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Publications
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- 2023
- Working Paper
Design-Based Confidence Sequences: A General Approach to Risk Mitigation in Online Experimentation
By: Dae Woong Ham, Michael Lindon, Martin Tingley and Iavor I Bojinov
Randomized experiments have become the standard method for companies to evaluate the performance of new products or services. In addition to augmenting managers’ decision-making, experimentation mitigates risk by limiting the proportion of customers exposed to...
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- May 3, 2023
- Article
What Top-Performing Sales Managers Do Differently
By: Mike Schultz and Frank V. Cespedes
Sales managers hire reps, influence their training, provide (we hope) feedback and so reinforce good selling behaviors, and are key in the execution of growth and change initiatives. In a study of more than 1,000 sales managers and sellers across industries, we found...
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- 2023
- Working Paper
The Hidden Cost of Coordination: Evidence from Last-Mile Delivery Services
By: Natalie Epstein, Santiago Gallino and Antonio Moreno
Problem definition: Communication and customer interaction design have been used as elements to improve customer satisfaction and future purchasing behavior, but little is known about how they can be used as levers to improve operational...
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- April 12, 2023
- Article
Using AI to Adjust Your Marketing and Sales in a Volatile World
By: Das Narayandas and Arijit Sengupta
Why are some firms better and faster than others at adapting their use of customer data to respond to changing or uncertain marketing conditions? A common thread across faster-acting firms is the use of AI models to predict outcomes at various stages of the customer...
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- 2023
- Working Paper
Using GPT for Market Research
By: James Brand, Ayelet Israeli and Donald Ngwe
Large language models (LLMs) have quickly become popular as labor-augmenting tools for programming, writing, and many other processes that benefit from quick text generation. In this paper we explore the uses and benefits of LLMs for researchers and practitioners who...
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- April 3, 2023
- Article
Getting a Clearer View of Your Company’s Carbon Footprint
By: Robert S. Kaplan, Karthik Ramanna and Stefan Reichelstein
E-liability accounting is a new technique that will help customers factor in a product’s environmental footprint into their purchasing decisions and will help create a competition dynamic that leads to reduced carbon outputs. This article describes two pilot studies—by...
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- April 2023
- Article
Inattentive Inference
By: Thomas Graeber
This paper studies how people infer a state of the world from information structures that include additional, payoff-irrelevant states. For example, learning from a customer review about a product’s quality requires accounting for the reviewer’s otherwise irrelevant...
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- March 31, 2023
- Article
What Is the Optimal Pattern of a Customer Journey?
Even though customer experience (CX) leaders are becoming increasingly focused on optimizing their firms’ customer journeys, they face a clear challenge: Which touchpoints along the journey should they invest in? That is, which moments when the customer interacts with...
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- March 13, 2023
- Article
Sales Teams Need to Stop Focusing on the Customer Funnel
Understanding where customers are, how they navigate streams in your market, and how to interact with them in a given stream is now central to crafting a good customer experience, and that has implications. Among other things, companies need to shift from thinking...
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- February 22, 2023
- Article
How to Seed Organic Marketing in a Video-First World
By: Ayelet Israeli, Leonard A. Schlesinger and Matt Higgins
Early direct-to-consumer (DTC) companies relied on plentiful capital and low-cost digital marketing to power growth. But as this sector has matured, capital is more constrained, social media is more cluttered, and customer acquisition costs are rising. DTC companies...
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Keywords:
Online Business;
Ecommerce;
E-commerce;
E-Commerce Strategy;
Omnichannel Retail;
Omnichannel Retailing;
Influencer Marketing;
Consumer;
Organic Growth;
Video Advertising;
Promotion;
Celebrities;
Online Advertising;
Online Channel;
Online Communities;
Online Community;
Go To Market Strategy;
Platform;
Media;
Media Content;
Digital;
Digital Culture;
Digital Influencers;
Direct To Consumer Marketing;
Direct-to-consumer;
Innovation ＆ Entrepreneurship;
Innovation;
Sales;
Digital Platforms;
Digital Marketing;
Digital Strategy;
Consumer Behavior;
Internet and the Web;
Advertising;
Business Model;
Growth Management;
Marketing;
Marketing Strategy;
Marketing Channels;
Marketing Communications;
Communication Strategy;
Innovation Strategy;
Retail Industry;
Consumer Products Industry;
Fashion Industry;
Advertising Industry;
Apparel and Accessories Industry;
Beauty and Cosmetics Industry;
Food and Beverage Industry;
Media and Broadcasting Industry;
United States;
North America
- 2023
- Working Paper
Black Ownership Matters: Does Revealing Race Increase Demand for Minority-Owned Businesses?
By: Abhay Aneja, Michael Luca and Oren Reshef
Is there consumer demand to support Black-owned businesses? To explore, we investigate the impact of a new feature on a large online platform that made the race of a set of Black business owners salient to customers. We find that this feature substantially increased...
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- 2023
- Working Paper
Self-Preferencing at Amazon: Evidence from Search Rankings
By: Chiara Farronato, Andrey Fradkin and Alexander MacKay
We study whether Amazon engages in self-preferencing on its marketplace by favoring its own brands (e.g., Amazon Basics) in search. To address this question, we collect new micro-level consumer search data using a custom browser extension installed by a panel of study...
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- 2023
- Working Paper
Doing More with Less: Overcoming Ineffective Long-Term Targeting Using Short-Term Signals
By: Ta-Wei Huang and Eva Ascarza
Firms are increasingly interested in developing targeted interventions for customers with the best response,
which requires identifying differences in customer sensitivity, typically through the conditional average treatment
effect (CATE) estimation. In theory, to...
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- October 2022
- Article
A Structural Model of Organizational Buying for Business-to-Business Markets: Innovation Adoption with Share-of-Wallet Contracts
By: Navid Mojir and K. Sudhir
The paper develops the first structural model of organizational buying to study innovation diffusion in a B2B market. Our model is particularly applicable for routinized exchange relationships, whereby centralized buyers periodically evaluate and choose contracts,...
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- August 2022
- Background Note
Retail Media Networks
By: Eva Ascarza, Ayelet Israeli and Celine Chammas
In 2022, retail media was one of the fastest growing segments in digital advertising. A retail media network (RMN) allows a retailer to use its assets for advertising. Retailers set up an advertising business by allowing marketers to buy advertising space across their...
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Keywords:
Advertisers;
Advertising Media;
Media And Broadcasting Industry;
Retail;
Retail Analytics;
Retail Promotion;
Retailing;
Ecommerce;
E-Commerce Strategy;
E-commerce;
Marketing Communication;
Targeting;
Targeted Advertising;
Targeted Marketing;
Advertising;
Marketing;
Marketing Communications;
Marketing Strategy;
Brands and Branding;
Media;
Marketing Channels;
Retail Industry;
Consumer Products Industry;
Advertising Industry;
United States
- 2022
- Book
Purpose + Profit: How Business Can Lift Up the World
By: George Serafeim
The roadmap and best practices to reap the enormous value that can emerge when your business prioritizes social and environmental goals—such as climate change, diversity and inclusion, and sustainability—right alongside the pursuit of profit.
We not only... View Details
We not only... View Details
- August 2022
- Article
The Bulletproof Glass Effect: Unintended Consequences of Privacy Notices
By: Aaron R. Brough, David A. Norton, Shannon L. Sciarappa and Leslie K. John
Drawing from a content analysis of publicly traded companies’ privacy notices, a survey of managers, a field study, and five online experiments, this research investigates how consumers respond to privacy notices. A privacy notice, by placing legally enforceable limits...
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- June 29, 2022
- Other Article
Strategic Complexity? Using Experiments to Understand and Overcome Obfuscation
By: Michael Luca, Ginger Zhe Jin and Daniel Martin
Credit card companies must decide what product features to disclose to consumers, such as payment schedules, penalties, and fees--and also whether to present them clearly or bury them in the fine print. Firms face similar choices in settings ranging from privacy...
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- April 2022 (Revised May 2022)
- Case
Mastercard Labs (A)
When Ajaypal (Ajay) Banga became the CEO of Mastercard in 2010, he shifted the company’s competitive focus from card networks to cash itself. Mastercard’s new vision of a “World Beyond Cash” distilled into a three-pronged framework: Grow the core business, Diversify...
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Keywords:
Organizational Behavior;
Culture;
Organizational Culture;
Culture Change;
Organizational Adaptation;
Organizational Effectiveness;
Alignment;
Leadership;
Leadership Development;
Innovation;
Innovation Ecosystems;
Ecosystem;
Diversity;
Collaboration;
Co-creation;
Learning Organizations;
Empowerment;
Globalization;
Agility;
Prototype;
Experiment;
Partnerships;
Operating Model;
Risk Management;
Metrics;
Payments;
Financial Inclusion;
Financial Industry;
Ambidexterity;
Corporate Innovation;
Innovation Lab;
Digital Transformation;
Digital Strategy;
Credit Cards;
Innovation Leadership
- April 2022 (Revised May 2022)
- Case
Mastercard Labs (A) (Abridged)
When Ajaypal (Ajay) Banga became the CEO of Mastercard in 2010, he shifted the company’s competitive focus from card networks to cash itself. Mastercard’s new vision of a “World Beyond Cash” distilled into a three-pronged framework: Grow the core business, Diversify...
View Details
Keywords:
Organizational Behavior;
Culture;
Organizational Culture;
Culture Change;
Organizational Adaptation;
Organizational Effectiveness;
Alignment;
Leadership;
Leadership Development;
Innovation;
Innovation Ecosystems;
Diversity;
Collaboration;
Co-creation;
Learning Organizations;
Empowerment;
Ecosystem;
Agility;
Prototype;
Experiment;
Partnerships;
Operating Model;
Risk Management;
Metrics;
Payments;
Financial Inclusion;
Financial Industry;
Ambidexterity;
Corporate Innovation;
Innovation Lab;
Accelerator;
Start-up;
Intrapreneurship;
Competitive Strategy;
Business Model;
Technological Innovation;
Growth and Development Strategy;
Digital Transformation