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- December 7, 2022
- Article
Why Decentralized Crypto Platforms Are Weathering the Crash
By: Shai Bernstein and Scott Duke Kominers
In the past year, crypto markets dropped from $2.9 trillion in value to around $800 billion. In the wake of the collapse, crypto lenders and exchanges have been accused of fraud and other wrongdoing. What went wrong? One factor is competition. In theory, competition...
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- July 1, 2022
- Editorial
New Transparency Rule Helps Rein in Health Care Costs
By: Regina E. Herzlinger and Cynthia A. Fisher
Over the last year, consumer prices have grown 60% faster than wages. Employers can help their employees contend with this high inflation by addressing a long-running source: health care costs.
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- 2022
- Working Paper
Banking on Transparency for the Poor: Experimental Evidence from India
By: Erica M. Field, Natalia Rigol, Charity M. Troyer Moore, Rohini Pande and Simone G. Schaner
Do information frictions limit the benefits of financial inclusion drives for the rural poor? We evaluate an experimental intervention among recently banked poor Indian women receiving government cash transfers via direct deposit. Treated women were provided automated...
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- July 2021
- Article
Information Transparency, Multihoming, and Platform Competition: A Natural Experiment in the Daily Deals Market
By: Hui Li and Feng Zhu
Platform competition is shaped by the likelihood of multi-homing (i.e., complementors or consumers adopt more than one platform). To take advantage of multi-homing, platform firms often attempt to motivate their rivals’ high-performing complementors to adopt their own...
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- November–December 2020
- Article
Lifting the Veil: The Benefits of Cost Transparency
By: Bhavya Mohan, Ryan W. Buell and Leslie K. John
Firms do not typically disclose information on their costs to produce a good to consumers. However, we provide evidence of when and why doing so can increase consumers’ purchase interest. Specifically, building on the psychology of disclosure and trust, we posit that...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Reverse Information Sharing: Reducing Costs in Supply Chains with Yield Uncertainty
By: Pavithra Harsha, Ashish Jagmohan, Retsef Levi, Elisabeth Paulson and Georgia Perakis
Supply uncertainty in produce supply chains presents major challenges to retailers. Supply shortages create frequent disruptions in terms of promised delivery times, quantity and quality delivered. To alleviate these challenges, dual sourcing--a strategy in which...
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- March 2020
- Article
Voluntary, Self-Regulatory, and Mandatory Disclosure of Oil and Gas Company Payments to Foreign Governments
By: Paul M. Healy and George Serafeim
Concerns about high rates of government corruption in resource-rich countries have led transparency advocates to urge oil and gas firms to disclose payments to host governments for natural resources. Transparency, they argue, can increase government accountability and...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Cutting the Gordian Knot of Employee Health Care Benefits and Costs: A Corporate Model Built on Employee Choice
By: Regina E. Herzlinger and Barak D. Richman
The U.S. employer-based health insurance tax exclusion created a system of employer-sponsored insurance (ESI) with limited insurance choices and transparency that may lock employed households into health plans that are costlier or different from those they prefer to...
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- 2019
- Working Paper
Thinking Outside the Box (12): The Benefits of Increased Transparency in Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance for the 180 Million Insured
By: Regina E. Herzlinger and Barak D. Richman
Economists have long noted that the tax exclusion of employer-sponsored insurance (ESI) caused workers to purchase health plans that differ in price and other characteristics from those they would otherwise choose for themselves. We explore the short-term and long-term...
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- January 2019
- Case
Data.gov (Abridged)
By: Karim R. Lakhani, Robert D. Austin and Yumi Yi
This case presents the logic and execution underlying the launch of Data.gov, an instantiation of President Obama's initiative for transparency and open government. The process used by Vivek Kundra, the federal CIO, and his team to rapidly develop the website and to...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
The Salary Taboo: Privacy Norms and the Diffusion of Information
By: Zoë B. Cullen and Ricardo Perez-Truglia
The limited diffusion of salary information has implications for labor markets, such as wage discrimination policies and collective bargaining. Access to salary information is believed to be limited and unequal, but there is little direct evidence on the sources of...
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- Fall 2018
- Article
What Problems Will You Solve with Blockchain?: Before Jumping on the Bandwagon, Companies Need to Carefully Consider how Ledger Technologies Fit into their Overall Strategy
By: Teppo Felin and Karim R. Lakhani
Distributed ledger technologies — collectively known as blockchain — have burst onto the business scene, accompanied by a significant amount of hype.They are widely expected to disrupt existing industries and lead to the creation of new types of companies. Some of the...
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- August 28, 2018
- Article
How Intermittent Breaks in Interaction Improve Collective Intelligence
By: Ethan Bernstein, Jesse Shore and David Lazer
People influence each other when they interact to solve problems. Such social influence introduces both benefits (higher average solution quality due to exploitation of existing answers through social learning) and costs (lower maximum solution quality due to a...
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Keywords:
Transparency;
Social Influence;
Collective Intelligence;
Interaction;
Problem Solving;
Collaboration;
Intermittant;
Breaks;
Always On;
Communication Technologies;
Communication;
Design;
Information;
Management;
Leadership;
Organizational Design;
Organizational Structure;
Performance;
Social and Collaborative Networks;
Information Technology
- 2016
- Working Paper
The State of Small Business Lending: Innovation and Technology and the Implications for Regulation
By: Karen Gordon Mills and Brayden McCarthy
Small businesses were among the hardest hit in the Great Recession, accounting for more than 60% of the total jobs lost. The economic crisis was one focused on the banking sector, which is one reason for the disproportionately high impact on America’s small businesses,...
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- September 2015 (Revised February 2023)
- Case
Emdeon's Acquisition of Change Healthcare: Innovating Transparency Solutions for Health Care Consumers
By: Regina E. Herzlinger, Jeet Guram and Aanchal Raj
Case describes acquisition of Change Healthcare, which provides health care cost and quality information, by Emdeon, a health information exchange, and discusses health care transparency. Emdeon is a billion-dollar company that has grown through acquisitions; at its...
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- March 2015
- Case
Statoil: Transparency on Payments to Governments
By: George Serafeim
The Statoil case describes the challenge of increasing transparency, in extractive industries, around host county government payments. The case describes Statoil's reasoning behind voluntarily disclosing host country government payments, and the events that led to this...
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Keywords:
Corruption;
Disclosure;
Disclosure Strategy;
Regulation;
Industry Self-regulation;
Corporate Governance;
Corporate Accountability;
Bribery;
Sustainability;
Corporate Social Responsibility;
Government Legislation;
Cost vs Benefits;
Corporate Disclosure;
Mining;
Mining Industry;
United States
- May 2014
- Case
Health Care Accountability: Examples in Cancer Treatment
By: Regina E. Herzlinger and Natalie Kindred
This case is designed to support a discussion of the importance of outcomes evidence in empowering the public to make better health care decisions, the desired level of transparency and accountability for health care providers, and the issues with current measuring and...
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Keywords:
Accountability;
Health Care;
Cancer;
Cancer Treatment;
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center;
Cancer Treatment Centers Of America;
Vantage Oncology;
Radiology;
Risk Adjustment;
Treatment Outcomes;
Health Care Outcomes;
Prostate Cancer;
Transparency;
Health Care and Treatment;
Risk Management;
Outcome or Result;
Health Industry;
United States
- Article
Corporate Social Responsibility and Access to Finance
By: Beiting Cheng, Ioannis Ioannou and George Serafeim
In this paper, we investigate whether superior performance on corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategies leads to better access to finance. We hypothesize that better access to finance can be attributed to a) reduced agency costs due to enhanced stakeholder...
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- June 2012
- Article
Pricing to Create Shared Value
By: Marco Bertini and John T. Gourville
Many companies are in competition with their customers to extract as much value as possible from every transaction. Pricing is their weapon of choice, and consumers fight back by rooting out and disseminating pricing policies that seem unfair. The problem is that...
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- 2011
- Working Paper
The Cost of Capital for Alternative Investments
By: Jakub W. Jurek and Erik Stafford
This paper studies the cost of capital for alternative investments. We document that the risk profile of the aggregate hedge fund universe can be accurately matched by a simple index put option writing strategy that offers monthly liquidity and complete transparency...
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