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New research on measurements and metrics from Harvard Business School faculty on issues including online metrics, auditing firms, and measuring social impact.
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The Impacts of Increasing Search Frictions on Online Shopping Behavior: Evidence from a Field Experiment

by Donald Ngwe, Kris J. Ferreira, and Thales Teixeira

This paper challenges the logic that making it easier for consumers to search across a wide assortment of products is the best strategy for online retailers. Experiments show that adding extra search costs to find discounted items can improve gross margins and sales by increasing the number of items inspected and serving as a self-selecting price discrimination mechanism among customers.

What’s the Antidote to Surveillance Capitalism?

by James Heskett

A new book takes companies to task for profiting off our personal data. How can consumers fight back? asks James Heskett. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

Rocket-tunity: Can Private Firms Turn a Profit in Space?

by Scott Wallask

Private rocket companies are competing to be the first to send paying tourists into space, perhaps even this year. Matthew Weinzierl lays out the strategic roadmap to the stars. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

Relative Performance Transparency: Effects on Sustainable Choices

by Ryan W. Buell, Shwetha Mariadassou, and Yanchong Zheng

Encouraging consumers to purchase a more sustainable product or use resources more responsibly is a key challenge for society. This paper discusses experiments involving more than 7,000 participants to shed light on how information and its presentation regarding sustainable performance can be a tool for enhancing sustainable choices in practice.

Marketplace Scalability and Strategic Use of Platform Investment

by Jin Li, Gary P. Pisano, and Feng Zhu

One well-known feature of marketplace platforms like Airbnb and eBay is their scalability. This paper identifies the strategic trade-off and implications for scalability when a platform provides services to existing and potential sellers that help reduce their fixed costs of running the business. Timing this investment is an important consideration for maximizing marketplace scalability.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Product Quality and Entering Through Tying: Experimental Evidence

by Hyunjin Kim and Michael Luca

This study empirically explores Google’s decision to tie its new reviews product to the top of its search results, excluding competitors. Results suggest that such "tying" can facilitate dominant platforms’ entry into adjacent markets, even when the tied product is of worse quality compared to existing options.

Could Big Data Replace the Creative Director at the Gap?

Re: Ayelet Israeli

Is it time to throw out the creative director and rely on big data to predict what consumers want to wear next? Assistant Professor Ayelet Israeli discusses how Gap CEO Art Peck considers a bold idea to boost sales. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

Design Rules, Volume 2: How Technology Shapes Organizations: Chapter 14 Introducing Open Platforms and Business Ecosystems

by Carliss Y. Baldwin

Platform systems have existed in various forms for centuries. Beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, newly competitive technology of open platform systems based on digital technology and modular architectures changed the structure of entire industries. This paper lays the groundwork for a comprehensive theoretical investigation of open platform systems.

Hunting for a Hot Job in High Tech? Try 'Digitization Economist'

by Roberta Holland

Amazon has more economists on staff than any university economics department, and technology firms are snapping them up the minute they graduate, says Michael Luca. Why? Call it the economics of digitization. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

Opportunistic Returns and Dynamic Pricing: Empirical Evidence from Online Retailing in Emerging Markets

by Chaithanya Bandi, Antonio Moreno, Donald Ngwe, and Zhiji Xu

Dynamic pricing is widely applied in industries like airline ticketing, ride-sharing, and online retailing. This paper identifies two downsides of dynamic pricing: opportunistic returns and strategic choice of payment method. The impact can be significant and has implications for managers and researchers.

Shipping Fees and Product Assortment in Online Retail

by Chaoqun Chen and Donald Ngwe

This study highlights a strong link between an online retailer’s product assortment decisions and shipping policies in determining purchase outcomes and profits. Consumers are less sensitive to shipping fees than to product prices, but free shipping for orders above the minimum is a strong motivator for increasing average basket sizes.

The Legacy of Boaty McBoatface: Beware of Customers Who Vote

by Michael Blanding

Companies that encourage consumers to vote online should be forewarned—they may expect more than you promise, according to research by Michael Norton, Leslie John, and colleagues. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

Large-Scale Demand Estimation with Search Data

by Tomomichi Amano, Andrew Rhodes, and Stephan Seiler

Online retailers face the challenge of leveraging the rich data they collect on their websites to uncover insights about consumer behavior. This study proposes a practical and tractable model of economic behavior that can reveal helpful patterns of cross-product substitution. The model can be used to simulate optimal prices.

Bargain Hunters Beware: A Store's 'Original Price' Might Not Be After All

by Michael Blanding

Retailers often compare a "sale" price to the original price. Donald Ngwe says consumers should be skeptical of those original prices — and so should regulators. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

That Costs HOW Much?

by Sean Silverthorne

Beyond the attributes of the product itself, price is probably the leading determinant of success in the marketplace. What does it takes to get the price right? Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.