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- January 2025
- Supplement
Hippo: Weathering the Storm of the Home Insurance Crisis (B)
By: Lauren Cohen, Grace Headinger and Sophia Pan
Rick McCathron, CEO of Hippo, was optimistic about the InsurTech's path to profitability after navigating the financial uncertainties of 2022. By bundling their home insurance services with third-parties and established insurance incumbents, Hippo was adopting a... View Details
Keywords: Fintech; Underwriters; Big Data; Homeowners' Insurance; Catastrophe Risk; Global Warming; Environment; Business Economics; Vertical Specialization; Bundling; Economies Of Scale; Business Model; Forecasting and Prediction; Climate Change; Environmental Sustainability; Green Technology; Technological Innovation; Natural Environment; Natural Disasters; Weather; Business Strategy; Competitive Advantage; Business Earnings; Insurance; Social Issues; Insurance Industry; California; United States
- January 2025
- Supplement
Martin Luther King, Jr.: A Young Minister Confronts the Challenges of Montgomery (B)
By: Nien-he Hsieh and Derek C. M. van Bever
Recounts a pivotal moment in Martin Luther King Jr.'s life during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, where a profound prayer amidst threats to his life renewed his faith and resolve to lead the movement. This transformative experience marked the beginning of his lifelong... View Details
- December 2024
- Case
Tencent Games
By: Rebecca Karp, Billy Chan and Nancy Hua Dai
For years, Tencent Games, a division of China’s largest internet company, had taken the lion’s share of revenue in the global gaming market with blockbuster titles such as “League of Legends” and “PUBG: Battlegrounds.” These games defined the game genres that they... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Charting (and Updating) the Path: A Bayesian Perspective on Entrepreneurial Learning
This chapter explores two distinct modes of entrepreneurial learning: assessing
venture viability and choosing between alternative development paths. It introduces
a framework for decomposing venture viability into technological feasibility, commercial
potential and... View Details
- December 2023
- Article
Managerial Pluralism: Thirty Years of Teaching Business Ethics
The author reflects on 30 years of teaching business ethics at Harvard Business School. The paper presents tactical lessons for teaching courses in professional ethics and introduces “managerial pluralism.” This concept is akin to Isaiah Berlin’s value pluralism and... View Details
- December 2024
- Article
Proxy Advisory Firms and Corporate Shareholder Engagement
By: Aiyesha Dey, Austin Starkweather and Joshua White
We study how Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) affect firms’ engagement with shareholders. Our analyses exploit a quasi-natural experiment using say-on-pay voting outcomes near a threshold that triggers ISS to review engagement activities. Firms receiving ISS... View Details
- November 2024
- Teaching Note
Mercado Bitcoin: M&A, IPO, or Series B?
By: Raymond Kluender, Emanuele Colonnelli and Sabrina Howell
Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 825-047. In April 2021, Brazilian cryptocurrency platform Mercado Bitcoin, had to decide how to scale: go public, M&A with a bank, or take a VC big check. In a highly volatile market, Roberto Dagnoni, chairman of the board, viewed the... View Details
Keywords: Business Ventures; Mergers and Acquisitions; Business Growth and Maturation; Business Startups; Decision Making; Going Public; Ownership Stake; Strategic Planning; Venture Capital; Problems and Challenges; Business Cycles; Digital Platforms; Emerging Markets; Market Timing; Expansion; Diversification; Value; Valuation; Value Creation; Investment Funds; Initial Public Offering; Price; Price Bubble; Negotiation Offer; Information Technology Industry; Financial Services Industry
- November 2024 (Revised November 2024)
- Case
MiDAS: Automating Unemployment Benefits
By: Shikhar Ghosh and Shweta Bagai
In 2015, the state of Michigan considered whether to nominate its Michigan Integrated Data Automated System (MiDAS) for a prestigious state technology award. Launched in 2013 amid severe budget pressures, the $47 million automated fraud detection system was designed to... View Details
Keywords: Artificial Intelligence; AI; Machine Learning Models; Algorithmic Data; Decision Making; Automation; Benefits; Compensation; Cost Reduction; Digital Transformation; Employment; Government; Fraud; Government Technology; Public Sector; Systems; Systems Integration; Unemployment Insurance; Waste Heat Recovery; AI and Machine Learning; Government Administration; Information Technology; Insurance; United States
- 2024
- Working Paper
Advice and the Bayesian Entrepreneur
By: Susan Cohen and Rembrand Koning
Bayesian entrepreneurship starts from the premise that entrepreneurs’ beliefs guide their theorizing, experimentation, and choices (Agrawal et al., n.d.). Since each entrepreneur has unique beliefs based on their own set of past experiences, cognitive ability, and... View Details
- November–December 2024
- Article
Group Size and Its Impact on Diversity-Related Perceptions and Hiring Decisions in Homogeneous Groups
By: Aneesh Rai, Edward H. Chang, Erika Kirgios and Katherine L. Milkman
Why do some homogeneous groups face backlash for lacking diversity, whereas others escape censure? We show that a homogeneous group’s size changes how it is perceived and whether decision makers pursue greater diversity in its ranks. We theorize that people make... View Details
- November 2024
- Article
On the Representativeness of Voter Turnout
By: Louis Kaplow and Scott Duke Kominers
Prominent theory research on voting analyzes a variety of models in which expected pivotality drives voters' turnout decisions and hence determines voting outcomes. It is recognized, however, that such work is at odds with Downs's paradox: in practice, many... View Details
- November 2024
- Article
Perceptions About Monetary Policy
By: Michael D. Bauer, Carolin Pflueger and Adi Sunderam
We estimate perceptions about the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy rule from panel data on professional forecasts of interest rates and macroeconomic conditions. The perceived dependence of the federal funds rate on economic conditions varies substantially over time,... View Details
- 2024
- Article
Political Polarization and Finance
By: Elisabeth Kempf and Margarita Tsoutsoura
We review an empirical literature that studies how political polarization affects financial decisions. We first discuss the degree of partisan segregation in finance and corporate America, the mechanisms through which partisanship may influence financial decisions, and... View Details
- October 2024
- Teaching Plan
Teamworks: Tackling a Forecasting Fumble
By: Lou Shipley and Stacy Straaberg
In late March 2018, Teamworks CEO Zach Maurides learned Q1 2018 sales were at risk for a large forecasting miss. Founded in 2004, Teamworks’s software application assisted support staff in messaging, scheduling, and sharing documents with collegiate and professional... View Details
Keywords: Acquisition; Business Growth and Maturation; Communication Strategy; Decisions; Forecasting and Prediction; Business Cycles; Technological Innovation; Sports; Growth and Development Strategy; Resource Allocation; Marketing; Sales; Business Strategy; Expansion; Sports Industry; Technology Industry; United States; North Carolina
- October 2024
- Background Note
Outsourcing Primer
By: Willy C. Shih
This note provides some background on one of the key resource allocation decisions managers make as they develop and produce products and services: what should they do with the walls of their own firm, and what they should depend upon suppliers or contractors to... View Details
- October 2024
- Article
Canary Categories
By: Eric Anderson, Chaoqun Chen, Ayelet Israeli and Duncan Simester
Past customer spending in a category is generally a positive signal of future customer spending. We show that there exist “canary categories” for which the reverse is true. Purchases in these categories are a signal that customers are less likely to return to that... View Details
- October 2024
- Article
How to Use Sales Assessments
Judging a person’s fit for a sales job is complex, and research shows that managers greatly overrate their ability to predict someone’s performance on the basis of interviews. Hence, using assessments is a growing trend in sales hiring and training. This article... View Details
- October 2024
- Article
On Why Women-owned Businesses Take More Time to Secure Microloans
By: Goran Calic, Moren Lévesque and Anton Shevchenko
Examining gender differences in business financing reveals important dimensions on which women- and men-owned businesses differ. Although considerable progress has been made in understanding gender differences in mobilizing resources, the role of time in business... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Pitfalls of Demographic Forecasts of U.S. Elections
By: Richard Calvo, Vincent Pons and Jesse M. Shapiro
Many observers have forecast large partisan shifts in the US electorate based on demographic trends. Such forecasts are appealing because demographic trends are often predictable even over long horizons. We backtest demographic forecasts using data on US elections... View Details
- Fall, 2024
- Article
Sixty Years of the Voting Rights Act: Progress and Pitfalls
By: Andrea Bernini, Giovanni Facchini, Marco Tabellini and Cecilia Testa
We review the literature on the effects of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA), which removed formal restrictions to Black political participation. After a brief description of racial discrimination suffered by Black Americans since Reconstruction, we introduce the goals... View Details