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Free Trade Needs Nurturing—and Other Lessons from History

by Staff

Global free trade is not the natural order of things, so it needs to be carefully tended to and maintained. Sophus Reinert and Dante Roscini discuss trade over time and what history teaches. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

New Research and Ideas, December 11, 2018

Dina Gerdeman

Platforms compete in UK betting industry ... Oral history sheds light on corruption ... Startup considers risks vs. rewards of new technology.

Platform Competition: Betfair and the U.K. Market for Sports Betting

by Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Neil Campbell

Since the early 2000s, online betting exchanges have had a new relationship with customers relative to traditional bookmakers, providing a platform to match individuals willing to lay and back the same outcome. This study shows how exchanges’ platform design choices have major implications for their likelihood of success.

Oral History and Writing the Business History of Emerging Markets

by Geoffrey Jones and Rachael Comunale

Oral history is a valuable resource to explore how businesses developed and functioned in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, regions with a growing share of global economic activity and the majority of the world’s population. While oral history is not uncritical, it provides openings for opinions, voices, and judgements on events on which there was often silence.

Honda Created a Civic for Very Light Jets. How High Will It Fly?

Re: Gary P. Pisano

After thirty years of research and development, HondaJet is finally in the air and winning its market. Gary Pisano discusses how Honda moved from cars and lawn mowers to multimillion-dollar private aircraft. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

Why Managers Should Reveal Their Failures

by Dina Gerdeman

If you want to get your messages through to employees, be ready to confess your own management shortcomings, counsels Alison Wood Brooks. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

The Salary Taboo: Privacy Norms and the Diffusion of Information

by Zoë B. Cullen and Ricardo Perez-Truglia

Barriers to the diffusion of salary information have implications for a wide range of labor market phenomena. This study of employees of a real organization shows that individuals significantly misinterpret their peers’ salaries, partly due to pervasive preferences for concealing own salary, and a potentially strategic decision of high earners to withhold their personal information.

New Research and Ideas, December 4, 2018

Dina Gerdeman

Work-from-anywhere policies work—sometimes ... Hello? Who’s listening to earnings calls? ... The risk of doing business overseas.

Work from Anywhere or Co-locate? Autonomy versus Learning Effects at the United States Patent Office

by Prithwiraj Choudhury, Cirrus Foroughi, and Barbara Larson

Managers often ask whether worker productivity rises or falls with work-from-anywhere (WFA) policies. This study of a real firm presents robust econometric evidence that WFA regimes can have positive effects on net worker output, especially for experienced hires working interdependently. For new hires, however, colocation is often needed to facilitate their learning.

How Companies Can Increase Market Rewards for Sustainability Efforts

by Rachel Layne

There is a connection between public sentiment about a company and how the market rewards its corporate social performance, according to George Serafeim. Is your company undervalued? Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

What’s the Best Administrative Approach to Climate Change?

by James Heskett

Addressing climate change is a massive undertaking for global society, involving local, national, and multinational entities. James Heskett asks how such an effort should be managed from an administrative perspective. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

On Target: Rethinking the Retail Website

by Dina Gerdeman

Target is one big-brand retailer that seems to have survived and even thrived in the apocalyptic retail landscape. What's its secret? Srikant Datar discusses the company's relentless focus on online data. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

Make Your Employees Feel Psychologically Safe

by Martha Lagace

To do their best work, people need to feel secure and safe in their workplace. In a new book, Amy C. Edmondson details how companies can develop psychological safety. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

Demand Estimation in Models of Imperfect Competition

by Alexander MacKay and Nathan H. Miller

The study shows how knowledge about firm behavior can be modeled to better predict demand. Firms tend to raise prices in response to higher demand, so observed relationships between price and quantity can be quite misleading. The authors provide an adjustment that can be used when price experiments or instrumental variables are not available.

Reverse the Curse of the Top-5

by Robert S. Kaplan

Scholars and those who evaluate them for promotion can overweight publications ranked in a discipline’s five top journals. This paper explains the origins of journal rankings, the errors and distortions when journal rankings are used to evaluate faculty research, how they inhibit innovative research on emerging practice issues, and possible reforms to reduce their perverse incentives.

Building a Nonprofit Marketplace to Feed America

Re: Scott Duke Kominers

Feeding America manages a network of more than 200 food banks nationwide. Scott Duke Kominers and Canice Prendergast discuss how the organization designed a fair and efficient marketplace for food distribution. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

New Research and Ideas, November 20, 2018

Dina Gerdeman

A promising revenue model for US health care ... Peer pressure in credit policies ... Pro hockey team gets philanthropic.

Lazy Prices

by Lauren Cohen, Christopher J. Malloy, and Quoc Nguyen

The most comprehensive information windows that firms provide to the markets—in the form of their mandated annual and quarterly filings—have changed dramatically over time, becoming significantly longer and more complex. When firms break from their routine phrasing and content, this action contains rich information for future firm stock returns and outcomes.

E-Santa: Is Retail Ready for Digital Christmas?

by Sean Silverthorne

The retail industry is in such a spin over multichannel strategy, mall closings, and big brand shutterings, to name a few pressures, that even Santa can't keep track of it all. Here is recent Harvard Business School research on digital trends shaping how we shop and sell. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

Can the Global Food Industry Overcome Public Distrust?

by Sean Silverthorne

The public is losing trust in many institutions involved in putting food on our table, says Ray A. Goldberg, author of the new book Food Citizenship. Here's what needs to be done. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.