Publications

SSRN

2023
Article

Provable Detection of Propagating Sampling Bias in Prediction Models

By: Pavan Ravishankar, Qingyu Mo, Edward McFowland III and Daniel B. Neill

With an increased focus on incorporating fairness in machine learning models, it becomes imperative not only to assess and mitigate bias at each stage of the machine learning pipeline but also to understand the downstream impacts of bias across stages. Here we consider... View Details

November 2012 (Revised July 2013)
Case

Gerry Pasciucco at AIG Financial Products

By: Gautam Mukunda and Thomas J. DeLong

Gerry Pasciucco was appointed to lead American International Group's Financial Products (AIGFP) group after the government bailout of AIG in 2008 and charged with the task of shutting down the division while minimizing the government's losses. AIGFP's failed trades had... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Accountability; Ethics; Crisis Management; Financial Crisis; Management Teams; Business and Government Relations; Financial Services Industry; United States

Educators

2021
Case

Leading Through Challenging Times: Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms

By: Michael Norris, Rawi Abdelal and Kimberlyn Leary

Keisha Lance Bottoms took office as Mayor of Atlanta in 2018 with a progressive agenda and hopes to “keep Atlanta moving forward, leaving no one behind.” She was an Atlanta native, had previously served as a local judge and city councilor, and came into office with... View Details

Keywords: Leadership; City; Problems and Challenges; Health Pandemics; Social Issues; Economy; Atlanta; United States

Article

Overcoming the Outcome Bias: Making Intentions Matter

By: Ovul Sezer, Ting Zhang, Francesca Gino and Max Bazerman

People often make the well-documented mistake of paying too much attention to the outcomes of others’ actions while neglecting information about the original intentions leading to those outcomes. In five experiments, we examine interventions aimed at reducing this... View Details

Keywords: Outcome Bias; Intentions; Joint Evaluation; Judgment; Separate Evaluation; Goals and Objectives; Prejudice and Bias; Judgments; Performance Evaluation; Outcome or Result

Samuel L. Hayes holds the Jacob H. Schiff Chair in Investment Banking Emeritus, at the Harvard Business School. He has taught at the School since 1970, prior to which he was a tenured member of the faculty of the Columbia University Graduate School of Business. He... View Details

2021
Book

Time for Reparations: A Global Perspective

By: Jaqueline Bhabha, Margareta Matache and Caroline M. Elkins

In this sweeping international perspective on reparations, Time for Reparations makes the case that past state injustice—be it slavery or colonization, forced sterilization or widespread atrocities—has enduring consequences that generate ongoing harm, which... View Details

Keywords: Reparations; Slavery; Colonization; Structural Racism; State Injustice

April 2025 (Revised June 2025)
Case

Governing Sustainability in a Shifting Context (A)

By: Lynn S. Paine and Will Hurwitz

In early 2025, boards of directors had to rethink corporate responsibility and sustainability efforts amid rapidly-shifting social, legal, regulatory, and economic forces. While just a few years earlier, calls to address racial justice and climate change reached into... View Details

Educators

Web

Browse All Articles, Research, & Case Studies - HBS Working Knowledge

businesses afford to exclude the roughly one in three working Americans with criminal records from the economy? In a case study, Paul Gompers explores the challenges a social justice startup encounters in helping the formerly... View Details

Robert J. Dolan

Robert J. Dolan is the Baker Foundation Professor at Harvard Business School. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester and began his academic career in 1976 as a faculty member at the Graduate School of Business of the University of Chicago. He joined... View Details

Article

Social Technology: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Improving Care for Older Adults

By: Arthur Kleinman, Hongtu Chen, Sue E. Levkoff, Ann Forsyth, David E. Bloom, Winnie Yip, Tarun Khanna, Conor J. Walsh, David Perry, Ellen W. Seely, Anne S. Kleinman, Yan Zhang, Yuan Wang, Jun Jing, Tianshu Pan, Ning An, Zhenggang Bai, Jiexiu Wang, Qing Liu and Fawwaz Habbal

Population aging is a defining demographic reality of our era. It is associated with an increase in the societal burden of delivering care to older adults with chronic conditions or frailty. How to integrate global population aging and technology development to help... View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Age; Service Delivery; Information Technology; Collaborative Innovation and Invention

05 Apr 2011
Working Paper Summaries

The Power of Political Voice: Women’s Political Representation and Crime in India

Keywords: by Lakshmi Iyer, Anandi Mani, Prachi Mishra & Petia Topalova

2017
Chapter

Corporate Moral Agency, Positive Duties, and Purpose

By: Nien-hê Hsieh

A long-standing question in business ethics is whether business enterprises are themselves moral agents with distinct moral responsibilities. To date, the debate about corporate moral agency has focused on responsibility for past wrongdoing that involves violating... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Moral Sensibility; Mission and Purpose

Web

Curriculum - Case Method Project

wish to use it.] Coverage: 1877 – 1880; post-bellum South; rise of segregated public schools; jury system; race and racism in the criminal justice system; federalism; U.S. Supreme Court; Rives v. Virginia; Ex Parte Virginia; origins of... View Details

2018
Book

Markets, Morals, Politics: Jealousy of Trade and the History of Political Thought

By: Béla Kapossy, Isaac Nakhimovsky, Sophus A. Reinert and Richard Whatmore

When Istvan Hont died in 2013, the world lost a giant of intellectual history. A leader of the Cambridge School of Political Thought, Hont argued passionately for a global-historical approach to political ideas. To better understand the development of liberalism, he... View Details

Keywords: Morals; Politics; Istvan Hont; Jealousy Of Trade; Enlightenment; Economic Nationalism; Markets; Moral Sensibility; Government and Politics; Trade; History

27 Sep 2018
Research & Ideas

Religion in the Workplace: What Managers Need to Know

Once the case reached the US Supreme Court in 2015, Justice Antonin Scalia said, “This is really easy.” He announced the court was siding with Elauf 8 to 1, ruling that under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it’s illegal to... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman; Food & Beverage; Apparel & Accessories

2018
Introduction

Introduction

By: Sophus A. Reinert

BOOK ABSTRACT: When Istvan Hont died in 2013, the world lost a giant of intellectual history. A leader of the Cambridge School of Political Thought, Hont argued passionately for a global-historical approach to political ideas. To better understand the development of... View Details

Keywords: Markets; Moral Sensibility; Government and Politics; Trade; History