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- August 2021
- Case
Orchadio’s First Two Split Experiments
By: Iavor I. Bojinov, Marco Iansiti and David Lane
Orchadio, a direct-to-consumer grocery business, needs to conduct its first two A/B tests—one to evaluate the effectiveness and functioning of its newly redesigned website, and one to market-test four versions of a new banner for the website. To do so, it will rely on...
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- July 2021
- Case
Fynd
By: Ranjay Gulati, Kairavi Dey and Rachna Tahilyani
Fynd is a fast-growing venture that in 7 years since its founding has become India's largest omnichannel retail company with real-time access to over 9,000 stores' offline inventory. It started as a B2B business supporting retailers who didn’t have an online business,...
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- July–August 2021
- Article
Surfacing the Submerged State: Operational Transparency Increases Trust in and Engagement with Government
By: Ryan W. Buell, Ethan Porter and Michael I. Norton
Problem definition: As trust in government reaches historic lows, frustration with government performance approaches record highs.
Academic/practical relevance: We propose that in co-productive settings like government services, peoples’ trust and...
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- 2021
- Article
Evidence of Decreasing Internet Entropy: The Lack of Redundancy in DNS Resolution by Major Websites and Services
By: Samantha Bates, John Bowers, Shane Greenstein, Jordi Weinstock, Jonathan Zittrain and Yunhan Xu
This paper analyzes the extent to which the Internet’s global domain name resolution (DNS) system has preserved its distributed resilience given the rise of cloud-based hosting and infrastructure. We explore trends in the concentration of the DNS space since at least...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
The Value of Descriptive Analytics: Evidence from Online Retailers
By: Ron Berman and Ayelet Israeli
Does the adoption of descriptive analytics impact online retailer performance, and if so, how? We use the synthetic control method to analyze the staggered adoption of a retail analytics dashboard by more than 1,000 e-commerce websites, and find an increase of 13–20%...
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- 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 (Revised January 2020)
- Case
Backstage at Boston Ballet
By: David G. Fubini, Begum Agca Okutgen and Julia Kelley
At the beginning of her second year with Boston Ballet, Executive Director Meredith "Max" Hodges got some bad news—a developer had purchased one of Boston Ballet's school locations and was planning to terminate Boston Ballet's lease. Hodges had already overseen a...
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Keywords:
Arts;
Buildings and Facilities;
Decision Making;
Theater Entertainment;
Leadership;
Business or Company Management;
Mission and Purpose;
Organizational Change and Adaptation;
Strategic Planning;
Problems and Challenges;
Nonprofit Organizations;
Strategy;
Marketing;
Price;
Fine Arts Industry;
Entertainment and Recreation Industry;
Education Industry;
United States;
North America;
Massachusetts;
Boston;
New England;
Northeastern United States
- Article
Why Am I Seeing This Ad? The Effect of Ad Transparency on Ad Effectiveness
By: Tami Kim, Kate Barasz and Leslie K. John
Given the increasingly specific ways marketers can target ads, many consumers and regulators are demanding ad transparency: disclosure of how consumers’ personal information was used to generate ads. We investigate how and why ad transparency impacts ad effectiveness....
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- January 2019
- Case
Data.gov (Abridged)
By: Karim R. Lakhani, Robert D. Austin and Yumi Yi
This case presents the logic and execution underlying the launch of Data.gov, an instantiation of President Obama's initiative for transparency and open government. The process used by Vivek Kundra, the federal CIO, and his team to rapidly develop the website and to...
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- December 2018
- Case
Choosy
By: Jeffrey J. Bussgang and Julia Kelley
Founded in 2017, Choosy is a data-driven fashion startup that uses algorithms to identify styles trending on social media. After manufacturing similar items using a China-based supply chain, Choosy sells them to consumers through its website and social media pages....
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Keywords:
Artificial Intelligence;
Algorithms;
Machine Learning;
Neural Networks;
Instagram;
Social Media;
Influencer;
Fast Fashion;
Design;
Customer Satisfaction;
Customer Focus and Relationships;
Decision Making;
Cost vs Benefits;
Innovation and Invention;
Brands and Branding;
Product Positioning;
Demand and Consumers;
Supply Chain;
Production;
Logistics;
Business Model;
Expansion;
Internet;
Mobile Technology;
Online Technology;
Technology Platform;
Technology Industry;
Fashion Industry;
North and Central America;
United States;
New York (state, US);
New York (city, NY)
- November 2018 (Revised February 2019)
- Teaching Plan
Gimlet Media: A Podcasting Startup
By: John Deighton and Leora Kornfeld
When digital distribution becomes an option for an analog industry, the effects on the incumbents can be devastating. Is podcasting the beginning of the end of radio? Can it do what streaming video did to television and websites did to print? Two former public radio...
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- 2018
- Working Paper
Need for Speed: The Impact of Website Performance on Online Retail
By: Santiago Gallino, Nil Karacaoglu and Antonio Moreno
The share of e-commerce sales is rapidly increasing and so are the associated losses generated by website outages and slow websites. We leverage novel retail and website performance data to investigate the impact of website performance on online sales. This question is...
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- September–October 2018
- Article
Online MAP Enforcement: Evidence from a Quasi-Experiment
By: Ayelet Israeli
This paper investigates a manufacturer’s ability to influence compliance rates among its authorized online retailers by exploiting changes in the Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) policy and in dealer agreements. MAP is a pricing policy widely used by manufacturers to...
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- April 2018 (Revised February 2019)
- Case
Gimlet Media: A Podcasting Startup
By: John Deighton and Leora Kornfeld
When digital distribution becomes an option for an analog industry, the effects on incumbents can be devastating. Is podcasting the beginning of the end of radio? Can it do what streaming video did to television and websites did to print? Two former public radio...
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- January–February 2018
- Article
Some Customers Would Rather Leave Without Saying Goodbye
By: Eva Ascarza, Oded Netzer and Bruce G.S. Hardie
We investigate the increasingly common business setting in which companies face the possibility of both observed and unobserved customer attrition (i.e., “overt” and “silent” churn) in the same pool of customers. This is the case for many online-based services where...
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- October 2017 (Revised November 2017)
- Case
NYC311
By: Constantine E. Kontokosta, Mitchell Weiss, Christine Snively and Sarah Gulick
Joe Morrisroe, executive director for NYC311, had some gut instincts but no definitive answer to the question he was just asked by one of the mayor’s deputies: “Are some communities being underserved by 311? How do we know we are hearing from the right people?” Founded...
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Keywords:
New York City;
NYC;
311;
NYC311;
Big Data;
Equal Access;
Bias;
Data Analysis;
Public Entrepreneurship;
Urban Informatics;
Predictive Analytics;
Chief Data Officer;
Data Analytics;
Cities;
City Leadership;
Data and Data Sets;
Analysis;
Prejudice and Bias;
Entrepreneurship;
Public Sector;
City;
Public Administration Industry;
New York (city, NY)
- September–October 2017
- Article
The Surprising Power of Online Experiments: Getting the Most Out of A/B and Other Controlled Tests
By: Ron Kohavi and Stefan Thomke
In the fast-moving digital world, even experts have a hard time assessing new ideas. Case in point: At Bing, a small headline change an employee proposed was deemed a low priority and shelved for months until one engineer decided to do a quick online controlled...
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- 2017
- Working Paper
Cluster Mapping as a Tool for Development
This report builds on the foundational work on cluster mapping that Prof. Michael E. Porter has led at the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness (ISC), Harvard Business School over the last two decades. He launched the U.S. Cluster Mapping Initiative in the late...
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- January 2017
- Case
Expanding Ecommerce at Technos
By: Thales Teixeira, Rohit Deshpandé, Ruth Costas and Priscilla Zogbi
Technos was the market leader in the Brazilian watch market. Its CEO had made a firm commitment to evolve the company’s marketing and commercial practices by focusing less on pushing product to retail clients and more on branding to end consumers to pull watches from...
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- Article
Are Online and Offline Prices Similar? Evidence from Large Multi-Channel Retailers
By: Alberto Cavallo
Online prices are increasingly used for measurement and research applications, yet little is known about their relation to prices in physical stores, where most retail transactions occur. I conduct the first large-scale comparison of prices simultaneously collected...
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