Publications

Educators

Research Summary

Improvisation

My research focuses on how teams and individuals improvise. Since my days as a jazz trumpet player, I have been fascinated by how groups and individuals perform novel actions in real time. My research investigates these improvisational processes in three... View Details

Profile

Laura Mackay

conferences, classes, and the healthcare club, and with alumni mentors and individuals in the broader Harvard and Boston communities, I have been exposed to a plethora of ideas and career opportunities. I have thus been able to explore... View Details

Keywords: Health Care; Technology

14 Aug 2023
Blog Post

Crossing the Bridge: A Reflection on the HKS/HBS Joint Degree Program

Association which has provided me access to Harvard leadership and insight to capital planning and university affairs. Just one of these individual experiences alone could be considered life-changing, and consequently I feel my life... View Details

Article

Estimating the Effects of Large Shareholders Using a Geographic Instrument

Large shareholders may play an important role for firm performance and policies, but identifying this empirically presents a challenge due to the endogeneity of ownership structures. We develop and test an empirical framework, which allows us to separate selection from... View Details

Keywords: Business and Shareholder Relations; Performance; Policy; Ownership; Selection and Staffing; Business Headquarters; Geography; Framework

2009
Working Paper

Estimating the Effects of Large Shareholders Using a Geographic Instrument

By: Bo Becker, Henrik Cronqvist and Rudiger Fahlenbrach

Large shareholders may play an important role for firm performance and policies, but identifying this empirically presents a challenge due to the endogeneity of ownership structures. We develop and test an empirical framework which allows us to separate selection from... View Details

Keywords: Business Headquarters; Geographic Location; Corporate Governance; Governance Controls; Performance Effectiveness; Business and Shareholder Relations; Mathematical Methods

Read Now

November 2013
Article

Learning from My Successes and from Others' Failures: Evidence from Minimally Invasive Cardiac Surgery

By: D. KC, B. Staats and F. Gino

Learning from past experience is central to an organization's adaptation and survival. A key dimension of prior experience is whether an outcome was successful or unsuccessful. While empirical studies have investigated the effects of success and failure in... View Details

Keywords: Healthcare; Health Care; Knowledge Work; Attribution Theory; Quality; Success; Medical Specialties; Health Care and Treatment; Failure; Learning; Health Industry

October 31, 2022
Article

Achieving Individual—and Organizational—Value with AI

By: Sam Ransbotham, David Kiron, François Candelon, Shervin Khodabandeh and Michael Chu

New research shows that employees derive individual value from AI when using the technology improves their sense of competency, autonomy, and relatedness. Likewise, organizations are far more likely to obtain value from AI when their workers do. This report offers key... View Details

Keywords: AI and Machine Learning; Value; Competency and Skills

Register to Read

March 2019
Article

A Structural Analysis of the Role of Superstars in Crowdsourcing Contests

By: Shunyuan Zhang, Param Singh and Anindya Ghose

We investigate the long-term impact of competing against superstars in crowdsourcing contests. Using a unique 50-month longitudinal panel data set on 1677 software design crowdsourcing contests, we illustrate a learning effect where participants are able to improve... View Details

Keywords: Crowdsourcing Contests; Superstar Effect; Bayesian Learning; Utility; Economics Of Information System; Dynamic Structural Model; Dynamic Programming; Markov Chain; Monte Carlo; Learning; Competition; Performance Improvement

Research Summary

Social Entrepreneurship

By: James L. Heskett

This project is centered around an analysis of data and experiences of 31 executive directors of not-for-profit organizations who completed the Denali Initiative on social entrepreneurship, of which I was volunteer faculty chairperson, between 1999 and 2002. The... View Details

2017
Performance & Appearance

Hair Penalties and Other Organizational Sins: Racism Disguised as Professionalism

2022
Working Paper

Is Hybrid Work the Best of Both Worlds? Evidence from a Field Experiment

By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Tarun Khanna, Christos A. Makridis and Kyle Schirmann

Hybrid work is emerging as a novel form of organizing work globally. This paper reports causal evidence on how the extent of hybrid work—the number of days worked from home relative to days worked from the office—affects work outcomes. Collaborating with an... View Details

Keywords: Hybrid Work; Remote Work; Work-from-home; Field Experiment; Employees; Geographic Location; Performance; Work-Life Balance

SSRN

Read Now

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

October 2014 (Revised June 2016)
Case

MasterCard: Driving Financial Inclusion

By: Sunil Gupta, Rajiv Lal and Natalie Kindred

MasterCard CEO Ajay Banga was investing significant time and attention to increase financial inclusion among individuals with historically no access to banking or financial services in countries around the world with large underserved populations. The effort included... View Details

Keywords: Marketing; Financial Services; Financial And Social Return; Financial Inclusion; Strategic Management; South Africa; Nigeria; Ajay Banga; Marketing Strategy; Social Marketing; Financial Services Industry; Banking Industry; South Africa; Nigeria

Educators

12 Sep 2012
Working Paper Summaries

Liability Structure in Small-Scale Finance: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

Keywords: by Fenella Carpena, Shawn Cole, Jeremy Shapiro & Bilal Zia

March 2025
Article

Is Personal Identity Intransitive?

By: J. De Freitas and L. J. Rips

There has been a call for a potentially revolutionary change to our existing understanding of the psychological concept of personal identity. Apparently, people can psychologically represent people, including themselves, as multiple individuals at the same time. Here... View Details

Keywords: Identity; Judgments

May 2022
Article

Can Gambling Increase Savings? Empirical Evidence on Prize-Linked Savings Accounts

By: Shawn A. Cole, Benjamin Iverson and Peter Tufano

This paper studies the adoption and impact of prize-linked savings (PLS) accounts, which offer lottery-like payouts to individual account holders in lieu of interest. Using microlevel data from a bank in South Africa, we show that PLS is attractive to a broad group of... View Details

Keywords: Household Finance; Banking; Savings; Prize-linked Savings; Lottery; Household; Personal Finance; Saving; Banks and Banking