Negotiation, Organizations & Markets

- October 18, 2024
- Article
Why Workplace Well-Being Programs Don’t Achieve Better Outcomes

By: Jazz Croft, Acacia Parks and Ashley Whillans

By 2026, global corporate spending on wellness programs is set to top $94.6 billion, yet anticipated improvements in well-being are not being realized, and, in fact, mental health needs are continuing to rise around the world. Drawing on a large body of recent research, the authors argue that well-being programs are failing, in part, because they focus on individual solutions rather than the broader systems that affect workers. The authors offer research-backed solutions to companies looking to better predict mental health improvements and increase the return-on-investment in their well-being programs.
- October 18, 2024
- Article
Why Workplace Well-Being Programs Don’t Achieve Better Outcomes

By: Jazz Croft, Acacia Parks and Ashley Whillans

By 2026, global corporate spending on wellness programs is set to top $94.6 billion, yet anticipated improvements in well-being are not being realized, and, in fact, mental health needs are continuing to rise around the world. Drawing on a large body of recent research, the authors argue that well-being programs are failing, in part, because they...
- September 2024
- Case
Ming Min Hui at Boston Ballet

By: Edward H. Chang, David Allen and Annelena Lobb

This case asks how Ming Min Hui, the newly appointed executive director of Boston Ballet, should ensure that the company stays true to its art form yet relevant to its times. Hui stood out among ballet leaders as a young, Asian American woman with a Harvard Business School MBA and a background in finance. She had worked at the Ballet for eight years as chief of staff and chief financial officer, and she had helped steer it through the double crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic and the racial reckoning of Black Lives Matter. Now at the helm of one of the foremost ballet companies in the United States, she confronted evolving demographics, shifting audience habits, and a financial environment that was becoming ever more challenging. Hui and the Ballet were also committed to making an historically exclusionary art form more inclusive. How could she get the balance between past, present, and future right?
- September 2024
- Case
Ming Min Hui at Boston Ballet

By: Edward H. Chang, David Allen and Annelena Lobb

This case asks how Ming Min Hui, the newly appointed executive director of Boston Ballet, should ensure that the company stays true to its art form yet relevant to its times. Hui stood out among ballet leaders as a young, Asian American woman with a Harvard Business School MBA and a background in finance. She had worked at the Ballet for eight...
- September 2024
- Case
Not Everyone’s Cup of Coffee: Organizing the Café Industry

By: Jillian Jordan and Kathleen McGinn
- September 2024
- Case
Not Everyone’s Cup of Coffee: Organizing the Café Industry

By: Jillian Jordan and Kathleen McGinn

About the Unit

The NOM Unit seeks to understand and improve the design and management of systems in which people make decisions: that is, design and management of negotiations, organizations, and markets. In addition, members of the group share an abiding interest in the micro foundations of these phenomena.

Our work is grounded in the power of strategic interaction to encourage individuals and organizations to create and sustain value (in negotiations, in organizations, and in markets). We explore these interactions through diverse approaches: Although many of us have training in economics, we also have members with backgrounds in social psychology, sociology, and law.

NOM seeks to apply rigorous scientific methods to real-world problems -- producing research and pedagogy that is compelling to both the academy and practitioners.

Recent Publications

Why Workplace Well-Being Programs Don’t Achieve Better Outcomes

By: Jazz Croft, Acacia Parks and Ashley Whillans

October 18, 2024 |
Article |
Harvard Business Review Digital Articles

By 2026, global corporate spending on wellness programs is set to top $94.6 billion, yet anticipated improvements in well-being are not being realized, and, in fact, mental health needs are continuing to rise around the world. Drawing on a large body of recent research, the authors argue that well-being programs are failing, in part, because they focus on individual solutions rather than the broader systems that affect workers. The authors offer research-backed solutions to companies looking to better predict mental health improvements and increase the return-on-investment in their well-being programs.

Keywords: Organizational Culture; Employees; Well-being

Citation

Read Now

Deepa Bachu: Design Thinking at Pensaar

By: Thomas Graeber and Joshua Schwartzstein

October 2024 |
Teaching Note |
Faculty Research

Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 923-026.

Citation

Purchase

Teaching Note for Río Curicó: A Six-party Negotiation Exercise

By: Julian Zlatev, Kathleen L. Valley and Rachel Drapper

October 2024 |
Teaching Note |
Faculty Research

Citation

Purchase

Teaching Note for Endesa Chile: Raising the Ralco Dam

By: Julian Zlatev, Kathleen L. McGinn, Katherine Chen and Rachel Drapper

September 2024 |
Teaching Note |
Faculty Research

Teaching Note for HBS Case Nos. 906-014 and 906-015.

Citation

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Ming Min Hui at Boston Ballet

By: Edward H. Chang, David Allen and Annelena Lobb

September 2024 |
Case |
Faculty Research

This case asks how Ming Min Hui, the newly appointed executive director of Boston Ballet, should ensure that the company stays true to its art form yet relevant to its times. Hui stood out among ballet leaders as a young, Asian American woman with a Harvard Business School MBA and a background in finance. She had worked at the Ballet for eight years as chief of staff and chief financial officer, and she had helped steer it through the double crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic and the racial reckoning of Black Lives Matter. Now at the helm of one of the foremost ballet companies in the United States, she confronted evolving demographics, shifting audience habits, and a financial environment that was becoming ever more challenging. Hui and the Ballet were also committed to making an historically exclusionary art form more inclusive. How could she get the balance between past, present, and future right?

Keywords: Arts; Change; Diversity; Gender; Race; Entertainment; Theater Entertainment; Leadership; Management; Nonprofit Organizations; Entertainment and Recreation Industry; Music Industry; United States; Massachusetts; Boston

Citation

Educators

Not Everyone’s Cup of Coffee: Organizing the Café Industry

By: Jillian Jordan and Kathleen McGinn

September 2024 |
Case |
Faculty Research

Citation

Educators

Purchase

Finance Without Exotic Risk

By: Pedro Bordalo, Nicola Gennaioli, Rafael La Porta and Andrei Shleifer

2024 |
Working Paper |
Faculty Research

We address the joint hypothesis problem in cross-sectional asset pricing by using measured analyst expectations of earnings growth. We construct a firm-level measure of Expectations Based Returns (EBRs) that uses analyst forecast errors and revisions and shuts down any cross-sectional differences in required returns. We obtain three results. First, variation in EBRs accounts for a large chunk of cross-sectional return spreads in value, investment, size, and momentum factors. Second, time variation in these spreads is predictable, and proxied by predictable time variation in EBRs. This result holds even controlling for scaled price variables, which may capture time varying required return differentials. Third, firm characteristics typically viewed as capturing risk predict disappointment of expectations (and of EBRs). Overall, return spreads typically attributed to exotic risk factors are explained by predictable movements in non-rational expectations of firms’ earnings growth.

Keywords: Investment Return; Financial Markets; Behavioral Finance; Risk and Uncertainty

Citation

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Behavioral Attenuation

By: Thomas Graeber, Benjamin Enke, Ryan Oprea and Jeffrey Yang

2024 |
Working Paper |
Faculty Research

We report a large-scale examination of behavioral attenuation: due to information-processing constraints, the elasticity of people’s decisions with respect to economic fundamentals is generally too small. We implement more than 30 experiments, 20 of which were crowd-sourced from leading experts. These experiments cover a broad range of economic decisions, from choice and valuation to belief formation, from strategic games to generic optimization problems, involving investment, savings, effort supply, product demand, taxes, environmental externalities, fairness, cooperation, beauty contests, information disclosure, search, policy evaluation, memory, forecasting and inference. In 93% of our experiments, the elasticity of decisions to fundamentals decreases in participants’ cognitive uncertainty, our measure of the severity of information-processing constraints. Moreover, in decision problems with objective solutions, we observe elasticities that are universally smaller than is optimal. Many widely-studied decision anomalies represent special cases of behavioral attenuation. We discuss both its limits and why it often gives rise to the classic phenomenon of diminishing sensitivity.

Keywords: Decisions; Behavior; Cognition and Thinking; Behavioral Finance

Citation

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