Strategy

When Does Product Liability Risk Chill Innovation? Evidence from Medical Implants

By: Alberto Galasso and Hong Luo

May 2022 |
Article |
American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

Liability laws designed to compensate for harms caused by defective products may also affect innovation. We examine this issue by exploiting a major quasi-exogenous increase in liability risk faced by U.S. suppliers of polymers used to manufacture medical implants. Difference-in-differences analyses show that this surge in suppliers' liability risk had a large and negative impact on downstream innovation in medical implants, but it had no significant effect on upstream polymer patenting. Our findings suggest that liability risk can percolate throughout a vertical chain and may have a significant chilling effect on downstream innovation.

Keywords: Product Liability; Innovation; Tort; Medical Devices; Vertical Foreclosure; Product; Innovation and Invention; Legal Liability; Laws and Statutes; Medical Devices and Supplies Industry

Find at Harvard

An Anatomy of Performance Monitoring

By: Achyuta Adhvaryu, Anant Nyshadham and Jorge Tamayo

2022 |
Working Paper |
Faculty Research

Performance monitoring is a mainstay management tool in most organizations. Yet we still know little about whether—and why—better monitoring yields better performance in practice. To shed light on these questions, we study the introduction of a performance monitoring technology that enabled managers to track the progress of drive-thru orders in real time in a large quick-service restaurant chain in Puerto Rico. Sales increased by nearly 5%, but this rise was on average short-lived: impacts diminished to roughly half their initial magnitude within two months. Investment in and depreciation of worker skills play an important role in explaining this pattern. Managers responded to the availability of real-time data on bottlenecks by providing greater training inputs to workers at key workstations, particularly in the kitchen. But only a subset of managers provided “refresher” training to counteract skill depreciation over time. Conditional on baseline store productivity-by-time interactions to account for dynamic effects of general managerial quality, stores in which managers utilized refresher training intensively prior to the technology implementation had more persistent gains in sales, suggesting that managers’ attention and responses to worker skill dynamics matter for productivity. These results provide a look inside the “black box” of the management-productivity relationship, and highlight the critical role of on-the-job human capital investment in realizing and sustaining productivity gains from better performance monitoring.

Keywords: Performance Monitoring; Worker Skills; Skill Depreciation; Managerial Inattention; On-the-job Training; Productivity; Multitasking; Quick Serve Restaurants; Performance Evaluation; Employees; Competency and Skills; Training; Performance Productivity; Management; Information Technology; Food and Beverage Industry; Puerto Rico

Connecting Students in Chattanooga (B)

By: Jan W. Rivkin and Manjari Raman

April 2022 |
Supplement |
Faculty Research

Keywords: K-12 Education; Pandemic; COVID-19; Accessibility; Education; Urban Development; Wealth and Poverty; Education Industry; Tennessee

Connecting Students in Chattanooga (A)

By: Jan W. Rivkin and Manjari Raman

April 2022 |
Case |
Faculty Research

As COVID-19 hit and school buildings closed across America in the spring of 2020, tens of thousands of K-12 students in Chattanooga’s Hamilton County lacked the high-quality Internet service required to connect them to remote education. Bryan Johnson, superintendent of the Hamilton County school system, scrambled alongside leaders in nonprofits, local governments, philanthropies, and public utilities to weigh three very different ways they might handle the crisis. Could the leaders come together to address both immediate needs and longstanding digital inequities?

Keywords: K-12 Education; Pandemic; COVID-19; Accessibility; Education; Urban Development; Wealth and Poverty; Online Technology; Education Industry; Tennessee

Educators

Is Hybrid Work the Best of Both Worlds? Evidence from a Field Experiment

By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Tarun Khanna, Christos A. Makridis and Kyle Schirmann

2022 |
Working Paper |
Faculty Research

Hybrid work is emerging as a novel form of organizing work globally. This paper reports causal evidence on how the extent of hybrid work—the number of days worked from home relative to days worked from the office—affects work outcomes. Collaborating with an organization in Bangladesh, we randomized the number of days that individual employees worked from the office for nine weeks in the summer of 2020. Our results indicate that an intermediate number of days in the office results in more emails sent, a higher number of email recipients, and increased novelty of work products. Our test for underlying mechanisms suggests that hybrid work might represent the “best of both worlds,” offering workers greater work-life balance, without the concern of being isolated from colleagues.

Keywords: Hybrid Work; Remote Work; Work-from-home; Field Experiment; Employees; Geographic Location; Performance; Work-Life Balance

Emeritus: Achieving Impact, Providing Access (A)

By: Ashish Nanda and Zack Kurtovich

March 2022 |
Case |
Faculty Research

In June 2019, Emeritus cofounders Ashwin Damera (HBS MBA 2005) and Chaitanya (Chait) Kalipatnapu were thrilled with the growth of their start-up. Eruditus, formed in October 2010 to provide in-person executive education, had established itself in the market and was growing steadily. Emeritus, an Eruditus subsidiary established in July 2015 to offer online executive education, had grown like a rocket. Damera and Kalipatnapu believed that their firm was only in the very early stages of an exciting journey. The opportunity for further growth and success was immense. Yet, the co-founders were acutely conscious that “what got us here will not get us there.” They faced some strategic choices in the near future. Among these was a decision on whether to grow its university-branded offerings aggressively or to promote the Emeritus brand more assiduously.

Keywords: Technology; Education Technology; Professional Service Firm; Strategy; Entrepreneurship And Strategy; Entrepreneurship; Executive Education; Startup; Digital Brand; Marketing; Global Business; Global Firm; Business Startups; Growth and Development; Growth and Development Strategy

Educators

EbonyLife Media (B)

By: Andy Wu

March 2022 |
Supplement |
Faculty Research