Headshot of Nien-hê Hsieh

Nien-hê Hsieh

Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration

Nien-hê Hsieh is the Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration in the General Management Unit at Harvard Business School. His research and teaching aims at helping business leaders and organizations determine and deliver on their responsibilities. He also studies what democratic values require for economic policies and institutions. Professor Hsieh teaches Leadership and Corporate Accountability (LCA) to first-year MBA students and Executive Education participants, and serves as Course Head for LCA. At Harvard University, he serves as Faculty Co-Director for the Justice, Health, and Democracy Impact Initiative at the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics, a Director at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, and on the Faculty Committee for the Scholars at Risk Program.

Professor Hsieh’s research centers on the question of whether and how managers, organzations, and economic institutions ought to be guided not only by considerations of efficiency, but also by values such as freedom and fairness and respect for basic rights and democracy. He has pursued this question in a variety of contexts, including the employment relationship, the operation of multinational enterprises in developing economies, and the ownership of productive property. Professor Hsieh also studies foundational aspects of this question, examining principles for rational decision making when choices involve multiple values that appear incomparable.
Professor Hsieh's work has been published in Business Ethics QuarterlyEconomics and Philosophy, The Journal of Political PhilosophyPhilosophy and Public AffairsSocial Theory and PracticeUtilitas, and various other journals. He is a past president of the Society for Business Ethics.

Professor Hsieh holds a B.A. in Economics from Swarthmore College, an M.Phil. in Politics from Oxford University, and a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University. He joined the faculty from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he was an associate professor of legal studies and business ethics and served as co-director of the Wharton Ethics Program. Before joining the faculty at Wharton in 2001, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard Business School, and he has held visiting fellowships at Harvard University, Oxford University, and the Research School for Social Sciences at the Australian National University.