Faculty & Research

• HBS Book

Business transactions take widely varying forms—from multibillion-dollar corporate mergers to patent licenses to the signing of an all-star quarterback. Yet every deal shares the same goal, or at least should: to maximize the joint value created and to distribute that value among the parties. Building on decades of experience teaching and advising on business deals, Michael Klausner and Guhan Subramanian show how to accomplish this goal through rigorous attention to designing incentives, conveying information, and specifying parties’ rights and obligations.

• Academy of Management Journal 67, no. 2 (April 2024): 437-467

Hybrid organizations must sustainably attend to multiple goals embedded in different institutional spheres. Past research has highlighted the value for hybrids in recruiting board members representing different logics to avoid attentional drifts; yet, diverse boards have also been prone to conflicts that occasion attentional lapses, thereby jeopardizing these organizations’ pursuit of multiple goals. We draw on a longitudinal comparative case study of five work integration social enterprises with institutionally diverse boards to uncover an integrative model of hybrid governance consisting of a protective board structure and relational leadership processes that, together, prevent distracting cognitive and emotional conflicts and foster attentional engagement of both the board and senior managers to multiple goals.

• Managing the Future of Work

Immigrants contribute disproportionately to entrepreneurship in many countries, accounting for a quarter of new employer businesses in the US. We review recent research on the measurement of immigrant entrepreneurship, the traits of immigrant founders, their economic impact, and policy levers. We provide updated statistics on the share of US entrepreneurs who are immigrants. We utilize the Annual Business Survey to quantify the greater rates of patenting and innovation in immigrant-founded firms. This higher propensity towards innovation is only partly explained by differences in education levels and fields of study. We conclude with avenues for future research.

• Featured Case

Secretariat, if anyone remembers, won the triple crown at the Belmont Race Track on Long Island, located at the nexus of La Guardia, JFK Airports, the Long Island Railroad and multiple major highways. Belmont Race Track is now being rebuilt along with an adjacent UBS hockey arena for the New York Islanders which can be transmogrified into a spectacular concert venue with great acoustics and amazing design for the likes of Harry Styles and Bruce Springsteen who have already played there to packed audiences. Adjacent to the new arena is the new Belmont Park Village filled with luxury brands such as Prada, Zegna, Polo and the like. Do people who watch and bet on horses, attend hockey games and rock concerts, shop the luxury brands? Is this the way entertainment and retail will have to work together now in the age of ZOOM and e-commerce shopping?

• Featured Case

In fall 2023, the Food Program of Met Council—America’s largest Jewish charity dedicated to fighting poverty—completed the rollout of the newest version of its digital pantry platform to twelve food pantries in the Met Council food pantry network. The digital initiative coincided with a shift from food pantries’ traditional “pre-packed” model—in which pantry staff and volunteers pre-packed standardized bags of foods and handed them out to long lines of waiting clients (the standard model in the US)—to a “client choice” model, where clients could choose their own food items. Over half of the pantries in Met Council’s network were undergoing the transition to client choice. This case discusses the evolution of the digital pantry; specifically, the pros and cons of each pantry model from an operational efficiency perspective, how operational levers can influence consumers’ purchasing decisions, fairness in resource allocation problems, and “push” versus “pull” inventory distribution models.

• HBS Working Paper

We examine the role of investors on the media coverage of their private firm investments. Specifically, we survey VC investors and find that 78% of the respondents take active steps to increase their portfolio companies’ media coverage. The survey results also demonstrate that increased media coverage supports the companies with better recognition and branding and provides benefits to diverse stakeholders. We extend the survey results using empirical tests. Both active VC monitoring and VC reputation are related to stronger effects. Overall, our findings emphasize the role of investors in media coverage decisions of private firms.

• HBS Working Paper

Much of the prior work on experimentation rests upon the assumption that entrepreneurs and managers use—or should optimally adopt—a "scientific approach" to test possible decisions before making them. This paper offers an alternative view of experimental strategy, introducing the possibility that at least some business experiments privilege persuasion over generating unbiased information. In this view, actors may craft experiments designed to gain support for their ideas, even if doing so reduces the informativeness of the experiment. However, decision-makers are not naïve—they are aware that the results they are reviewing may be the product of a curated information environment. Using a formal model, this paper shows that under a wide range of conditions, actors prefer to enact a less than fully informative experiment designed to persuade—even when a fully informative experiment is feasible at the same cost.