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- February 2021 (Revised April 2021)
- Case
Board Director Dilemmas—Back the SPAC?
By: Suraj Srinivasan, David G. Fubini and Amram Migdal
This case focuses on a board director of a diversified holding company. The firm’s longtime CEO had always exhibited a cautious, methodical approach to growth. Now, the CEO is raising the idea of joining with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) to spin off...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Achieving Reliable Causal Inference with Data-Mined Variables: A Random Forest Approach to the Measurement Error Problem
By: Mochen Yang, Edward McFowland III, Gordon Burtch and Gediminas Adomavicius
Combining machine learning with econometric analysis is becoming increasingly prevalent in both research and practice. A common empirical strategy involves the application of predictive modeling techniques to "mine" variables of interest from available data, followed...
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- October 2020
- Article
Peer Influence on Trade Credit
By: Daniel Gyimah, Michael Machokoto and Anywhere (Siko) Sikochi
We examine the influence of peer firms on trade credit policies of listed firms in the United States. We posit and find evidence that firms mimic their peers in formulating trade credit policies. The findings are more pronounced for firms in highly competitive product...
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Keywords:
Trade Credit;
Peer Effects;
Product Market Competition;
Trade;
Credit;
Policy;
Competition
- 2020
- Working Paper
Design and Analysis of Switchback Experiments
By: Iavor I Bojinov, David Simchi-Levi and Jinglong Zhao
In switchback experiments, a firm sequentially exposes an experimental unit to a random treatment, measures its response, and repeats the procedure for several periods to determine which treatment leads to the best outcome. Although practitioners have widely adopted...
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- Article
Active World Model Learning with Progress Curiosity
By: Kuno Kim, Megumi Sano, Julian De Freitas, Nick Haber and Daniel Yamins
World models are self-supervised predictive models of how the world evolves. Humans learn world models by curiously exploring their environment, in the process acquiring compact abstractions of high bandwidth sensory inputs, the ability to plan across long temporal...
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- June 2020
- Teaching Note
Understanding the Brand Equity of Nestlé Crunch Bar
By: Jill Avery and Gerald Zaltman
Teaching Note for HBS Case Nos. 519-061 and 519-062. In early 2018, Nestlé announced the sale of its U.S. candy-making division and a select collection of twenty of its confectionery brands, including the Nestlé Crunch Bar, to Ferrero SpA for $2.8 billion. Under the...
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- June 2020
- Article
Parallel Play: Startups, Nascent Markets, and the Effective Design of a Business Model
By: Rory McDonald and Kathleen Eisenhardt
Prior research advances several explanations for entrepreneurial success in nascent markets but leaves a key imperative unexplored: the business model. By studying five ventures in the same nascent market, we develop a novel theoretical framework for understanding how...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Iterative Coordination and Innovation
By: Sourobh Ghosh and Andy Wu
Agile management practices from the software industry continue to transform the way organizations innovate across industries, yet they remain understudied in the organizations literature. We investigate the widespread Agile practice of iterative coordination: frequent...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Shaping Nascent Industries: Innovation Strategy and Regulatory Uncertainty in Personal Genomics
By: Cheng Gao and Rory McDonald
In nascent industries—whose new technologies are often poorly understood by regulators—contending with regulatory uncertainty can be crucial to organizational survival and growth. Prior research on nonmarket strategy largely focuses on established firms in mature...
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- Article
History-informed Strategy Research: The Promise of History and Historical Research Methods in Advancing Strategy Scholarship
By: Nicholas Argyres, Alfredo De Massis, Nicolai J. Foss, Federico Frattini, Geoffrey Jones and Brian Silverman
Recent years have seen an increasing interest in the use of history and historical research methods in strategy research. This article discusses how and why history and historical research methods can enrich theoretical explanations of strategy phenomena. The article...
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- 2019
- Working Paper
Industrial Change, the Boundary of the Firm, and Racial Employment Segregation
By: John-Paul Ferguson and Rembrand Koning
Racial employment segregation between large workplaces in America has grown over the last generation. We know little about how changes in patterns of employment by economic sector have contributed to this growth, though. While there are many stylized narratives about...
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Keywords:
Workplace Segregation;
Firm Boundaries;
Organizations;
Employees;
Segmentation;
Race;
Change;
United States
- November–December 2019
- Article
Pivoting Isn't Enough? Managing Strategic Reorientation in New Ventures
By: Rory McDonald and Cheng Gao
New ventures often experience deviations from their plans that oblige them to reorient in pursuit of better fit between their evolving products and their target customers. Yet research is largely silent on how managers explain such changes and justify their ventures in...
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Keywords:
Strategic Reorientation;
Technology Entrepreneurship;
Innovation;
Product Development Processes;
Organizational Adaptation;
Qualitative Methods (General);
Entrepreneurship;
Technology;
Organizational Change and Adaptation;
Strategy;
Innovation and Invention;
Product Development;
Communication Strategy
- August 2019
- Article
When and How to Diversify—A Multicategory Utility Model for Personalized Content Recommendation
By: Yicheng Song, Nachiketa Sahoo and Elie Ofek
Sometimes we desire change, a break from the same or an opportunity to fulfill different aspects of our needs. Noting that consumers seek variety, several approaches have been developed to diversify items recommended by personalized recommender systems. However,...
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- July 2019
- Case
Christmas Inc. (A)
By: Susanna Gallani, Gregory Sabin, Lexor Adams and Nicholas Haberling
Santa Claus is facing increasing pressures to contain costs. The economic model that has worked for centuries is starting to show some cracks, to the point that he is considering outsourcing part of its toy production. Evaluating the bids his team collected from...
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- May 2019
- Case
The United States Air Force: 'Chaos' in the 99th Reconnaissance Squadron
By: Francesca Gino, Jeff Huizinga and Nicole Keller
In the spring of 2019, Lt. Col. Matthew “Chaos” Nussbaum is nearing the end of his two-year term as commander of the U.S. Air Force's 99th Reconnaissance Squadron. In this position, he has focused the majority of his energy on finding new ways to organize, train, and...
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- 2019
- Working Paper
The Comprehensive Effects of a Digital Paywall Sales Strategy
By: Doug J. Chung, Ho Kim and Reo Song
This paper explores the multiple and comprehensive effects of a digital paywall sales strategy, an increasingly common means of go-to-market for media firms. Specifically, we examine the effects of a digital paywall on a media firm’s two sources of income—subscription...
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- April 2019 (Revised April 2021)
- Case
Wayfair
By: Jeffrey F. Rayport, Susie L. Ma and Matthew G. Preble
In 2016 Niraj Shah and Steve Conine, founders of online home goods retailer Wayfair, are faced with a decision about how to improve user experience on their e-commerce sites. A key driver of consumer interest and conversion to purchase in the home category is visual...
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- March 2019 (Revised May 2019)
- Case
Fetchr: A New Way of Last Mile Delivery
By: V.G. Narayanan and Eren Kuzucu
By mid-2016, five years of aggressive growth had transformed Fetchr from a small logistics startup to a 1,000-employee, full-fledged last-mile delivery company operating across four countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Already beneficiaries of the...
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Keywords:
Startup;
Decision;
Financial Strategy;
UAE;
KSA;
MENA;
Cost Accounting;
Business Model;
Business Startups;
Transformation;
Cost Management;
Strategy;
Disruptive Innovation;
Technological Innovation;
Growth and Development Strategy;
Growth Management;
Logistics;
Service Delivery;
Supply Chain Management;
Performance Evaluation;
Mathematical Methods;
Mobile Technology;
Transportation Networks;
Middle East;
United Arab Emirates;
Dubai;
Bahrain;
Egypt;
Saudi Arabia;
North Africa
- January 2019
- Supplement
Understanding the Brand Equity of Nestlé Crunch Bar (B): Data Analysis
By: Jill Avery and Gerald Zaltman
In early 2018, Nestlé announced the sale of its U.S. candy-making division and a select collection of 20 of its confectionery brands, including the Nestlé Crunch Bar, to Ferrero SpA for $2.8 billion. Luckily, an old consumer research study on the Nestlé Crunch Bar...
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Keywords:
Brand Management;
Market Research;
Brand Positioning;
Value Proposition;
Consumer Products;
Fast Moving Consumer Goods;
Qualitative Methods;
Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique;
ZMET;
Data Analysis;
Marketing;
Marketing Strategy;
Brands and Branding;
Consumer Behavior;
Marketing Communications;
Data and Data Sets;
Analysis;
Consumer Products Industry;
Food and Beverage Industry;
Advertising Industry;
United States;
North America;
Italy
- December 2018
- Case
Bata versus Relaxo—Analyzing Performance
By: Suraj Srinivasan, Iris Leung and Quinn Pitcher
Set in 2016, “Bata India versus Relaxo—Analyzing Performance” compares the strategies and financial performance of two Indian footwear companies. Bata India had long been the market leader in footwear in India, but its leading market position was being challenged by...
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