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- February 2023 (Revised April 2023)
- Case
Kvadrat: Focus, Execute, and Grow
By: Boris Groysberg and Sarah L. Abbott
Kvadrat was a family-owned global textiles company. The company had enjoyed impressive top-line growth and was shifting gears to emphasize profitability via a shorter strategic agenda. Agenda items included: U.S. expansion, generating improved margins in its consumer...
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- January 2023
- Article
Calculators for Women: When Identity-Based Appeals Backfire
By: Tami Kim, Kate Barasz, Michael I. Norton and Leslie K. John
From “Chick Beer” to “Dryer Sheets for Men,” identity-based labeling is frequently deployed by marketers to appeal to specific target markets. Yet such identity appeals can backfire, alienating the very consumers they aim to attract. We theorize and empirically...
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Keywords:
Categorization Threat;
Stereotypes;
Identity;
Labels;
Gender;
Perception;
Consumer Behavior
- January–February 2023
- Article
The Overlooked Key to a Successful Scale-Up
By: Jeffrey F. Rayport, Davide Sola and Martin Kupp
Many start-ups experience enormous popularity and runaway growth, but only a few go on to become stable giants. What separates them from the pack? They all go through a developmental stage called extrapolation, say three business school professors.
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- 2022
- Working Paper
Coordination and Incumbency Advantage in Multi-Party Systems: Evidence from French Elections
By: Kevin Dano, Francesco Ferlenga, Vincenzo Galasso, Caroline Le Pennec and Vincent Pons
In theory, free and fair elections can improve the selection of politicians and incentivize them to exert effort. In practice, incumbency advantage and coordination issues may lead to the (re)election of bad politicians. We ask whether these two forces compound each...
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- October 2022
- Supplement
Framebridge (B): A New Approach
By: Rembrand Koning and Alicia Dadlani
In 2022, after revamping operations and expanding retail stores, Framebridge founder and CEO Susan Tynan is optimistic for the future but realizes changing market dynamics. New competitors are entering the market, and margin pressures remained. This case is part two of...
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- September 16, 2022
- Article
A Causal Test of the Strength of Weak Ties
By: Karthik Rajkumar, Guillaume Saint-Jacques, Iavor I. Bojinov, Erik Brynjolfsson and Sinan Aral
The authors analyzed data from multiple large-scale randomized experiments on LinkedIn’s People You May Know algorithm, which recommends new connections to LinkedIn members, to test the extent to which weak ties increased job mobility in the world’s largest...
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- August 2022 (Revised December 2022)
- Case
Iluméxico: For Every Family to Have Power
By: Brian Trelstad, Isa Oliveres and Jenyfeer Martinez Buitrago
In 2022, Manuel Wiechers, the CEO of Iluméxico, a for-profit social enterprise that provided off-grid solar energy services in rural Mexico, was finalizing his presentation for the company’s upcoming board meeting. In the 12 years since Wiechers had co-founded...
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- 2022
- Article
Data Poisoning Attacks on Off-Policy Evaluation Methods
By: Elita Lobo, Harvineet Singh, Marek Petrik, Cynthia Rudin and Himabindu Lakkaraju
Off-policy Evaluation (OPE) methods are a crucial tool for evaluating policies in high-stakes domains such as healthcare, where exploration is often infeasible, unethical, or expensive. However, the extent to which such methods can be trusted under adversarial threats...
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- Article
Financing Constraints, Home Equity and Selection into Entrepreneurship
By: Thais Laerkholm Jensen, Søren Leth-Petersen and Ramana Nanda
We exploit a mortgage reform that differentially unlocked home equity across the Danish population and study how this impacted selection into entrepreneurship. We find that increased entry was concentrated among entrepreneurs whose firms were founded in industries...
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- June 2022 (Revised October 2022)
- Background Note
Digital Commerce and Delivery: Preparing Food and Retail Value Chains for a 50-50 World
By: William R. Kerr, Daniel O'Connor, Paige Boehmcke and Will Ensor
Increasing digitalization of grocery retail and quick commerce reveals insights about managing complex supply chains at scale and shifting revenue streams from product sales to data monetization. How are the roles of retailers changing? What happens if marginal cost...
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Keywords:
Grocery Delivery;
Grocery;
Digitalization;
Fulfillment;
Delivery;
Supply Chain;
Disruption;
Food;
Supply Chain Management;
Market Design;
Trends;
Value Creation;
Goods and Commodities;
Customer Value and Value Chain;
Digital Transformation;
Retail Industry;
Food and Beverage Industry;
United States;
China
- March 2022 (Revised April 2023)
- Case
Hometown Foods: Changing Price Amid Inflation
During the early part of the 2021 Covid-19 pandemic, Hometown Foods, a large seller of flour-based products, thrived as consumers hoarded baked goods and took up baking to pass the time and find comfort. Then, amid growing shortages in commodities, a vaccine arrived,...
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- March 2022
- Supplement
Washio (C): From Growth to Margin
By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Karen Elterman
- 2022
- Working Paper
Investing in the Next Generation: The Long-Run Impacts of a Liquidity Shock
By: Patrick Agte, Arielle Bernhardt, Erica M. Field, Rohini Pande and Natalia Rigol
How do poor entrepreneurs trade off investments in business enterprises versus children's human capital, and how do these choices influence intergenerational socio-economic mobility? To examine this, we exploit experimental variation in household income resulting from...
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- Article
More-Experienced Entrepreneurs Have Bigger Deadline Problems
By: Andy Wu, Aticus Peterson and Amy Meeker
Professor Andy Wu and doctoral candidate Aticus Peterson of Harvard Business School tracked 314 entrepreneurs who launched multiple technology hardware products on the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter from September 2010 to June 2019. The more projects the founders...
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- March 2022
- Teaching Note
Sawiris Foundation: Elevating Education in Egypt
By: Brian Trelstad and Alpana Thapar
Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 322-023. Founded in 2001 by the Sawiris family, one of the wealthiest families in Egypt, the Sawiris Foundation for Social Development (SFSD) invested in human capital and provision of basic social services for the most marginalized...
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- March 2022
- Article
Targeting High Ability Entrepreneurs Using Community Information: Mechanism Design in the Field
Identifying high-growth microentrepreneurs in low-income countries remains a challenge due to a scarcity of verifiable information. With a cash grant experiment in India we demonstrate that community knowledge can help target high-growth microentrepreneurs; while the...
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- Article
When Seeking Help, Women and Racial/Ethnic Minorities Benefit from Explicitly Stating Their Identity
By: Erika L. Kirgios, Aneesh Rai, Edward H. Chang and Katherine L. Milkman
Receiving help can make or break a career, but women and racial/ethnic minorities do not always receive the support they seek. Across two audit experiments—one with politicians and another with students—as well as an online experiment (total n = 5,145), we test whether...
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- Article
How Market Power Affects Dynamic Pricing: Evidence from Inventory Fluctuations at Car Dealerships
By: Ayelet Israeli, Fiona Scott-Morton, Jorge Silva-Risso and Florian Zettelmeyer
This paper investigates empirically the effect of market power on dynamic pricing in the presence of inventories. Our setting is the auto retail industry; we analyze how automotive dealerships adjust prices to inventory levels under varying degrees of market power. We...
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- December 2021 (Revised February 2022)
- Case
Bed Bath & Beyond: The New Strategy to Drive Shareholder Value
By: Benjamin C. Esty and Daniel W. Fisher
At one time, Bed Bath & Beyond was one of the most successful specialty retailers in the United States—its growth and profit margins far exceeded both peer retailers in the home goods market as well as many other discount retailers. But in 2014, its stock price peaked,...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Limits to Bank Deposit Market Power
By: Juliane Begenau and Erik Stafford
Claims about the market power of bank deposits in the banking literature are numerous and far reaching. Recently, a causal narrative has emerged in the banking literature: market power in bank deposits, measured as imperfect pass-through of short-term market rates on...
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