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- Article
Choice Architects Reveal a Bias Toward Positivity and Certainty
By: David P. Daniels and Julian Zlatev
Biases influence important decisions, but little is known about whether and how individuals try to exploit others’ biases in strategic interactions. Choice architects—that is, people who present choices to others—must often decide between presenting choice sets with... View Details
- 2019
- Working Paper
Does Public Ownership and Accountability Increase Diversity? Evidence from IPOs
By: Rembrand Koning and John-Paul Ferguson
Does public ownership improve employment diversity? Organizational researchers theorize that increased transparency to regulators and the public should lead firms to conform to legal and social norms—but that social closure and decoupling should preserve the status... View Details
Keywords: IPO; Initial Public Offering; Employees; Diversity; Gender; Race; Entrepreneurship; United States
- January–February 2019
- Article
Who Loses When a Team Wins? Better Performance Increases Racial Bias
By: Letian Zhang
Although it is well known that organizational and team performance influences strategic decision-making, little is known about its impact on ascriptive inequality. This study proposes a performance effect on racial bias: higher team performance reduces managers’... View Details
Keywords: Discrimination; Race And Ethnicity; Performance Feedback; NBA; Prejudice and Bias; Race; Ethnicity; Performance; Sports
- December 2018 (Revised May 2019)
- Case
Bord Bia: Strategically Growing Irish Exports
By: Jose B. Alvarez, Forest L. Reinhardt and Emer Moloney
Agriculture was Ireland’s largest indigenous industry. Its agri-food sector was export driven, with almost 90% of production exported. Bord Bia was the Irish government agency charged with the promotion, trade development, and marketing of the Irish food, drink, and... View Details
Keywords: Agribusiness; Trends; Disruption; Communication Strategy; Experience and Expertise; Talent and Talent Management; Public Sector; Trade; Education; Food; Geography; Geographic Location; Rural Scope; Corporate Governance; Government Administration; Information; Knowledge Dissemination; Marketing Channels; Brands and Branding; Marketing Communications; Marketing Strategy; Planning; Business and Government Relations; Environmental Sustainability; Public Opinion; Business Strategy; Diversification; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Food and Beverage Industry; Public Administration Industry; Retail Industry; Republic of Ireland; United Kingdom; Europe
- Article
Optimality Bias in Moral Judgment
By: Julian De Freitas and Samuel G.B. Johnson
We often make decisions with incomplete knowledge of their consequences. Might people nonetheless expect others to make optimal choices, despite this ignorance? Here, we show that people are sensitive to moral optimality: that people hold moral agents accountable... View Details
- September 2018
- Article
Do Experts or Crowd-Based Models Produce More Bias? Evidence from Encyclopædia Britannica and Wikipedia
By: Shane Greenstein and Feng Zhu
Organizations today can use both crowds and experts to produce knowledge. While prior work compares the accuracy of crowd-produced and expert-produced knowledge, we compare bias in these two models in the context of contested knowledge, which involves subjective,... View Details
- August 28, 2018
- Article
Maintaining Trust When Agents Can Engage in Self-deception
By: Andres Babino, Hernan A. Makse, Rafael Di Tella and Mariano Sigman
The coexistence of cooperation and selfish instincts is a remarkable characteristic of humans. Psychological research has unveiled the cognitive mechanisms behind self-deception. Two important findings are that a higher ambiguity about others’ social preferences leads... View Details
- June 2018
- Teaching Note
Difficult Conversations and Dealing with Challenging Situations at Work
By: Boris Groysberg and Amram Migdal
Teaching Note for HBS Nos. 416-031, 416-032, 416-033, 416-034, 416-035, and 416-036. View Details
Keywords: Communication; Communication Intention and Meaning; Human Resources; Employee Relationship Management; Management Skills; Performance; Performance Evaluation; Personal Development and Career; Relationships; Groups and Teams; Social Psychology; Attitudes; Behavior; Conflict and Resolution; Conflict Management; Emotions; Perception; Personal Characteristics; Perspective; Power and Influence; Prejudice and Bias; Reputation; Satisfaction; Trust
- May 28, 2018
- Article
How Companies Can Identify Racial and Gender Bias in Their Customer Service
By: Alexandra C. Feldberg and Tami Kim
Research shows that minority customers — blacks and Asians — regularly receive worse customer service than whites in ways that are not immediately obvious to onlookers (or even managers). These results prompt a couple of questions for executives and managers. One, does... View Details
- Article
Consistent Belief in a Good True Self in Misanthropes and Three Interdependent Cultures
By: Julian De Freitas, Hagop Sarkissian, George E. Newman, Igor Grossman, Felipe De Brigard, Andres Luco and Joshua Knobe
People sometimes explain behavior by appealing to an essentialist concept of the self, often
referred to as the true self. Existing studies suggest that people tend to believe that the true self is
morally virtuous; that is deep inside, every person is motivated to... View Details
- May 2018
- Article
Selection and Market Reallocation: Productivity Gains from Multinational Production
By: Laura Alfaro and Maggie X. Chen
Assessing the productivity gains from multinational production has been a vital topic of economic research and policy debate. Positive aggregate productivity gains are often attributed to within-firm productivity improvement; however, an alternative, less emphasized... View Details
- March 2018
- Article
Scraped Data and Sticky Prices
By: Alberto Cavallo
I use daily prices collected from online retailers in five countries to study the impact of measurement bias on three common price stickiness statistics. Relative to previous results, I find that online prices have longer durations, with fewer price changes close to... View Details
- Article
Mitigating Bias in Adaptive Data Gathering via Differential Privacy
By: Seth Neel and Aaron Leon Roth
Data that is gathered adaptively—via bandit algorithms, for example—exhibits bias. This is true both when gathering simple numeric valued data—the empirical means kept track of by stochastic bandit algorithms are biased downwards—and when gathering more complicated... View Details
- 2018
- Chapter
Organizational Remedies for Discrimination
By: R. Ely and A. Feldberg
Laws now exist to protect employees from blatant forms of discrimination in hiring and promotion, but workplace discrimination persists in latent forms. These “second-generation” forms of bias arise in workplace structures, practices, and patterns of interaction that... View Details
- Article
Default Neglect in Attempts at Social Influence
By: Julian Zlatev, David P. Daniels, Hajin Kim and Margaret A. Neale
Current theories suggest that people understand how to exploit common biases to influence others. However, these predictions have received little empirical attention. We consider a widely studied bias with special policy relevance: the default effect, which is the... View Details
- Article
A Fair Game? Racial Bias and Repeated Interaction between NBA Coaches and Players
By: Letian Zhang
There is strong evidence of racial bias in organizations but little understanding of how it changes with repeated interaction. This study proposes that repeated interaction has the potential to reduce racial bias, but its moderating effects are limited to the treatment... View Details
- October 2017 (Revised November 2017)
- Case
NYC311
By: Constantine E. Kontokosta, Mitchell Weiss, Christine Snively and Sarah Gulick
Joe Morrisroe, executive director for NYC311, had some gut instincts but no definitive answer to the question he was just asked by one of the mayor’s deputies: “Are some communities being underserved by 311? How do we know we are hearing from the right people?” Founded... View Details
Keywords: New York City; NYC; 311; NYC311; Big Data; Equal Access; Bias; Data Analysis; Public Entrepreneurship; Urban Informatics; Predictive Analytics; Chief Data Officer; Data Analytics; Cities; City Leadership; Analytics and Data Science; Analysis; Prejudice and Bias; Entrepreneurship; Public Sector; City; Public Administration Industry; New York (city, NY)
- October 2017
- Case
Still Leading (B10): Louis Gossett Jr.— A New Role Erasing Racism
By: Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Ai-Ling Jamila Malone
Louis (Lou) Gossett Jr.’s exemplary life included a groundbreaking career in entertainment and a bold and audacious goal to erase racism. From the Broadway stage to television and the movie screen, Gossett earned major accolades in his field, notably becoming the first... View Details
- 2017
- Working Paper
Biased Beliefs About Random Samples: Evidence from Two Integrated Experiments
By: Daniel J. Benjamin, Don A. Moore and Matthew Rabin
This paper describes results of a pair of incentivized experiments on biases in judgments about random samples. Consistent with the Law of Small Numbers (LSN), participants exaggerated the likelihood that short sequences and random subsets of coin flips would be... View Details
- October 2017
- Article
The Size of the LGBT Population and the Magnitude of Anti-Gay Sentiment Are Substantially Underestimated
By: Katherine Baldiga Coffman, Lucas C. Coffman and Keith M. Marzilli Ericson
We demonstrate that widely used measures of anti-gay sentiment and the size of the LGBT population are misestimated, likely substantially. In a series of online experiments using a large and diverse but non-representative sample, we compare estimates from the standard... View Details