Publications
Publications
Show Results For
-
All HBS Web
(4,430)
- Faculty Publications (114)
Page 1 of
114
Results
→
- 2021
- Working Paper
Absenteeism, Productivity, and Relational Contracts Inside the Firm
By: Achyuta Adhvaryu, Jean-François Gauthier, Anant Nyshadham and Jorge Tamayo
We study relational contracts among managers using a unique dataset that tracks transfers of workers across teams in Indian ready-made garment factories. We focus on how relational contracts help managers cope with worker absenteeism shocks, which are frequent, often...
View Details
- March 2021
- Technical Note
Competitive Strategy in International Construction
By: John D. Macomber and Emrah Ergelen
Construction of buildings and infrastructure is one of the largest industries in the world in terms of volume. It is also one of the most physically risky, financially uncertain, and politically impacted. The industry is highly fragmented since there are few economies...
View Details
- 2021
- Working Paper
Entrepreneurial Learning and Strategic Foresight
By: Aticus Peterson and Andy Wu
We study how learning by experience across projects affects an entrepreneur’s
strategic foresight. In a quantitative study of 314 entrepreneurs across 722 crowdfunded
projects supplemented with a program of qualitative interviews, we counterintuitively find
that...
View Details
- January 2021
- Article
The Effects of Menu Costs on Retail Performance: Evidence from Adoption of the Electronic Shelf Label Technology
By: Ioannis Stamatopoulos, Achal Bassamboo and Antonio Moreno
We use the adoption of electronic shelf labels (ESLs) by an international grocery retailer in 2015 to identify the effects of physical menu costs (i.e., labor and material costs of price adjustment) on retail performance. We find that the installation of ESLs increased...
View Details
- November–December 2020
- Article
Our Work-from-Anywhere Future
The pandemic has hastened a rise in remote working for knowledge-based organizations. This has notable benefits: Companies can save on real estate costs, hire and utilize talent globally, mitigate immigration issues, and experience productivity gains, while workers can...
View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
The Effects of Temporal Distance on Intra-Firm Communication: Evidence from Daylight Savings Time
By: Jasmina Chauvin, Prithwiraj Choudhury and Tommy Pan Fang
Cross-border communication costs have plummeted and enabled the global distribution of work, but frictions attributable to distance persist. We estimate the causal effects of temporal distance stemming from time zone differences on intra-firm communication. We argue...
View Details
- September 2020
- Case
Chip and Joanna Gaines' Magnolia Network
By: Anita Elberse and Julia McNicholas
Chip and Joanna Gaines, who have shot to fame as stars of the hit television show Fixer Upper, are preparing to launch their own television network. It is April 2019, a year since the home-renovation show Fixer Upper’s fifth season on cable channel HGTV ended, and more...
View Details
Keywords:
Entertainment;
Television;
Superstars;
Innovation;
Creative Industries;
Talent;
General Management;
Celebrities;
Television Entertainment;
Entrepreneurship;
Joint Ventures;
Innovation and Invention;
Marketing;
Strategy;
Entertainment and Recreation Industry;
Media and Broadcasting Industry
- August 2020
- Article
Workplace Knowledge Flows
By: Jason Sandvik, Richard Saouma, Nathan Seegert and Christopher Stanton
We conducted a field experiment in a sales firm to test whether improving knowledge flows between coworkers affects productivity. Our design allows us to compare different management practices and to isolate whether frictions to knowledge transmission primarily reside...
View Details
- June 2020
- Case
Agile Consumer Product Innovation with Alibaba's Tmall Innovation Center
By: William R. Kerr, Daniel O'Connor and James Palano
Consumer products companies were beset by changes on all sides during the 2010s. Customers were increasingly turning to ecommerce platforms rather than shopping in-store. Meanwhile, nimble, digitally-savvy competitors were gaining market share by capitalizing on the...
View Details
- May 2020
- Case
Big Boom Beverages: Fight or Flight?
By: Stephen A. Greyser and William Ellet
Four college friends market a beverage that combines ingredients like those in a drink they consumed in college bars. It includes a caffeinated energy drink, malt liquor, and a soft drink flavoring. They launch the business, Big Boom Beverages (BBB), with their own...
View Details
- January–February 2020
- Article
Consumer Reactions to Drip Pricing
By: Shelle Santana, Steven Dallas and Vicki Morwitz
This research examines how drip pricing—a strategy whereby a firm advertises only part of a product’s price upfront and then reveals additional mandatory or optional fees/surcharges as the consumer proceeds through the buying process—affects consumer choice and...
View Details
Keywords:
Drip Pricing;
Pricing;
Consumer Protection;
Hidden Fees;
Price;
Consumer Behavior;
Perception
- November 2019 (Revised December 2020)
- Case
Grupo Éxito: Facing Colombia's Competitive Grocery Retail Industry
By: José B. Alvarez, Carla Larangeira, Jenyfeer Martinez Buitrago and Miguel Diaz Moreno
Grupo Éxito, a leading South American retailer, faced declining market shares in Colombia in 2019 with the arrival of low-cost competitors and emerging digital trends. Originally founded in Medellín, Éxito had over the course of its seventy-year history evolved from a...
View Details
Keywords:
Grocery;
Market Share;
Technology;
Trends;
Competitive Strategy;
Retail Industry;
Colombia;
Latin America
- 2019
- Working Paper
The Economic Effects of Private Equity Buyouts
By: Steven J. Davis, John Haltiwanger, Kyle Handley, Ben Lipsius, Josh Lerner and Javier Miranda
We examine thousands of U.S. private equity (PE) buyouts from 1980 to 2013, a period that saw huge swings in credit market tightness and GDP growth. Our results show striking, systematic differences in the real-side effects of PE buyouts, depending on buyout type and...
View Details
- September 2019 (Revised December 2019)
- Case
Blenheim Chalcot
By: John R. Wells and Benjamin Weinstock
In April 2019, Manoj Badale and Charles Mindenhall, co-founders of Blenheim Chalcot, were contemplating how they might go about developing their portfolio. Since founding the company as an internet consultancy called netdecisions in 1998, Badale and Mindenhall had...
View Details
- 2019
- White Paper
Impact-Weighted Financial Accounts: The Missing Piece for an Impact Economy
By: George Serafeim, T. Robert Zochowski and Jennifer Downing
Reimagining capitalism is an imperative. We need to create a more inclusive and sustainable form of capitalism that works for every person and the planet. Massive environmental damage, growing income and wealth disparity, stress, and depression within developed...
View Details
- July 2019
- Case
Instabeat—One More Lap?
By: Shikhar Ghosh, Nicole Tempest Keller and Alpana Thapar
This case follows Lebanese entrepreneur, Hind Hobeika, an engineer and competitive swimmer who spends seven years trying to launch a wearable heartrate monitor and motion sensor to help swimmers track their performance while swimming. While the Beirut-based...
View Details
- 2021
- Working Paper
Improving Customer Compatibility with Tradeoff Transparency
By: Ryan W. Buell and MoonSoo Choi
Through a large-scale field experiment with 393,036 customers considering opening a credit card account with a nationwide retail bank, we investigate how providing transparency into an offering’s tradeoffs affects subsequent rates of customer acquisition and long-run...
View Details
- March 2019 (Revised April 2021)
- Case
The DivaCup: Navigating Distribution and Growth
By: Ayelet Israeli
When the mother-daughter founders of DivaCup set out with a mission to disrupt the menstrual care industry with an innovative product form, they initially struggled to gain legitimacy and convince retailers to carry their unique product. Fifteen years later, the...
View Details
Keywords:
Female;
Female Ceo;
Female Entrepreneur;
Female Protagonist;
Health ＆ Wellness;
Healthcare;
Price Policies;
Minimum Advertised Price;
Differentiation;
Positioning;
Growth;
Health;
Health Care and Treatment;
Price;
Disruption;
Distribution;
Distribution Channels;
Competitive Strategy;
Competition;
Growth Management;
Mission and Purpose;
Product Development;
Product Marketing;
Product Launch;
Product Positioning;
Advertising;
Business Startups;
Internet;
Entrepreneurship;
Social Entrepreneurship;
Social Issues;
Social Enterprise;
Retail Industry;
Medical Devices and Supplies Industry;
Manufacturing Industry;
Health Industry;
Green Technology Industry;
Education Industry;
Distribution Industry;
Consumer Products Industry;
Canada;
United States;
United Kingdom
- 2019
- Working Paper
Managerial Quality and Productivity Dynamics
By: Achyuta Adhvaryu, Anant Nyshadham and Jorge Tamayo
Which managerial skills, traits, and practices matter most for productivity? How does the observability of these features affect how appropriately they are priced into wages? Combining two years of daily, line-level production data from a large Indian garment firm with...
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