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Skip to Main Content Cold Call A podcast featuring faculty discussing cases they've written and the lessons they impart. Subscribe on iTunes 29 Sep...
- November 2020 (Revised April 2021)
- Case
Roll-Ups and Surprise Billing: Collisions at the Intersection of Private Equity and Patient Care
By: Trevor Fetter and Kira Seiger
This case describes the increasing investment by private equity (PE) firms in patient care and other healthcare services. The case focuses on investments in physician staffing firms and roll-up strategy investments in physician practice management (PPM). Included in...
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Keywords:
Business Ventures;
Acquisition;
Mergers and Acquisitions;
Business Model;
Change;
Disruption;
Fluctuation;
Trends;
Customers;
Customer Value and Value Chain;
Ethics;
Fairness;
Finance;
Equity;
Insurance;
Private Equity;
Geography;
Geographic Scope;
Health;
Health Care and Treatment;
Markets;
Demand and Consumers;
Supply and Industry;
Industry Structures;
Ownership;
Ownership Type;
Private Ownership;
Relationships;
Agency Theory;
Business and Community Relations;
Business and Shareholder Relations;
Business and Stakeholder Relations;
Networks;
Strategy;
Competition;
Consolidation;
Expansion;
Integration;
Horizontal Integration;
Vertical Integration;
Value;
Value Creation;
Health Industry;
Insurance Industry;
United States
- 2020
- Working Paper
Collusion in Brokered Markets
By: John William Hatfield, Scott Duke Kominers and Richard Lowery
The U.S. residential real estate agency market presents a puzzle for economic theory: commissions on real estate transactions have remained high for decades even though entry is frequent and costs are low. We model the real estate agency market, and other brokered...
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- 2018
- Working Paper
Design Rules, Volume 2: How Technology Shapes Organizations: Chapter 5 Complementarity
The purpose of this chapter is to relate the theory of task networks and technology set forth in previous chapters to theories of firm boundaries from economics and management. Complementary goods have more value when used together than separately. Complementarity may...
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Keywords:
Complementarity
- March 2018
- Teaching Note
ISRO: Explore Space or Exploit CubeSats?
ISRO, India’s space agency, established to address domestic challenges with space technology, is one of the six largest space agencies in the world. Through its 59 missions, ISRO has launched numerous satellites for communication, disaster management, navigation,...
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- June 2017
- Case
Sales Misconduct at Wells Fargo Community Bank
Set in early 2017, this case examines widespread sales misconduct at Wells Fargo Community Bank. Wells Fargo's governance and controls are described in the lead up to the September 2016 announcement that Wells Fargo had settled with regulators for $185 million in...
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Keywords:
Corporate Governance;
Governance Controls;
Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms;
Governing and Advisory Boards;
Executive Compensation;
Lawsuits and Litigation;
Crisis Management;
Mission and Purpose;
Organizational Design;
Business and Community Relations;
Business and Government Relations;
Crime and Corruption;
Business Organization;
Business Model;
Ethics;
Corporate Accountability;
Governance Compliance;
Policy;
Compensation and Benefits;
Resignation and Termination;
Laws and Statutes;
Legal Liability;
Business or Company Management;
Risk Management;
Business Processes;
Organizational Culture;
Organizational Structure;
Failure;
Agency Theory;
Business and Shareholder Relations;
Business and Stakeholder Relations;
Risk and Uncertainty;
Salesforce Management;
Public Opinion;
Banking Industry;
North and Central America
- June 2017
- Article
The Social Trajectory of a Finance Professor and the Common Sense of Capital
By: Marion Fourcade and Rakesh Khurana
This paper traces the career of Michael Jensen, a Chicago finance PhD turned Harvard Business School professor to reveal the intellectual and social conditions that enabled the emergence and institutionalization of what we call the “neoliberal common sense of capital,”...
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- Article
The Error at the Heart of Corporate Leadership
By: Joseph L. Bower and Lynn S. Paine
Agency theory, a new model of governance promulgated by academic economists in the 1970s, is behind the idea that corporate managers should make shareholder value their primary concern and that boards should ensure they do. The theory regards shareholders as owners of...
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- 2017
- Chapter
Corporate Moral Agency, Positive Duties, and Purpose
By: Nien-hê Hsieh
A long-standing question in business ethics is whether business enterprises are themselves moral agents with distinct moral responsibilities. To date, the debate about corporate moral agency has focused on responsibility for past wrongdoing that involves violating...
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- March 2017
- Article
Institutional Ownership and Corporate Tax Avoidance: New Evidence
By: Mozaffar N. Khan, Suraj Srinivasan and Liang Tan
We provide new evidence on the agency theory of corporate tax avoidance (Slemrod, 2004; Crocker and Slemrod, 2005; Chen and Chu, 2005) by showing that increases in institutional ownership are associated with increases in tax avoidance. Using the Russell index...
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- July–August 2016
- Article
Minimum Advertised Pricing: Patterns of Violation in Competitive Retail Markets
By: Ayelet Israeli, Eric Anderson and Anne Coughlan
Manufacturers in many industries frequently use vertical price policies, such as minimum advertised price (MAP), to influence prices set by downstream retailers. Although manufacturers expect retail partners to comply with MAP policies, violations of MAP are common in...
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- Article
Landing the First Job: The Value of Intermediaries in Online Hiring
By: Christopher Stanton and Catherine Thomas
Online markets for remote labor services allow workers and firms to contract with each other directly. Despite this, intermediaries—called outsourcing agencies—have emerged in these markets. This paper shows that agencies signal to employers that inexperienced workers...
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- December 2015
- Article
Entrepreneurial Imagination and a Demand and Supply-side Perspective on the MNE and Cross-border Organization
By: Geoffrey Jones and Christos Pitelis
This article explores the role of entrepreneurial imagination on the international expansion of multinational enterprises. The focus is on supply- and demand-side factors that help explicate cross-border expansion. The article explores how appropriability-informed and...
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- 2019
- Working Paper
Self-Interest: The Economist's Straitjacket
By: Robert Simons
This paper examines contemporary economic theories that focus on the design and management of business organizations. In the first part of the paper, a taxonomy is presented that describes the different types of economists interested in this subject—market economists,...
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Keywords:
Self-interest;
Economist;
Moral Philosophers;
Regulation;
Capture;
Organization Design;
Economy Theory;
Organization Theory;
Management Theory;
Commitment;
Controls;
Governance;
Customers;
Conflict of Interests;
Business or Company Management;
Competition;
Organizational Design;
Business Education;
Agency Theory;
Economics;
Theory;
Boundaries
- October 2015
- Article
The Multinational Firm and Geopolitics: Europe, Russian Energy, and Power
By: Rawi Abdelal
Multinational firms unavoidably exert influence over politics through power that is generated by both structure and process. While both political economy and management scholars address international firms, neither field has an adequate understanding of the reciprocal...
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- January 2015
- Article
Are Incentives Without Expertise Sufficient? Evidence from Fortune 500 Firms
By: Emilie R. Feldman and Cynthia A. Montgomery
Agency theory predicts that incentives will align agents' interests with those of principals. However, the resource-based view suggests that to be effective, the incentive to deliver must be paired with the ability to deliver. Using Fortune 500 boards as an...
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- Article
Toward Resource Independence—Why State-Owned Entities Become Multinationals: An Empirical Study of India's Public R&D Laboratories
By: Prithwiraj Choudhury and Tarun Khanna
In this paper, we build on the standard resource dependence theory and its departure suggested by Vernon to offer a novel explanation for why state-owned entities (SOEs) might seek a global footprint and global cash flows: to achieve resource independence from...
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- 2014
- Chapter
Bringing Agency Back Into Network Research: Constrained Agency and Network Action
By: Ranjay Gulati and Sameer Srivastava
We propose a framework of constrained agency grounded in the actors' resources and motivations within their structurally constrained context. Structural positions influence the resources available to actors and color the motivations that shape their actions. Resources...
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- 2014
- Chapter
Corporate Social Responsibility and Multinational Corporations
By: Nien-he Hsieh and Florian Wettstein
A central question that arises from the perspective of global ethics is what standards ought to apply to the activities of multinational corporations (MNCs). This chapter surveys the contemporary theoretical literature on this question. The first section provides...
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- 2013
- Article
Multinational Corporations, Global Justice and Corporate Responsibility: A Question of Purpose
By: Nien-he Hsieh
Do multinational corporations (MNCs) have a responsibility to address unjust conditions—not simply by refraining from contributing to injustice, but also by actively working to bring about a just state of affairs? This paper examines whether this question can be...
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- September–October 2013
- Article
The Role of Organizational Scope and Governance in Strengthening Private Monitoring
By: Lamar Pierce and Michael W. Toffel
Governments and other organizations often outsource activities to achieve cost savings from market competition. Yet such benefits are often accompanied by poor quality resulting from moral hazard, which can be particularly onerous when outsourcing the monitoring and...
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Keywords:
Crime and Corruption;
Decision Choices and Conditions;
Corporate Accountability;
Governance Compliance;
Policy;
Management Practices and Processes;
Demand and Consumers;
Market Design;
Market Entry and Exit;
Market Transactions;
Service Delivery;
Service Operations;
Business Processes;
Organizational Structure;
Performance Effectiveness;
Performance Expectations;
Practice;
Transportation;
Transportation Industry;
Service Industry;
United States;
New York (state, US)