Bharat N. Anand

Bharat Anand is a Professor in the Strategy Unit at Harvard Business School, where he currently teaches and heads the first year Strategy course, and co-chairs the school's executive education program on media strategies. He received an AB in Economics, magna cum laude , from Harvard University, and his PhD in Economics from Princeton University. At Princeton, he was nominated to the Princeton Society of Fellows.

Professor Anand's research is in applied and empirical industrial organization, and corporate strategy.

His current research examines competition in information goods markets, with a primary focus on media and entertainment. His research focuses on two central strategic challenges that firms face in these markets. The first is the challenge of "getting noticed" amongst the increasing clutter of alternatives that are widely available to consumers. The second is the challenge that firms face in "getting paid" for what they produce, since property rights over inputs and outputs are often difficult to establish in these markets.

To understand how firms respond to the challenge of getting noticed, Professor Anand's recent papers employ novel datasets and empirical methods to shed light on the roles of branding and advertising as vehicles of matching and information rather than instruments of persuasion and shaping tastes. His case-based research explores the consequences of these findings for business and corporate strategy, including vertical integration and media conglomeration. In ongoing work, he has examined competition between specialist financiers versus corporations in markets for talent, the industrial organization of the media and implications for bias in the media, and why media conglomerates exist.

Professor Anand has also written several papers on strategies that firms employ to tackle the challenge of "getting paid" when property rights over assets are weak or insecure. In many sectors, property rights over knowledge and information are weak as they are embodied in employees, competitors can copy, or customers can pirate. In his research, he has examined how firms capture value in these settings. His work examines the financing of R&D, the structure of technology licensing contracts, and the industrial organization of financial intermediation markets.

His work on strategic alliances provided the intellectual platform for Andersen Consulting's Partnership Value Assessment methodology for the valuation of such alliances. His work has been published in various journals in economics and strategy, and he has written numerous case studies.

At Harvard, Anand has also taught the second-year elective course in Corporate Strategy, for which he received the Faculty Award for Teaching Excellence from the MBA class of 2006 and the MBA class of 2007, and in several executive education programs. Prior to coming to HBS, he was on the faculty at the Yale School of Management.

Anand lives in Wellesley, MA with his wife, Anju, who is a cardiologist, and their daughter Rhea.