Publications
Publications
Show Results For
-
All HBS Web
(760)
- Faculty Publications (102)
Page 1 of
102
Results
→
- February 2021
- Supplement
Apple: Privacy vs. Safety (B)
By: Henry McGee, Nien-hê Hsieh and Christian Godwin
In 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the globe, Apple and Google partnered to develop a contact tracing application that would collect information about users infected with the disease and notify those who they had been in contact with. While Apple/Google’s...
View Details
Keywords:
Iphone;
Encryption;
Data Privacy;
Customers;
Customer Focus and Relationships;
Decision Making;
Ethics;
Values and Beliefs;
Globalized Firms and Management;
Government and Politics;
Health;
Health Pandemics;
Leadership;
Markets;
Safety;
Social Issues;
Technology;
Telecommunications Industry;
Technology Industry;
Consumer Products Industry;
Electronics Industry;
Health Industry;
United States;
Europe
- 2020
- Working Paper
Come Together: Firm Boundaries and Delegation
By: Laura Alfaro
We develop an incomplete-contracts model to jointly study firm boundaries and the allocation of decision rights within them. Integration has an option value: it gives firm owners authority to delegate or centralize decision rights, depending on who can best solve...
View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Design Rules, Volume 2: How Technology Shapes Organizations: Chapter 6 The Value Structure of Technologies, Part 1: Mapping Functional Relationships
Organizations are formed in a free economy because an individual or group perceives value in carrying out a technical recipe that is beyond the capacity of a single person. Technology specifies what must be done, what resources must be assembled, what actions taken in...
View Details
- September 2020 (Revised November 2020)
- Case
PDS: Ring-Fencing the Ranch
By: Dennis Campbell, Tarun Khanna and Kerry Herman
Pallak Seth, Group CEO of PDS Multinational Fashions, is contemplating options to bring better collaboration across his global apparel supply chain platform. PDS, a group of 50-plus subsidiary companies, each led by its own CEO and with different apparel industry...
View Details
- April 2020 (Revised May 2020)
- Case
NTT DOCOMO's Race to 5G
By: Juan Alcácer, Horst Melcher and Akiko Kanno
The case, based on extensive interviews with NTT DOCOMO’s technology leaders, focuses on the opportunities and challenges that NTT DOCOMO faces with the launch of infrastructure and services for 5G wireless telecommunication technology. With higher data rates and...
View Details
- January 2020
- Case
A Tough Call: SEAL Team Leader in Kandahar (A)
By: George A. Riedel
The case, which is a disguised version of real events, is set in Kandahar, Afghanistan (2013) during the long running Afghan war. Lt. Paul Rickson, a Navy SEAL Platoon Commander, is leading a team of 30 US and Afghan soldiers on a mission to clear hostile forces in...
View Details
- November 2019
- Supplement
Hapag-Lloyd AG: Complying with IMO 2020
By: Benjamin C. Esty, Mette Fuglsang Hjortshoej and Emer Moloney
A new environmental regulation known as IMO 2020 was creating what one industry analyst called “the biggest shakeup for the oil and shipping industries in decades.” According to the new regulation, all ocean-going ships would have to limit their sulfur emissions by...
View Details
- November 2019
- Case
Hapag-Lloyd AG: Complying with IMO 2020
By: Benjamin C. Esty, Mette Fuglsang Hjortshoej and Emer Moloney
A new environmental regulation known as IMO 2020 was creating what one industry analyst called “the biggest shakeup for the oil and shipping industries in decades.” According to the new regulation, all ocean-going ships would have to limit their sulfur emissions by...
View Details
- 2019
- Working Paper
Design Rules, Volume 2: How Technology Shapes Organizations: Chapter 16 Capturing Value by Controlling Bottlenecks in Open Platform Systems
The purpose of this chapter is to investigate the means by which firms capture value in open platform systems. I begin by arguing that the surplus value created by complementarities within a technical system will be split among the owners of the unique and essential...
View Details
- March 2019
- Technical Note
Control or Flexibility? Structured Empowerment Offers Both—Lessons from Retail & Service Chains (Abridged)
By: Tatiana Sandino
This note explains how several retail and service organizations use a practice described here as “structured empowerment” to balance control and flexibility as they grow. I define structured empowerment as a practice that grants employees both (a) the power to make...
View Details
- February 2019 (Revised August 2019)
- Case
KangaTech
By: Karim R. Lakhani, Patrick J. Ferguson, Sarah Fleischer, Jin Hyun Paik and Steven Randazzo
On a warm January afternoon in 2019, Steve Saunders, Dave Scerri, Carl Dilena, and Nick Haslam (see Exhibit 1 for biographies), co-founders of KangaTech, wrapped up the latest round of discussions about the future direction of their sports-technology start-up. Focused...
View Details
- 2019
- Working Paper
Infringing Use as a Path to Legal Consumption: Evidence from a Field Experiment
By: Hong Luo and Julie Holland Mortimer
Digitization has transformed how users find and use copyrighted goods, but many existing legal options remain difficult to access, possibly leading to infringement. In a field experiment, we contact firms that are caught infringing on expensive digital images. Emails...
View Details
- 2019
- Working Paper
Design Rules, Volume 2: How Technology Shapes Organizations: Chapter 13 Platform Systems vs. Step Processes—The Value of Options and the Power of Modularity
This is the first chapter in Part 3. Its purpose is to contrast the value structure of platform systems with step processes from a technological perspective. I first review the basic technical architecture of computers and argue that every computer is inherently a...
View Details
- March 2018
- Teaching Note
Mavi: Fashioning a Path to Brand Growth
By: Jill Avery and Gamze Yucaoglu
Mavi, a leading Turkish apparel retailer, had sales of $419 million in 2015, up 20%. Growth rates like these were becoming routine at Mavi. But, its path to growth was getting more challenging, and Turkven, Mavi’s private equity partner, was planning its exit options...
View Details
- March 2018 (Revised March 2019)
- Technical Note
Control or Flexibility? Structured Empowerment Offers Both — Lessons from Retail & Service Chains
By: Tatiana Sandino
This note explains how several retail and service organizations use a practice described here as “structured empowerment” to balance control and flexibility as they grow. I define structured empowerment as a practice that grants employees both (a) the power to make...
View Details
- February 2018
- Case
Rosslyn Resource: Monetization and Sales Strategy
By: Robert J. Dolan and Sunru Yong
Rosslyn Resource identifies exploration targets (potential mineral deposits) in the mining industry and advances them until the project can be monetized, usually through sale to a larger mining company, in return for an upfront fee and a royalty on future revenues....
View Details
- 2017
- Article
Frictions or Mental Gaps: What's Behind the Information We (Don't) Use and When Do We Care?
By: Benjamin Handel and Joshua Schwartzstein
Consumers suffer significant losses from not acting on available information. These losses stem from frictions such as search costs, switching costs, and rational inattention, as well as what we call mental gaps resulting from wrong priors/worldviews, or relevant...
View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Come Together: Firm Boundaries and Delegation
By: Laura Alfaro, Nick Bloom, Paola Conconi, Harald Fadinger, Patrick Legros, Andrew F. Newman, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen
We develop an incomplete-contracts model to jointly study firm boundaries and the allocation of decision rights within them. Integration has an option value: it gives firm owners authority to delegate or centralize decision rights, depending on who can best solve...
View Details
- 2017
- Working Paper
Investment Timing with Costly Search for Financing
By: Samuel Antill
I develop a dynamic model of investment timing in which firms must first choose when to search for external financing. Search is costly and the arrival of investors is uncertain, leading to delay in financing and investment. Depending on parameters, my model can...
View Details
- October 2017 (Revised November 2017)
- Case
Lovepop
By: Robert F. White, Ramana Nanda and Olivia Hull
As they prepare to graduate from Harvard Business School, the co-founders of greeting card company startup Lovepop need capital to cover the company’s operating costs and must choose between two seed financing offers. One offer is from an angel group and the other from...
View Details