Publications
Publications
Show Results For
- All HBS Web
(836)
- Faculty Publications (164)
- 2016
- Working Paper
Explaining the Persistence of Gender Inequality: The Work-Family Narrative as a Social Defense Against the 24/7 Work Culture
By: Irene Padavic, Robin J. Ely and Erin M. Reid
It is widely accepted that the conflict women experience between family obligations and professional jobs’ long hours lies at the heart of their stalled advancement. Yet research suggests that this “work-family narrative” is partial at best: men, too, experience... View Details
- Article
Physical and Situational Inequality on Airplanes Predict Air Rage
By: K. A. DeCelles and Michael I. Norton
We posit that the modern airplane is a social microcosm of class-based society, and that the increasing incidence of “air rage” can be understood through the lens of inequality. Research on inequality typically examines the effects of relatively fixed, macrostructural... View Details
- 2016
- Working Paper
Popular Acceptance of Inequality Due to Innate Brute Luck and Support for Classical Benefit-Based Taxation
U.S. survey respondents' views on distributive justice are shown to differ in two specific, related ways from what is conventionally assumed in modern optimal tax research. A large share of respondents, and in some cases a large majority, resist the full equalization... View Details
- February 2016
- Article
Unearned Status Gain: Evidence from a Global Language Mandate
By: Tsedal Neeley and Tracy Dumas
Theories of status rarely address unearned status gain—an unexpected and unsolicited increase in relative standing, prestige, or worth, attained not through individual effort or achievement, but from a shift in organizationally valued characteristics. We build theory... View Details
- 2015
- Working Paper
Incentives versus Reciprocity: Insights from a Field Experiment
By: Doug J. Chung and Das Narayandas
We conduct a field experiment in which we vary the sales force compensation scheme at an Asian enterprise that sells consumer durable goods. With variation generated by the experimental treatments, we model sales force performance to identify the effectiveness of... View Details
- Article
Should Business Have Human Rights Obligations?
By: Nien-he Hsieh
Businesses and their managers are increasingly called upon to take on human rights obligations. Focusing on the case of multinational enterprises (MNEs), the paper argues we have reason to reject assigning human rights obligations to business enterprises and their... View Details
- January 2015
- Background Note
Note on Economic Inequality (2015)
By: Clayton S. Rose and Aldo Sesia
For over half a century, most of the world's economies have enjoyed steady growth and prosperity. However, beginning in the 1980s, and continuing essentially unabated to the present, the gap between the "haves" and the "have-nots" in developed countries has widened,... View Details
- December 2014 (Revised November 2015)
- Case
Governing the 'Chinese Dream': Corruption, Inequality and the Rule of Law
By: Rafael Di Tella, Meg Rithmire and Kait Szydlowski
Xi Jinping assumed his position as head of China's fifth generation of leaders in 2012. Xi was head of both the People's Republic of China and the Chinese Communist Party, which had ruled China since 1949. Xi inherited a country far more unequal than the one that Mao... View Details
- September 2, 2014
- Article
Development of In-Group Favoritism in Children's Third-Party Punishment of Selfishness
By: Jillian J. Jordan, Katherine McAuliffe and Felix Warneken
When enforcing norms for cooperative behavior, human adults sometimes exhibit in-group bias. For example, third-party observers punish selfish behaviors committed by out-group members more harshly than similar behaviors committed by in-group members. Although evidence... View Details
- Article
Getting the Most Out of Giving: Concretely Framing a Prosocial Goal Maximizes Happiness
By: Melanie Rudd, Jennifer Aaker and Michael I. Norton
Across six field and laboratory experiments, participants assigned a more concretely-framed prosocial goal (e.g., making someone smile or increasing recycling) felt happier and reported creating greater personal happiness after performing a goal-directed act of... View Details
- September 2014
- Article
Income Inequality and Social Preferences for Redistribution and Compensation Differentials
By: William R. Kerr
In cross-sectional studies, countries with greater income inequality typically exhibit less support for government-led redistribution and greater acceptance of wage inequality (e.g., United States versus Western Europe). If individual nations evolve along this pattern,... View Details
- June–July 2014
- Article
Language as a Lightning Rod: Power Contests, Emotion Regulation, and Subgroup Dynamics in Global Teams
By: Pamela J. Hinds, Tsedal Neeley and Catherine Durnell Cramton
Through an ethnographic study comprised of interviews with and observations of 96 globally distributed members in six software development teams, we propose a model that captures how asymmetries in language fluency contribute to an us vs. them dynamic so common in... View Details
- March 2014
- Case
Inequality and Growth in the 'Chinese Dream'
By: Rafael Di Tella, Meg Rithmire and Kaitlyn Szydlowski
Xi Jinping assumed his position as head of China's fifth generation of leaders in 2012. Xi was head of both the People's Republic of China and the Chinese Communist Party, which had ruled China since 1949. Xi inherited a country far more unequal than the one that Mao... View Details
- 2014
- Article
Paying It Forward: Generalized Reciprocity and the Limits of Generosity
By: Kurt Gray, Adrian F. Ward and Michael I. Norton
When people are the victims of greed or recipients of generosity, their first impulse is often to pay back that behavior in kind. What happens when people cannot reciprocate, but instead have the chance to be cruel or kind to someone entirely different—to pay it... View Details
- 2013
- Working Paper
Inequality and Decision Making: Imagining a New Line of Inquiry
By: David Moss, Anant Thaker and Howard Rudnick
The substantial increase in inequality in the United States over the past three decades has provoked considerable debate, with some analysts characterizing rising inequality as among the greatest threats facing the nation and others dismissing it as little more than a... View Details
- December 2012
- Article
Reflected Knowledge and Trust in Global Collaboration
By: Mark Mortensen and Tsedal Neeley
Scholars argue that direct knowledge about distant colleagues is crucial for fostering trust in global collaboration. However, their arguments focus mainly on how trust accrues from knowledge about distant collaborators' personal characteristics, relationships, and... View Details
- 2017
- Working Paper
Inequality in Knowledge Repository Use in Scaling Service Operations
By: Melissa A. Valentine, Tom Fangyun Tan, Bradley R. Staats and Amy C. Edmondson
To scale service operations requires sharing knowledge across the organization. However, prior work highlights that individuals on the periphery of organizational knowledge sharing networks may struggle to access useful knowledge at work. A knowledge repository (KR)... View Details
- June 2012
- Article
Sweeping Dishonesty under the Rug: How Unethical Actions Lead to Forgetting of Moral Rules
By: Lisa L. Shu and Francesca Gino
Dishonest behavior can have various psychological outcomes. We examine whether one consequence could be the forgetting of moral rules. In four experiments, participants were given the opportunity to behave dishonestly, and thus earn undeserved money, by over-reporting... View Details
- March 2012
- Article
The Incentive Bubble
By: Mihir Desai
The past three decades have seen American capitalism quietly transformed by a single, powerful idea—that financial markets are a suitable tool for measuring performance and structuring compensation. Stock instruments for managers, high-powered incentive contracts for... View Details
- February 2012
- Article
Walking the Talk in Multiparty Bargaining: An Experimental Investigation
By: Kathleen L. McGinn, Katherine L. Milkman and Markus Noth
We study the framing effects of communication on payoffs in multiparty bargaining. Communication has been shown to be more truthful and revealing than predicted in equilibrium. Because talk is preference revealing, it may effectively frame bargaining around a logic of... View Details