Faculty & Research

• HBS Book

The world has changed dramatically in just the past few years—and so has the game of negotiation. COVID-19, Zoom, political polarization, the online economy, increasing economic globalization, and greater workplace diversity—all have transformed the who, what, where, and how of negotiation. Today, traditional negotiating tactics, while still effective, need to be tailored to vastly different situations and circumstances. In Negotiation: The Game Has Changed, legendary Harvard Business School professor Max Bazerman, a pioneer in the field of negotiation, shows you how to negotiate successfully today by adapting proven negotiation principles and strategies to the challenging new contexts you face—from negotiating across cultural and political differences to trying to reach an agreement over Zoom or during a supply chain crisis.

• Journal of Financial Economics 165 (March 2025).

We study the socially optimal level of illiquidity in an economy populated by households with taste shocks and present bias with naive beliefs. The government chooses mandatory contributions to accounts, each with a different pre-retirement withdrawal penalty. Collected penalties are rebated lump sum. When households have homogeneous present bias, β, the social optimum is well approximated by a single account with an early-withdrawal penalty of 1 − β. When households have heterogeneous present bias, the social optimum is well approximated by a two-account system: (i) an account that is completely liquid and (ii) an account that is completely illiquid until retirement.

• Health Care Initiative

We measure whether expert patients – those trained as physicians and nurses – have fewer emergency department visits and the reasons for these differences. Relative to similar patients physicians and nurses had 19.8% and 5.1% fewer ED visits, principally due to fewer avoidable visits. The differences in avoidable visits between physicians and other patients were largest for diagnoses commonly requiring prescriptions, which physicians often self-prescribed. Our results suggest that improving access to prescriptions for acute symptoms, more than improving patient education, may reduce avoidable health care.

• Featured Case

In the fall of 2022, Blue Owl Capital's investment committee evaluated a potential investment in the technology sector. The proposed transaction centered on Ping Identity Corporation (“Ping”), a fast-growing identity access management (IAM) software company that was being taken private by Thoma Bravo. Blue Owl was invited to play a leading role in an $875 million debt financing package to support the acquisition. Ping’s strong fundamentals made the opportunity appealing: the company operated in a high-growth market, generated the majority of its revenues from subscription-based services, and demonstrated significant growth in its product offerings and customer base. However, despite these strengths, Ping had yet to generate meaningful cash flow. This presented Blue Owl with a high-risk, high-reward scenario. The critical question for the team was whether Blue Owl should proceed with the transaction despite the risks, and whether the proposed deal structure offered adequate protection against potential downsides.

• Featured Case

Since taking over as CEO of industrial packaging giant Greif, Ole Rosgaard has focused on growing the company and improving the perception of its value by the capital markets. He and his senior leadership team have made inroads to this end, including adjusting the company’s portfolio mix to higher-margin businesses and affirming and strengthening Greif’s strong culture. In partnership with the company’s board chair, Rosgaard worked to make changes to the board composition and board routines to create more board engagement with the company’s strategy and transformation. Have these efforts been enough?

• HBS Working Paper

We show that when firms compete via supply functions, transferring high-cost capacity to the largest, most efficient firm—thereby diversifying its production technologies while increasing concentration—can lower prices by prompting the leader to expand output and competitors to aggressively defend market shares. However, large transfers prove anticompetitive, as sizable capacity differences discourage price undercutting. Exploiting renewable intermittencies in Colombia’s electricity market, where firms are technology-diversified, we consistently find a U-shape relationship between prices and concentration. Counterfactually reallocating 30% of competitors’ high-cost capacities to the leader cuts prices 10%, while larger transfers raise them, revealing how capacity and efficiency influence market power.

• Working Paper

This paper examines the short-run impact of the 2025 U.S. tariffs on consumer prices using a unique integration of high-frequency retail pricing data, product-level country-of-origin information, and detailed tariff classifications. By linking daily prices from major U.S. retailers to Harmonized System (HS) codes and import origins, we construct custom price indices that isolate the direct effects of tariff changes across product categories and trading partners. Our analysis reveals rapid pricing responses, though their magnitude remains modest relative to the announced tariff rates and varies by country of origin. Both imported and domestic goods are affected, suggesting broader pricing and supply chain spillovers. These findings offer timely evidence for policymakers, businesses, and consumers navigating the immediate consequences of trade policy changes.