Publications

May 2021
Article

Ideology and Composition Among an Online Crowd: Evidence From Wikipedians

By: Shane Greenstein, Grace Gu and Feng Zhu

Online communities bring together participants from diverse backgrounds and often face challenges in aggregating their opinions. We infer lessons from the experience of individual contributors to Wikipedia articles about U.S. politics. We identify two factors that... View Details

Keywords: User Segregation; Online Community; Contested Knowledge; Collective Intelligence; Ideology; Bias; Wikipedia; Knowledge Sharing; Perspective; Government and Politics

November–December 2019
Article

Making Sense of Soft Information: Interpretation Bias and Loan Quality

By: Dennis Campbell, Maria Loumioti and Regina Wittenberg Moerman

We explore whether behavioral biases impede the effective processing and interpretation of soft information in private lending. Taking advantage of the internal reporting system of a large federal credit union, we delineate three important biases likely to affect the... View Details

Keywords: Soft Information; Lending; Banking; Information; Financing and Loans; Banks and Banking; Decision Making

2007
Other Unpublished Work

Mind Over Matter? Similarities and Differences Between Perceived and Observed Networks

In spite of the rapid development of new methods for network analysis—relying on electronic data sources and sophisticated computational analysis—organizational scholars continue to rely largely on more traditional survey-based methods. We believe that the... View Details

Keywords: Surveys; Organizations; Social and Collaborative Networks

26 Apr 2017
Working Paper Summaries

Assessing the Quality of Quality Assessment: The Role of Scheduling

Keywords: by Maria Ibanez and Michael W. Toffel; Service; Food & Beverage

July 2017
Article

The Impact of 'Display-Set' Options on Decision-Making

By: Uma R. Karmarkar

The way a choice set is constructed can have a significant influence on how individuals perceive and evaluate their options and make decisions between them. Here, I examine whether a “display set” of visible but unavailable options can exert these same types of... View Details

Keywords: Decision Making Process; Heuristics; Similarity; Categorization; Marketing Insight; Marketing; Choice; Choice Architecture; Choice Sets; Display; Retail; Consumer Behavior; Decision Choices and Conditions; Decisions; Decision Making; Retail Industry; Consumer Products Industry

December 2020 (Revised April 2021)
Teaching Note

Women Entrepreneurs and Tech Ecosystems: One City, Two Realities, and Four Diverse Women

By: Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Joyce J. Kim

Four diverse women entrepreneurs launched their ventures in a thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem that was part of a shift to a creative technology-driven economy for Miami. Although Miami was rated the #1 U.S. city for startups in 2017, the region contained structural... View Details

Keywords: Women; Racism; Black Entrepreneurs; Entrepreneurship; Diversity; Gender; Race; Prejudice and Bias; Innovation and Invention; City; Culture; Miami

2008
Working Paper

Taste Heterogeneity, IIA, and the Similarity Critique

By: Thomas J. Steenburgh and Andrew Ainslie

The purpose of this paper is to show that allowing for taste heterogeneity does not address the similarity critique of discrete-choice models. Although IIA may technically be broken in aggregate, the mixed logit model allows neither a given individual nor the... View Details

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Mathematical Methods; Behavior; Prejudice and Bias

Research Summary

Analyst Disagreement, Forecast Bias and Stock Returns

We present evidence of inefficient information processing in equity markets by documenting that biases in analysts' earnings forecasts are reflected in stock prices. In particular, investors fail to account for analysts' tendency to withhold negative views and to issue... View Details

October 2020 (Revised April 2021)
Case

Women Entrepreneurs and Tech Ecosystems: One City, Two Realities, and Four Diverse Women

By: Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Joyce J. Kim

Four diverse women entrepreneurs launched their ventures in a thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem that was part of a shift to a creative technology-driven economy for Miami. Although Miami was rated the #1 U.S. city for startups in 2017, the region contained structural... View Details

Keywords: Female Entrepreneur; Entrepreneurial Ecosystems; Inclusion; Innovation ＆ Entrepreneurship; Racism; Sexism; Start-up; Entrepreneurship; Business Startups; Diversity; Gender; Race; Prejudice and Bias; Innovation and Invention; City; Culture; Miami

Educators

August 2020
Article

Machine Learning and Human Capital Complementarities: Experimental Evidence on Bias Mitigation

By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Evan Starr and Rajshree Agarwal

The use of machine learning (ML) for productivity in the knowledge economy requires considerations of important biases that may arise from ML predictions. We define a new source of bias related to incompleteness in real time inputs, which may result from strategic... View Details

Keywords: Machine Learning; Bias; Human Capital; Management; Strategy

Article

Preventing Fairness Gerrymandering: Auditing and Learning for Subgroup Fairness

By: Michael J Kearns, Seth Neel, Aaron Leon Roth and Zhiwei Steven Wu

The most prevalent notions of fairness in machine learning are statistical definitions: they fix a small collection of pre-defined groups, and then ask for parity of some statistic of the classifier (like classification rate or false positive rate) across these groups.... View Details

Keywords: Machine Learning; Algorithms; Fairness; Mathematical Methods

August 2011
Article

Coming Clean and Cleaning Up: Does Voluntary Self-Reporting Indicate Effective Self-Policing

By: Michael W. Toffel and Jodi L. Short

Regulatory agencies are increasingly establishing voluntary self-reporting programs both as an investigative tool and to encourage regulated firms to commit to policing themselves. We investigate whether voluntary self-reporting can reliably indicate effective... View Details

Keywords: Environmental Sustainability; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Programs; Governance Compliance; Corporate Disclosure; Law Enforcement

Spring 2016
Article

The Billion Prices Project: Using Online Prices for Inflation Measurement and Research

By: Alberto Cavallo and Roberto Rigobon

New data-gathering techniques, often referred to as “Big Data” have the potential to improve statistics and empirical research in economics. In this paper we describe our work with online data at the Billion Prices Project at MIT and discuss key lessons for both... View Details

Keywords: Billion Prices Project; Online Scraped Data; Online Price Index; Economics; Research; Price; Analytics and Data Science

January 2011 (Revised March 2011)
Case

Development and Promotion at North Atlantic Hospital

By: Boris Groysberg, Lisa Leffert, Kerry Herman and Libby Williams

Dr. Elizabeth Harris, Chair of the Department of Anesthesiology (DA) at North Atlantic Hospital (NAH), faces several significant challenges. Staff satisfaction surveys confirmed her assessment that department faculty morale was low, the tenure and promotion system was... View Details

Keywords: Training; Employees; Retention; Performance Evaluation; Personal Development and Career; Motivation and Incentives; Health Industry

Educators

September 2021
Article

Gender Stereotypes in Deliberation and Team Decisions

By: Katherine B. Coffman, Clio Bryant Flikkema and Olga Shurchkov

We explore how groups deliberate and decide on ideas in an experiment with communication. We find that gender biases play a significant role in which group members are chosen to answer on behalf of the group. Conditional on the quality of their ideas, individuals are... View Details

Keywords: Gender Differences; Stereotypes; Teams; Economic Experiments; Gender; Prejudice and Bias; Groups and Teams; Perception