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- Faculty Publications (352)
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- October 2021
- Article
Board Design and Governance Failures at Peer Firms
By: Shelby Gai, J. Yo-Jud Cheng and Andy Wu
Our study introduces board committees as a crucial determinant of board actions. We examine how directors who structurally link different board committees—referred to as multi-committee directors (MCDs)—explain why some board actions are merely symbolic while others...
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- September 2021
- Article
Trials and Terminations: Learning from Competitors' R&D Failures
I analyze project continuation decisions where firms may resolve uncertainty through news about competitors' research and development (R&D) failures, as well as through their own results. I examine the trade-offs and interactions between product-market competition and...
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- August 2021
- Teaching Note
IBM Watson at MD Anderson Cancer Center
By: Shane Greenstein and Mel Martin
Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 621-022.
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Keywords:
Decision Making;
Technological Innovation;
Innovation Strategy;
Knowledge Management;
Knowledge Use and Leverage;
Operations;
Failure;
Technology;
Information Technology;
Software;
Health Care and Treatment;
Product Development;
Health Industry;
Information Technology Industry;
Technology Industry;
United States;
Houston;
Texas
- July 2021
- Case
Amazon HQ2
By: James K. Sebenius and Ben Cook
Amazon’s failed bid for a second headquarters location (“HQ2”) in Long Island City, New York offers many lessons for negotiators looking to avoid similar high-profile defeats in strategically important deals. The company’s project – which promised to bring billions of...
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- July 2021
- Article
Do Interactions with Candidates Increase Voter Support and Participation? Experimental Evidence from Italy
By: Enrico Cantoni and Vincent Pons
We test whether politicians can use direct contact to reconnect with citizens, increase turnout, and win votes. During the 2014 Italian municipal elections, we randomly assigned 26,000 voters to receive visits from city council candidates, from canvassers supporting...
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- May–June 2021
- Article
Why Start-ups Fail
If you’re launching a business, the odds are against you: Two-thirds of start-ups never show a positive return. Unnerved by that statistic, a professor of entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School set out to discover why. Based on interviews and surveys with hundreds...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Cognitive Biases: Mistakes or Missing Stakes?
By: Benjamin Enke, Uri Gneezy, Brian Hall, David Martin, Vadim Nelidov, Theo Offerman and Jeroen van de Ven
Despite decades of research on heuristics and biases, empirical evidence on the effect of large incentives—as present in relevant economic decisions—on cognitive biases is scant. This paper tests the effect of incentives on four widely documented biases: base rate...
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- January 11, 2021
- Article
The Breach of the U.S. Capitol Was a Breach of Trust
By: Sandra J. Sucher and Shalene Gupta
This article frames the January 6th attack of the U.S. Capitol as a betrayal of our trust in government. Using Sucher and Gupta’s trust framework, the article explains how the attacks were a failure of the four elements of trust: competence, motives, fair means, and...
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- Editorial
Why ESG Funds Fail to Scale
By: Gabriel Karageorgiou and George Serafeim
You’ve seen the headlines about the growth in environmental, social, and governance funds. Many investment professionals might read these and believe that launching a new ESG investment firm or ESG offering will be an automatic success. Our analysis of the data shows...
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Keywords:
ESG;
ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) Performance;
ESG Disclosure;
ESG Disclosure Metrics;
ESG Ratings;
ESG Reporting;
Investment Management;
Investment Strategy;
Investments;
Investment Fund;
Sustainability;
Sustainable Finance;
Sustainable Investing;
Investment;
Management;
Strategy;
Investment Portfolio;
Finance;
Growth and Development;
Failure
- January 2021
- Supplement
What Went Wrong with Boeing’s 737 Max? (B)
By: William W. George and Amram Migdal
Following the March 10, 2019, crash of Ethiopian Airlines flight 302, en route to Nairobi, Kenya and the October 29, 2018, downing of Lion Air flight 610 as it took off from Jakarta, Indonesia, Boeing’s 737 Max jet, the model flown in both instances, was grounded by...
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Keywords:
Ethics;
Values and Beliefs;
Governance;
Corporate Accountability;
Governance Controls;
Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms;
Leadership;
Management;
Business or Company Management;
Crisis Management;
Risk Management;
Organizations;
Organizational Culture;
Problems and Challenges;
Risk and Uncertainty;
Safety;
Failure;
Transportation;
Air Transportation;
Aerospace Industry;
Air Transportation Industry;
North America;
United States
- 2021
- Working Paper
No-fault Default, Chapter 11 Bankruptcy, and Financial Institutions
By: Robert C. Merton and Richard T. Thakor
This paper analyzes the costs and benefits of a no-fault-default debt structure as an alternative to the typical bankruptcy process. We show that the deadweight costs of bankruptcy can be avoided or substantially reduced through no-fault-default debt, which permits a...
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- Article
Resilience vs. Vulnerability: Psychological Safety and Reporting of Near Misses with Varying Proximity to Harm in Radiation Oncology
By: Palak Kundu, Olivia Jung, Amy C. Edmondson, Nzhde Agazaryan, John Hegde, Michael Steinberg and Ann Raldow
Background
Psychological safety, a shared belief that interpersonal risk taking is safe, is an important determinant of incident reporting. However, how psychological safety affects near-miss reporting is unclear, as near misses contain contrasting cues that... View Details
Psychological safety, a shared belief that interpersonal risk taking is safe, is an important determinant of incident reporting. However, how psychological safety affects near-miss reporting is unclear, as near misses contain contrasting cues that... View Details
- December 2020 (Revised April 2021)
- Case
IBM Watson at MD Anderson Cancer Center
By: Shane Greenstein, Mel Martin and Sarkis Agaian
After discovering that their cancer diagnostic tool, designed to leverage the cloud computing power of IBM Watson, needed greater integration into the clinical processes at the MD Anderson Cancer Center, the development team had difficult choices to make. The Oncology...
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Keywords:
Decision Making;
Innovation Strategy;
Knowledge Management;
Knowledge Use and Leverage;
Operations;
Failure;
Technology;
Information Technology;
Software;
Health Care and Treatment;
Product Development;
Health Industry;
Information Technology Industry;
Technology Industry;
United States;
Houston;
Texas
- 2020
- Working Paper
Determinants of Early-Stage Startup Performance: Survey Results
To explore determinants of new venture performance, the CEOs of 470 early-stage startups were surveyed regarding a broad range of factors related to their venture’s customer value proposition, product management, marketing, technology and operations, financial...
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- October 2020 (Revised June 2021)
- Case
When Institutions Fail: HIV/AIDS in the 1980s
By: Tom Nicholas and Christian Godwin
During the early 1980s, young gay men in urban centers such as San Francisco and New York City began contracting a mysterious illness that would come to be known as HIV/AIDS. A diagnosis meant almost certain death, with a less than 1% survival rate. Conflicting...
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Keywords:
Ethics;
Policy;
Government and Politics;
Health Pandemics;
History;
Rights;
Media;
Organizations;
Business and Community Relations;
Religion;
Social Psychology;
Identity;
Prejudice and Bias;
Social Issues;
Public Opinion;
Pharmaceutical Industry;
Biotechnology Industry;
Health Industry;
Journalism and News Industry;
Media and Broadcasting Industry;
Public Administration Industry;
United States
- 2020
- Working Paper
Heterogeneity of Gain-Loss Attitudes and Expectations-Based Reference Points
By: Lorenz Goette, Thomas Graeber, Alex Kellogg and Charles Sprenger
We examine the role of heterogeneity in gain-loss attitudes for identifying the leading behavioral model of expectations-based reference dependence (Kőszegi and Rabin, 2006, 2007) (KR). Failure to account for recently-documented heterogeneity in gain-loss attitudes is...
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- Fall 2020
- Article
Sizing Up Corporate Restructuring in the COVID Crisis
By: Robin Greenwood, Benjamin Iverson and David Thesmar
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the financial and legal system will need to deal with a surge of financial distress in the business sector. Some firms will be able to survive, while others will face bankruptcy and thus need to be liquidated or reorganized. Many...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
When Do Experts Listen to Other Experts? The Role of Negative Information in Expert Evaluations for Novel Projects
By: Jacqueline N. Lane, Misha Teplitskiy, Gary Gray, Hardeep Ranu, Michael Menietti, Eva C. Guinan and Karim R. Lakhani
The evaluation of novel projects lies at the heart of scientific and technological innovation, and yet literature suggests that this process is subject to inconsistency and potential biases. This paper investigates the role of information sharing among experts as the...
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- July 2020
- Article
Intra-firm Geographic Mobility: Value Creation Mechanisms and Future Research Directions
This paper argues that intra-firm geographic mobility is an understudied mechanism that can help mitigate coordination failures in a geographically distributed organization. The paper presents an organizing framework on how intra-firm geographic mobility creates value...
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