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- April 2023 (Revised July 2023)
- Case
Fermenting Accounting Problems at Vermont Kombucha Corp.
By: Tatiana Sandino and Marshal Herrmann
Founded in 2005, Vermont Kombucha Corp. (V-Ko) was an early mover in the fledgling U.S. market for kombucha, a drink brewed for its health benefits. Early on, the company captured more than 90% of market share. Under the leadership of its founder and CEO, Joe Williams,...
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- June 18, 2022
- Article
In Defense of Online Anonymity
By: Michael Luca
Lack of transparency on the internet may help fuel toxic dialogue, but it also encourages honest feedback and protects people against discrimination
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- May 2022
- Case
Executive Decision-Making at Zola
By: Amy C. Edmondson and Michael Roberto
In April 2020, Rachel Jarrett, President and COO of wedding technology company Zola, called a meeting with the organization’s key decision-makers. The company had previously launched three business expansions: a vendor marketplace, a wedding apparel division, and a...
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- Article
Early Withdrawal of Pandemic Unemployment Insurance: Effects on Earnings, Employment and Consumption
By: Kyle Coombs, Arindrajit Dube, Calvin Jahnke, Raymond Kluender, Suresh Naidu and Michael Stepner
In June 2021, 22 states ended all supplemental pandemic unemployment insurance (UI) benefits, eliminating benefits entirely for over 2 million workers and reducing benefits by $300 per week for over 1 million workers. Using anonymous bank transaction data and a...
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- March 2022 (Revised August 2022)
- Case
LooksRare: The Decentralized, Tokenized, NFT Marketplace
By: Scott Duke Kominers, Shai Bernstein and George Gonzalez
LooksRare launched a decentralized and anonymous organization to compete against NFT marketplace leader OpenSea. By launching its own cryptocurrency, LooksRare attempted to lure users with a digital rewards program. The nature of the organization and its business...
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- 2022
- Working Paper
E-commerce During COVID: Stylized Facts from 47 Economies
By: Joel Alcedo, Alberto Cavallo, Bricklin Dwyer, Prachi Mishra and Antonio Spilimbergo
We study e-commerce across 47 economies and 26 industries during the COVID-19 pandemic using aggregated and anonymized transaction-level data from Mastercard, scaled to represent total consumer spending. The share of online transactions in total consumption increased...
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- December 1, 2021
- Article
Do You Know How Your Teams Get Work Done?
By: Rohan Narayana Murty, Rajath B. Das, Scott Duke Kominers, Arjun Narayan, Suraj Srinivasan, Tarun Khanna and Kartik Hosanagar
In a research study at four Fortune 500 companies, when managers were asked about their teams’ work, on average they either did not know or could not remember 60% of the work their teams do. This is a major problem because it can lead to unrealistic digital...
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- October 2021
- Case
Financial Reporting at Mattel
By: Aiyesha Dey, Trung Nguyen, Marshal Herrmann and Julia Kelley
In September 2020, Diana Ferguson was nearing her first Audit Committee meeting as the newly appointed Audit Committee chair of Mattel, Inc. Mattel was just recovering from an accounting scandal which had revealed the company’s poor internal controls and weak board...
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Keywords:
Accounting;
Accounting Audits;
Financial Reporting;
Financial Statements;
Governance;
Corporate Accountability;
Corporate Disclosure;
Corporate Governance;
Governance Compliance;
Governance Controls;
Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms;
Governing and Advisory Boards;
Lawsuits and Litigation;
Business and Shareholder Relations;
Consumer Products Industry;
Entertainment and Recreation Industry;
Financial Services Industry;
North and Central America;
United States;
California
- 2021
- Working Paper
Invisible Primes: Fintech Lending with Alternative Data
By: Marco Di Maggio, Dimuthu Ratnadiwakara and Don Carmichael
We exploit anonymized administrative data provided by a major fintech platform to investigate whether using alternative data to assess borrowers’ creditworthiness results in broader credit access. Comparing actual outcomes of the fintech platform’s model to...
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- October 2021
- Article
Judgment Aggregation in Creative Production: Evidence from the Movie Industry
By: Hong Luo, Jeffrey T. Macher and Michael Wahlen
We study a novel, low-cost approach to aggregating judgment from a large number of industry experts on ideas that they encounter in their normal course of business. Our context is the movie industry, in which customer appeal is difficult to predict and investment costs...
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- May–June 2021
- Article
How to Close the Gender Gap
By: Colleen Ammerman and Boris Groysberg
Most companies say they’re committed to advancing women into leadership roles. What they may fail to recognize, though, is that systemic barriers are holding women back. As a result, women remain disadvantaged at every stage of their employment and underrepresented in...
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- Article
Dynamic Silos: Modularity in Intra-organizational Communication Networks during the Covid-19 Pandemic
By: Jonathan Larson, Tiona Zuzul, Emily Cox Pahnke, Neha Parikh Shah, Patrick Bourke, Nicholas Caurvina, Fereshteh Amini, Youngser Park, Joshua Vogelstein, Jeffrey Weston, Christopher White and Carey E. Priebe
Workplace communications around the world were drastically altered by Covid-19, work-from-home orders, and the rise of remote work. We analyze aggregated, anonymized metadata from over 360 billion emails within over 4000 organizations worldwide to examine changes in...
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- August 2020
- Supplement
Luckin Coffee (B): Revelations of Fraud
By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Karen Elterman
This case describes revelations of fraud at Luckin Coffee, beginning with an anonymous report in January 2020 and continuing with the company’s admission in April 2020 that it had inflated its revenues by 2.2 billion RMB ($310 million), almost half its reported...
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- Article
Signaling When Nobody Is Watching: A Reputation Heuristics Account of Outrage and Punishment in One-shot Anonymous Interactions
By: Jillian J. Jordan and David G. Rand
Moralistic punishment can confer reputation benefits by signaling trustworthiness to observers. However, why do people punish even when nobody is watching? We argue that people often rely on the heuristic that reputation is typically at stake, such that reputation...
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Keywords:
Signaling;
Morality;
Trustworthiness;
Anger;
Third-party Punishment;
Moral Sensibility;
Behavior;
Trust;
Reputation
- 2019
- Working Paper
Judgment Aggregation in Creative Production: Evidence from the Movie Industry
By: Hong Luo, Jeffrey T. Macher and Michael Wahlen
This paper studies a novel, light-touch approach to aggregate judgment from a large number of industry experts on ideas that they encounter in their normal course of business. Our context is the movie industry, in which customer appeal is difficult to predict and...
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- Article
Maimonides' Ladder: States of Mutual Knowledge and the Perception of Charitability
By: Julian De Freitas, Peter DiScioli, Kyle A. Thomas and Steven Pinker
Why do people esteem anonymous charitable giving? We connect normative theories of charitability
(captured in Maimonides’ Ladder of Charity) with evolutionary theories of partner choice to test predictions on how attributions of charitability are affected by states of...
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- 2018
- Article
Insight into Gender Differences in STEM: Evidence from Peer Reviews in an Engineering Class
By: Jacqueline N. Lane, Bruce Ankenman and Seyed Iravani
As the service industry moves toward self-service, peer feedback serves a critical role in this shift for educational services. Peer feedback is a process by which students provide feedback to each other. One of its major benefits is that it enables students to become...
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Keywords:
Peer Review;
Peer Feedback;
STEM Education;
Anonymity;
Education;
Gender;
Education Industry
- November 2017 (Revised August 2018)
- Case
Fair Value Accounting at Noble Group (A)
By: Siko Sikochi, Suraj Srinivasan and Quinn Pitcher
Noble Group was a large commodities trader based in Hong Kong and listed on the Singapore Stock Exchange. In 2012, Noble shifted its business strategy towards an asset-light model. Under this model, Noble did not own mines or farms to produce commodities but built...
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- 2017
- Article
Refugees Misdirected: How Information, Misinformation and Rumors Shape Refugees’ Access to Fundamental Rights
By: Melissa Carlson, Laura Jakli and Katerina Linos
The global refugee regime represents one of the few generous commitments governments offer to outsiders. Indeed, few persons fleeing armed conflict actually claim international protection upon first arriving in Europe, even though the benefits of legal protection are...
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- November, 2016
- Article
Fixing Discrimination in Online Marketplaces
By: Ray Fisman and Michael Luca
Online marketplaces such as eBay, Uber, and Airbnb have the potential to reduce racial, gender, and other forms of bias that affect the off-line world. And in the early days of Internet commerce, the relative anonymity of transactions did make it harder for...
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