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- January 2023
- Case
Proday: Calling the Right Play
By: Lindsay N. Hyde, Thomas R. Eisenmann and Tom Quinn
Sarah Kunst knew the elements of a successful startup from her tenure at venture capital firms. In April 2018, however, her own app – Proday, a home fitness platform featuring exercises filmed by professional sports stars – was floundering. Kunst theorized that...
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- 2023
- Working Paper
Achieving Universal Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: Addressing Market Failures or Providing a Social Floor?
By: Katherine Baicker, Amitabh Chandra and Mark Shepard
The United States spends substantially more on health care than most developed countries, yet leaves a greater share of the population uninsured. We suggest that incremental insurance expansions focused on addressing market failures will propagate inefficiencies and...
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- Winter 2022
- Article
Vaccines and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Lessons from Failure and Success
By: Scott Duke Kominers and Alex Tabarrok
The losses from the global COVID-19 pandemic have been staggering—trillions in economic costs, on top of significant losses of life, health, and well-being. The world made significant and successful investments in vaccines to mitigate the pandemic, yet there were...
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- January 2022
- Case
Walmart Goes Global (A)
By: Juan Alcácer
- 2021
- Chapter
Business Continuity Insurance in the Next Disaster
By: Samuel Gregory Hanson, Adi Sunderam and Eric Zwick
This article draws lessons from the business support policies pursued in the COVID-19
pandemic to guide policy design for the next disaster. We contrast the performance
of the Paycheck Protection Program to the Main Street Lending Program to illustrate
how design...
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- December 2021 (Revised May 2022)
- Case
Troverie (A)
By: Thomas R. Eisenmann, Lindsay N. Hyde and Olivia Graham
Six months after the August 2018 launch of Troverie, a U.S.-based online retailer of luxury watches, the average cost of acquiring a customer is much higher than originally projected, and the startup is incurring a substantial loss on each sales transaction. Could...
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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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- 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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- 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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- April 29, 2020
- Article
The Case for AI Insurance
By: Ram Shankar Siva Kumar and Frank Nagle
When organizations place machine learning systems at the center of their businesses, they introduce the risk of failures that could lead to a data breach, brand damage, property damage, business interruption, and in some cases, bodily harm. Even when companies are...
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- April 2020 (Revised July 2020)
- Case
Amazon in China and India
By: Krishna G. Palepu and Kairavi Dey
Amazon has been unsuccessful in its efforts to develop a business in China. Even though Amazon was an early entrant into China’s e-commerce space, its domestic rivals, especially Alibaba, created innovative business models uniquely suited for the conditions in China. ...
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- September 2019 (Revised December 2019)
- Supplement
Anthony Soohoo: Retrospection on Dot & Bo
By: Thomas R. Eisenmann, Allison M. Ciechanover and George Gonzalez
The case describes the final year of the once-promising furniture e-tailer, Dot & Bo, that included a challenging fundraising market, troubles with logistics and operations, and a team tragedy. The founder looks back at the experience and shares his learnings about...
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- August 2019
- Case
Rand Fishkin at Moz (A)
In 2016, senior management at Moz, a venture capital–backed startup providing software tools for digital marketing professionals, must decide how to address a looming cash flow crisis precipitated by failed efforts to broaden its product line. Seattle-based Moz had...
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- June 2019
- Article
Social Risk, Fiscal Risk, and the Portfolio of Government Programs
We develop a model of government portfolio choice in which a benevolent government chooses the scale of risky projects in the presence of market failures and tax distortions. These two frictions generate motives to manage social risk and fiscal risk. Social risk...
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- December 2018
- Technical Note
The First Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics and Market Failures
By: Matthew C. Weinzierl and Robert Scherf
- Article
The Social Purpose of Corporations
By: Nien-he Hsieh, Marco Meyer, David Rodin and Jens van ‘t Klooster
To think about the purpose of corporations is to think about what corporations are for. In this article, we argue that the concept of a purpose has an important role in thinking about the moral evaluation of corporations. We make three contributions. First, we...
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- 2018
- Working Paper
OTC Intermediaries
By: Andrea L. Eisfeldt, Bernard Herskovic, Sriram Rajan and Emil Siriwardane
Over-the-counter (OTC) markets for financial assets are dominated by a relatively small number of core intermediaries and a large number of peripheral customers. In this paper, we develop a model of trade in a core-periphery network and estimate its key structural...
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- 2022
- Working Paper
Responding Strategically to Competitors' Failures: Evidence from Medical Device Recalls & New Product Submissions
By: George P. Ball, Jeffrey T. Macher and Ariel Dora Stern
Medical device firms operate at the frontiers of innovation. When functioning properly, innovative medical devices can prolong and improve lives; when malfunctioning, the same devices may harm patients and lead to product recalls. Product recalls create significant...
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- July 2018
- Teaching Note
Ron Johnson: A Career in Retail
By: Ryan Raffaelli
In April 2013, Ron Johnson (HBS '84) stepped down after just 18 months as CEO of J.C. Penney. In his brief tenure, Johnson, an acclaimed retailer respected for his innovation and success in shaping the retail image at Target and Apple, introduced dramatic departures...
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