor market has marked a significant societal transformation, coinciding with the rise of gender conservatism and far-right support. We study whether the economic consequences of labor market feminization and gender backlash are causally connected beyond other well-known factors, such as cultural change. Using Swiss panel data and a novel shift-share instrument measuring men’s exposure to changes in the gender composition of the labor force across industries (labor market feminization), we make two contributions. First, labor market feminization negatively affects men’s income and employment prospects, making men more conservative in their gender attitudes. Second, while labor market feminization affects gender attitudes within the private sphere, in a context of low politicization of gender by political elites, it does not influence broader political outcomes like policy preferences or far-right voting.

• Working Paper

This paper, an 18-month ethnographic investigation of international art fairs (IAFs), shows how market platforms can have a coercive effect, inducing sellers (i.e., art galleries) to participate despite ambivalence over their value and anxiety over the process by which participants are selected. The key to this coercive effect, clarified via the contrast between “curatorial” art fairs and low-status “pay-to-play” art fairs, is that IAFs render visible a status hierarchy that is otherwise opaque. As such, galleries who seek to cultivate demand for their artist-clients from premier collectors come to feel they have no choice but to participate lest they lose visibility and thereby raise suspicion that they have lost their capacity to support their artist-clients and by default the collectors.