About

Meghan Busse joined the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in 2008 as an Associate Professor of Strategy. Prior to her tenure at Kellogg, she was on the faculty of the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley and at the Yale School of Management. Her research initially focused on market structure and competition, with particular interest in pricing and price discrimination across various industries including cellular telephones, airlines, and automobiles. More recently, her work has centered on energy and environmental economics, investigating how firms respond to economic incentives created by climate and energy policies and how these strategic responses influence the effectiveness of such policies. Professor Busse's academic background includes a PhD in economics from MIT, and she is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. She teaches core strategy courses and electives on energy and climate at Kellogg. Her research interests encompass energy and environmental economics and policy, market structure and competition, and business strategy. She has received multiple teaching awards and holds editorial positions, including editor of the Journal of Industrial Economics. Her professional experience includes roles as a faculty research fellow at the NBER and visiting researcher at UC Berkeley.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Art
• Business
• Commerce
• Art history
• Programming language
• Advertising

Selected publications

• Enterprise Rent-A-Car in the US

  Kellogg School of Management eBooks · 2025-01-01

  book1st authorCorresponding
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• MoviePass: Unhappy Ending or Reboot?

  Kellogg School of Management Cases · 2024-12-06

  article1st authorCorresponding

  MoviePass is a movie ticket subscription service that grew slowly between 2011 and 2016 under its founder, Stacy Spikes. In 2016 and 2017, the company brought in a new CEO, Mitch Lowe, and a new majority owner, Ted Farnsworth, who cut the monthly subscription price to $9.95. The service grew meteorically but struggled to make the subscription ticket business profitable because $9.95 per month could not cover the cost of the movie tickets that MoviePass had to buy on behalf of its customers. According to Farnsworth, turning a profit on the subscription business was never the main idea; it was just a path to an advertising and marketing business built on the data. (The case provides some data on Facebook that enables students to benchmark this claim.) The original MoviePass went bankrupt in 2020 but was reincarnated in 2022 by Stacy Spikes with a business model that differed in several significant ways from the MoviePass of 2016-2018: the new model was a credit system, the subscription price was higher, and it had the support of a network of participating theaters.

  PublisherDOI

• Enterprise Rent-A-Car in the US

  Kellogg School of Management Cases · 2024-01-16

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Little more than a year had passed since Chrissy Taylor, granddaughter of the company's founder and daughter of its longest-serving CEO, had been promoted, in December 2019, to CEO of Enterprise Holdings, the parent company of Enterprise Rent-A-Car. Taylor had spent her entire career in the family-owned business, but like all Enterprise employees, she started as a management trainee at a branch office. “Just like everybody else in our upper management, I started behind a rental counter,” Taylor said in an interview at the time of her promotion. “I worked my way up in various roles, learning the job by doing it: washing cars, picking up customers.” She was determined to continue the legacy of her family's company, which her father famously described as being committed to three things: “listening to and satisfying our customers, creating opportunities for our employees, and achieving long-term, sustainable growth.”

  PublisherDOI

• Boeing and Airbus: Large Commercial Aircraft, 2000–2021

  Kellogg School of Management Cases · 2024-07-15 · 1 citations

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  At the dawn of the twenty-first century, Boeing and Airbus, the leading manufacturers of large commercial aircraft, were locked in a battle for market share that drove down prices for their new planes. At about the same time, the two industry heavyweights began developing new aircraft families to address their projected future market needs. Large commercial aircraft (generally defined as those carrying more than 100 passengers) were among the world's most complex and expensive manufactured products. A wide-body jet comprising millions of parts and nearly 200 miles of wires and tubing could be priced at $300 million or more. Design and manufacturing took up to ten years, from initial research to a finished product. The process required large numbers of highly trained and specialized workers. It also took large amounts of capital; recent aircraft programs were estimated to cost more than $13 billion. Manufacturers had to invest in extensive and highly specialized facilities and equipment and commit to high attendant fixed costs. To maximize their development investment, manufacturers created aircraft “families” that used the same airframe or body as a platform for multiple models. Within each family were aircraft that varied in numerous dimensions, the most important of which were passenger capacity and flight range–critical determinants of the airline's strategy. In October 2007, the Airbus superjumbo A380 made its first flight. The A380 carried more passengers than any other plane in history and had as a solution to increased congestion at global mega-hub airports. Four years later, the Boeing 787, a smaller long-range aircraft, was launched to serve secondary cities in a point-to-point network. When these planes made their inaugural flights, the global environment had significantly changed from when they were first planned. China and other emerging Asian economies were growing rapidly, spawning immediate and long-term demand for more aircraft. At the same time, changes to the market for air travel had created opportunities for new products. These opportunities had not gone unnoticed by potential new entrants, which were positioning themselves to compete against the market leaders. The case provides students with an opportunity to analyze the profit potential of the global aircraft manufacturing industry in 2002 and 2011. Students can also identify the actions of participants that weakened or intensified the pressure on profits within the industry.

  PublisherDOI

• MoviePass: Unhappy Ending or Reboot?

  Kellogg School of Management eBooks · 2024-01-01

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Boeing and Airbus: Large Commercial Aircraft, 2000–2021

  Kellogg School of Management eBooks · 2024-01-01

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  PublisherDOI

• Grocery Delivery in the United States: Trying to Bag Profits

  Kellogg School of Management eBooks · 2022 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Business
  • Advertising
  • Commerce
  PublisherDOI

• Apple’s Custom Chips: A Genius Decision?

  Kellogg School of Management eBooks · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Art
  PublisherDOI

• Apple's custom chips : A Genius Decision?

  Kellogg School of Management Cases · 2022-08-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Within a decade, Apple twice changed its mind about where the boundaries of the firm should lie. In 2010 the company introduced an Apple-designed custom “system on a chip” (SoC) for its iPhone and iPad products, which replaced non-customized Samsung chips. Then in 2020, Apple announced that it would end its 15-year partnership with Intel and begin designing the microprocessors inside its new Mac computers. This was the second time Apple had switched microprocessors in its computers. From 1994 to 2005, Apple computers ran on IBM PowerPC microprocessors, which were incompatible with the dominant Intel x86 chip architecture. At the time, Apple had only a 4 percent share of the personal computer market. In 2005, the company announced it would switch its Mac computers to Intel chips to take advantage of Intel's industry-standard architecture and superior product roadmap, which would enable Apple to build the products it envisioned. In November 2020, Apple unveiled three Mac computers that used its new custom M1 processor. Apple's custom chip contained numerous special-purpose accelerators that enabled performance and capabilities not accessible with off-the-shelf chips. As it did when it switched to Intel microprocessors, Apple provided software emulation technology that enabled existing Intel-based apps to run on the new Macs until they were updated to work with the new Apple chips. Huawei and Samsung had developed custom SoCs for their smartphones, but no other personal computer company followed Apple's path.

  PublisherDOI

• Grocery Delivery in the US: Trying to Bag Profits

  Kellogg School of Management Cases · 2022-02-07

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Since 1989, US companies have been trying--mostly unsuccessfully--to marry the ease of ordering groceries online with the convenience of home delivery. All have learned that the combination of customer demands and logistical challenges has made it difficult to be profitable in this space. Unlike retailers of standard items (such as books), sellers of groceries had to exercise judgment when selecting fresh meat, fruits, and vegetables to satisfy consumers' tastes. Once selected, many items needed to be packed in specific ways and required timely delivery to maintain freshness and quality. In addition, the “last mile” of delivery was costly and highly variable between high-density urban customers and those in more dispersed suburban and rural communities. Customers were familiar with in-store prices and resisted paying more, a preference reinforced by Amazon and other online retailers, which had created an expectation that online prices should be the same as—or even lower than—prices in stores. In addition, customers had a strong aversion to delivery charges, even if delivery saved them time. They also much preferred the convenience of narrow time windows for delivery and had a low tolerance for mistakes.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Florian Zettelmeyer

  44 shared

• Christopher R. Knittel

  National Bureau of Economic Research

  17 shared

• Duncan Simester

  14 shared

• Jorge Silva‐Risso

  University of California, Riverside

  14 shared

• Severin Borenstein

  9 shared

• Andrew B. Bernard

  9 shared

• Ryan Kellogg

  7 shared

• Devin G. Pope

  5 shared

Awards & honors

• Executive MBA Program Outstanding Teaching Award (EMBA 137)
• Sidney J Levy Teaching Award, Kellogg School of Management
• L.G. Lavengood Outstanding Professor of the Year Award, Kell…
• Nominee for L.G. Lavengood Outstanding Professor of the Year…
• Sidney J. Levy Teaching Award, 2018-2019