Ariel D. Stern

Poronui Associate Professor of Business Administration

Ariel Dora Stern is an Associate Professor of Business Administration in the Technology and Operations Management Unit at Harvard Business School. She co-teaches Transforming Health Care Delivery in the MBA elective curriculum.

Ariel's research focuses on the management of innovation in health care, with a focus on the medical device and pharmaceutical industries. Her projects seek to understand the drivers of innovation among firms and the determinants of how medical technologies are adopted and used in practice. Ariel is particularly interested in the intersection of the regulation, firm strategy, and economics of health care. She also researches the digital transformation of medical technology and health care delivery, investigating the policy and managerial questions raised by the growth of “digital health.” Her research has been cited by Bloomberg, The New York Times, and National Public Radio.

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Professor Stern received her Ph.D. in Public Policy from Harvard, where she was a National Bureau of Economic Research Predoctoral Fellow in the Economics of Health and Aging and was honored with the Harvard Kennedy School Dean’s Award for excellence in student teaching. She holds an undergraduate degree in economics from Dartmouth College, where she was a Presidential Scholar and a two-time U.S. national collegiate figure skating champion. Before beginning her academic career, she worked as an economist on Wall Street and at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW), the German Development Bank (KfW), and LeapFrog Investments, an impact investment fund.

Ariel is currently a faculty affiliate of the Harvard Business School Health Care Initiative and Digital Initiative and a Research Associate at Ariadne Labs, a joint center between the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, which focuses on scaling health care delivery innovation.

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Recalls, Innovation, and Competitor Response: Evidence from Medical Device Firms

Innovation and new product development are the lifeblood of firms in R&D-intensive industries, yet malfunctioning products can cause immense damage. Product failures thus create managerial challenges and opportunities for focal firms and their competitors. Focal firm failures often result in sales decreases and cost increases associated with remedial public relations and manufacturing activities. Competitor firm failures, however, can create market opportunities and elicit strategic responses by focal firms. We develop theory and provide empirical evidence of how innovative activity changes in response to product recalls in the U.S. medical device industry. Focal firm recalls slow incremental innovation while competitor firm recalls accelerate incremental and major innovation. Recall prevention and remediation efforts are thus more important than previously suggested, due to significant competitor responses.

Why Apps for Managing Chronic Disease Haven’t Been Widely Used, and How to Fix It

While chronic disease management (CDM) apps have had some initial success, they have not yet lived up to their potential. This shortcoming is not due to the capability of the technologies, which are quite impressive; the problem is the incentives and institutions of the delivery system into which the technologies are being introduced. To succeed under these circumstances, developers of CDM apps must first consider who the primary (that is, paying) customers will be for their technologies. They must then develop an approach for ensuring that a customer’s willingness to adopt the app translates into the sustained use of that app. Only with sustained use will CDM apps have a chance of improving patient outcomes and reducing costs for the treatment of the conditions they target.

How Economics Can Shape Precision Medicines

Many public and private efforts in coming years will focus on research in precision medicine, developing biomarkers to indicate which patients are likely to benefit from a certain treatment so that others can be spared the cost—financial and physical—of being treated with unproductive therapies and therapeutic signals can be more easily uncovered. However, such research initiatives alone will not deliver new medicines to patients in the absence of strong incentives to bring new products to market. We examine the unique economics of precision medicines and associated biomarkers, with an emphasis on the factors affecting their development, pricing, and access.

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Ariel D. Stern