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- HBS Book
Deeply Responsible Business: A Global History of Values-Driven Leadership
By: Geoffrey JonesCorporate social responsibility has entered the mainstream, but what does it take to run a successful purpose-driven business? This book examines leaders who put values alongside profits to showcase the challenges and upside of deeply responsible business. Should business leaders play a role in solving society’s problems? For decades, CEOs have been told that their only responsibility is to the bottom line. But consensus is growing that companies―and their leaders―must engage with their social, political, and environmental contexts. Jones distinguishes deep responsibility, which can deliver radical social and ecological responses, from corporate social responsibility, which is often little more than window dressing.

- HBS Book
Deeply Responsible Business: A Global History of Values-Driven Leadership
By: Geoffrey JonesCorporate social responsibility has entered the mainstream, but what does it take to run a successful purpose-driven business? This book examines leaders who put values alongside profits to showcase the challenges and upside of deeply responsible business. Should business leaders play a role in solving society’s problems? For decades, CEOs have...
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- Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 105 (March 2023).
Giving-by-proxy Triggers Subsequent Charitable Behavior
By: Samantha Kassirer, Jillian J. Jordan and Maryam KouchakiHow can we foster habits of charitable giving? Here, we investigate the potential power of giving-by-proxy experiences, drawing inspiration from a growing trend in marketing and corporate social responsibility contexts in which organizations make charitable donations on behalf of employees or consumers. We create laboratory models of giving-by-proxy in workplace (Studies 1a-3) and consumer (Study 4) contexts. We then investigate how giving-by-proxy experiences (with varying amounts of autonomy) influence subsequent charitable behavior.
- Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 105 (March 2023).
Giving-by-proxy Triggers Subsequent Charitable Behavior
By: Samantha Kassirer, Jillian J. Jordan and Maryam KouchakiHow can we foster habits of charitable giving? Here, we investigate the potential power of giving-by-proxy experiences, drawing inspiration from a growing trend in marketing and corporate social responsibility contexts in which organizations make charitable donations on behalf of employees or consumers. We create laboratory models of...
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- Business & Environment Initiative
Driving Decarbonization at BMW
By: Shirley Lu, George Serafeim and Michael W. ToffelThe case describes BMW’s electrification and decarbonization strategy, and how the company measured carbon emissions throughout the life cycle of its vehicles and used tools like carbon abatement cost curves to evaluate decarbonization opportunities. In mid-2022, automakers, consumers, regulators, and investors were focusing on the transition from internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles to electric vehicles (EV). While this would reduce tail-pipe emissions, the production of EVs—and especially their batteries—increased emissions in the supply chain. Under CEO Oliver Zipse, BMW was focusing on life cycle emissions and was pursuing a flexible powertrain strategy by offering vehicles with several powertrain options: gasoline and diesel-fueled ICE, plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV), and battery electric vehicles (BEV).
- Business & Environment Initiative
Driving Decarbonization at BMW
By: Shirley Lu, George Serafeim and Michael W. ToffelThe case describes BMW’s electrification and decarbonization strategy, and how the company measured carbon emissions throughout the life cycle of its vehicles and used tools like carbon abatement cost curves to evaluate decarbonization opportunities. In mid-2022, automakers, consumers, regulators, and investors were focusing on the transition from...
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- Featured Case
Roblox: Virtual Commerce in the Metaverse
By: Ayelet Israeli and Nicole Tempest KellerIn 2022, Roblox had 58.8 million daily active users, including over half of all children and teens under the age of 16 in the United States. Roblox, a free-to-use “co-experience platform,” allowed users to come together in immersive 3D experiences to socialize, work, play, learn, and purchase virtual and real goods. Roblox was grappling with how to maintain revenue growth and generate profits, considering two key decisions. First, how should Roblox expand its partnerships with brands, and should Roblox allow brands to offer immersive advertising within experiences? Second, should Roblox change its economic model which was free to publish, and adopt a “scarcity economy” whereby Roblox would allow creators to only publish items in limited quantities and charge an upfront fee for item creation, similar to a manufacturing fee?
- Featured Case
Roblox: Virtual Commerce in the Metaverse
By: Ayelet Israeli and Nicole Tempest KellerIn 2022, Roblox had 58.8 million daily active users, including over half of all children and teens under the age of 16 in the United States. Roblox, a free-to-use “co-experience platform,” allowed users to come together in immersive 3D experiences to socialize, work, play, learn, and purchase virtual and real goods. Roblox was grappling with how...
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- Featured Case
Graphic Packaging: Project Cowboy (A)
By: Benjamin C. Esty and E. Scott MayfieldIn July 2019, Graphic Packaging CEO Michael Doss was proposing a $600 million investment in a new machine to produce coated recycled board (CRB), a type of paper packaging used for consumer products (cups, cereal boxes, beverage boxes, etc.) that utilized recycled paper as an input. Graphic Packaging was an integrated producer of paperboard packaging for consumer products and the market leader in CRB. For the past 30 years, plastic packaging had been replacing paper packaging because of cost and ease of manufacturing. Yet a growing interest in environmental sustainability among paperboard manufacturers, consumer goods companies (immediate customers), and consumers (end users) was creating the possibility of a transition from plastics back to paper-based products.
- Featured Case
Graphic Packaging: Project Cowboy (A)
By: Benjamin C. Esty and E. Scott MayfieldIn July 2019, Graphic Packaging CEO Michael Doss was proposing a $600 million investment in a new machine to produce coated recycled board (CRB), a type of paper packaging used for consumer products (cups, cereal boxes, beverage boxes, etc.) that utilized recycled paper as an input. Graphic Packaging was an integrated producer of paperboard...
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- HBS Working Paper
Organizational Responses to Product Cycles
By: Achyuta Adhvaryu, Vittorio Bassi, Anant Nyshadham, Jorge Tamayo and Nicolas TorresProduct cycles entail the mass production of new—and often increasingly complex—products on a regular basis. How do firms manage these changes? We use granular daily data from a leading automobile manufacturer to study the organizational impacts of introducing new models to the auto assembly line. We show that the numbers of vehicles and parts do not change after a new model is introduced; the main change is a large, discontinuous increase in new parts. The product cycle thus necessitates dealing with new complex problems: we accordingly show that defects increase substantially after the production change, then decrease to prior levels over about three weeks.
- HBS Working Paper
Organizational Responses to Product Cycles
By: Achyuta Adhvaryu, Vittorio Bassi, Anant Nyshadham, Jorge Tamayo and Nicolas TorresProduct cycles entail the mass production of new—and often increasingly complex—products on a regular basis. How do firms manage these changes? We use granular daily data from a leading automobile manufacturer to study the organizational impacts of introducing new models to the auto assembly line. We show that the numbers of vehicles and parts do...
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- HBS Working Paper
Complexity and Time
By: Benjamin Enke, Thomas Graeber and Ryan OpreaWe provide experimental evidence that core intertemporal choice anomalies -- including extreme short-run impatience, structural estimates of present bias, hyperbolicity and transitivity violations -- are driven by complexity rather than time or risk preferences. First, all anomalies also arise in structurally similar atemporal decision problems involving valuation of iteratively discounted (but immediately paid) rewards. These computational errors are strongly predictive of intertemporal decisions. Second, intertemporal choice anomalies are highly correlated with indices of complexity responses including cognitive uncertainty and choice inconsistency. We show that model misspecification resulting from ignoring behavioral responses to complexity severely inflates structural estimates of present bias.
- HBS Working Paper
Complexity and Time
By: Benjamin Enke, Thomas Graeber and Ryan OpreaWe provide experimental evidence that core intertemporal choice anomalies -- including extreme short-run impatience, structural estimates of present bias, hyperbolicity and transitivity violations -- are driven by complexity rather than time or risk preferences. First, all anomalies also arise in structurally similar atemporal decision problems...
Initiatives & Projects
U.S. Competitiveness
Seminars & Conferences
Recent Publications
The High Cost of Neglecting Low-Wage Workers
- May–June 2023 |
- Article |
- Harvard Business Review
Should Your Start-up Be For-profit or Nonprofit?: A Guide for Social Entrepreneurs
- May–June 2023 |
- Article |
- Harvard Business Review
Analytics for Marketers: When to Rely on Algorithms and When to Trust Your Gut
- May–June 2023 |
- Article |
- Harvard Business Review
The High Cost of Neglecting Low-Wage Workers: Six Mistakes That Companies Make—and How They Can Do Better
- May–June 2023 |
- Article |
- Harvard Business Review
Why Is Dollar Debt Cheaper? Evidence from Peru
- June 2023 |
- Article |
- Journal of Financial Economics
Regulatory Submission Characteristics and Recalls of Medical Devices Receiving 510(k) Clearance—Reply
- Response |
- JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association
Setting Gendered Expectations? Recruiter Outreach Bias in Online Tech Training Programs
- 2023 |
- Working Paper |
- Faculty Research
El Dorado Lost: Local Elites, Real Estate and the Education Business in China
- 2023 |
- Working Paper |
- Faculty Research