Browsing HBS Theses and Dissertations by Title
Now showing items 36-54 of 54
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Lifting the Veil: Essays on Firm Transparency and Consumer Behavior
(2016-05-13)This research examines the effects of firm transparency on consumer behavior. Three essays investigate how consumer behavior changes when firms are transparent about costs, wages, and promotional strategies. Essay one ... -
Management Control and Employee-Driven Innovation
(2016-05-13)Organizations increasingly empower their employees to conduct local experimentation and generate innovation ideas. The aim of this dissertation is to understand the role of management control mechanisms in motivating and ... -
Mission and Markets? Organizational Hybridity in Social Ventures
This dissertation seeks to understand the antecedents, processes, and consequences of institutional hybridity in entrepreneurship and organizations, with a specific focus on phenomena at the interface of business organization ... -
An Optimal Ownership Structure for Cooperatives
(2017-10-31)This thesis identifies an optimal ownership structure for cooperatives. The objective of this structure is to maximize the joint income of the members of that cooperative. To achieve this objective, this structure must ... -
Overcoming Limits in the Design of Formal Management Control Systems: Evidence from the Field
(2018-08-28)The management accounting literature emphasizes the importance of management control systems as means to monitor and influence activities in a firm. Whereas prior works in this area primarily focus on the design of explicit ... -
Platform and Ecosystem Transitions: Strategic and Organizational Implications
(2015-05-26)By most conventional measures of corporate success (revenue, market capitalization, global brand growth, etc.) businesses operating as multi-sided platforms (MSPs) and their associated ecosystems constitute the majority ... -
Private Equity's Diversification Illusion: Economic Comovement and Fair Value Reporting
This study examines how financial reporting practices have shaped private equity's claims to diversification. Despite research showing that private equity lacks unique economic exposure, private equity firms and trade ... -
Shifting Loci of Innovation: A Study of Knowledge Boundaries, Identity and Innovation at NASA
This dissertation explores how the ability to innovate is being transformed by the Web and the information age, as well as the challenges and opportunities the transformation entails. This research interest is fueled by ... -
Strategies for the Non-Market Environment
(2015-05-26)ABSTRACT 1: This paper examines whether mobile telecom operators with access to different kinds of knowledge pursue different strategies in politically risky markets. Using data from 2000-2010 I find that firms with ... -
Strategies to Grow Network Goods
(2015-09-16)A network good is a product or service which becomes inherently more valuable as its adoption increases. The mechanism driving this value varies by context: for example, a software ecosystem produces more software as the ... -
Supply Chain Disruptions and the Role of Information Asymmetry
My research examines how firm operational decisions influence and are influenced by firm value. In particular, I focus on these relationships in the context of low probability, high impact disruptions. Over the last several ... -
Symbolic Consumption and Alternative Signals of Status
(2015-05-26)My dissertation is composed of three papers on symbolic consumption–how consumers use products, brands, and time to express who they are and signal status. The first paper (Brand Tourists: How Non–Core Users Enhance the ... -
The Downsides of Status Consumption
While research on status consumption has largely focused on consumer desire for goods that are associated with high social status, the essays featured in this dissertation will broadly explore instances where consumers ... -
The Effect of Quality Decisions on Competitive Strategy
This dissertation analyzes how quality decisions are given and their respective effects on strategic marketing variables such as pricing and advertising decisions. I study quality decisions in three unique settings in three ... -
The Experience of Production: Essays on Customers in Service Operations
Over time, the delivery of services has become increasingly co-productive (customers participate materially in the production of service outcomes) and inseparable from customer view. As a result, a distinctive aspect of ... -
The use of intangible assets as loan collateral
This dissertation investigates the role of intangibles in reducing financing frictions in credit markets and examines whether intangible collateralization is associated with risky lending in the corporate loan market by ... -
Truth or Dare: Management Theory at a Crossroads
This dissertation examines the state of management theory, whether as espoused by the (largely self-proclaimed) gurus, or by management academics. Given that philosophers of science have determined that theory is supposed ... -
Why Do Firm Practices Differ? Examining the Selection and Implementation of Organizational Practices
(2016-04-27)This dissertation is comprised of three studies investigating sources of variation in firm practices. Firm practices may differ both due to differences in the practices firms choose to implement – different types of firms ...