Publications

Purchase

2023
Working Paper

When Does Gamified Training Improve Performance? The Roles of Office and Leader Engagement

By: Ryan W. Buell, Wei Cai and Tatiana Sandino

Gamified training is a novel management control system in which companies use gamification techniques to engage and motivate employees to learn. This study empirically examines the performance consequences of gamified training using data from a natural field... View Details

Keywords: Gamified Training; Management Control Systems; Employee Engagement; Employees; Learning; Training; Motivation and Incentives; Performance

29 Jan 2019
Research & Ideas

'Green Bonds' May Be Our Best Bet for Environmental Damage Control

Municipalities have been selling bonds to pay for public works projects—fire stations, parking garages,sewage treatment systems—for 200 years. It’s only in the past decade or so, however, that they’ve been selling them with an extra perk: helping the environment. In... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Energy; Utilities; Construction; Green Technology; Public Administration

2016
Working Paper

What Factors Drive Director Perceptions of Their Board's Effectiveness?

By: Boris Groysberg, Paul M. Healy and Richard Ellis Crum

We use a survey of directors to collect data on their ratings of board effectiveness as well as board internal dynamics and key processes. Controlling for many of the governance metrics examined by prior research, we find that directors’ ratings of their boards’... View Details

Keywords: Board Of Directors; Corporate Governance; Performance Effectiveness; Perception; Risk Management

17 Apr 2019
Cold Call Podcast

Would You Live in a Smart City Where Government Controls Privacy?

February 2022 (Revised October 2022)
Supplement

Henkel: Building a Winning Culture (D)

By: Robert L. Simons and Carolyn Deller

This three-page case is the third update to Henkel: Building a Winning Culture (A). In this supplement, dated 2021, a new CEO has taken over Henkel and implemented a new strategy. His changes to the original performance management system are presented as a new... View Details

Keywords: Execution; Management Control Systems; Performance Goals; Incentives; Levers Of Control; Strategy; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques; Performance Evaluation

Purchase

Article

On Her Own Account: How Strengthening Women's Financial Control Impacts Labor Supply and Gender Norms

By: Natalia Rigol, Simone Schaner, Rohini Pande, Erica Field and Charity Troyer Moore

Can increasing control over earnings incentivize a woman to work, and thereby influence norms around gender roles? We randomly varied whether rural Indian women received bank accounts, training in account use, and direct deposit of public sector wages into their own... View Details

Keywords: Social Norms; Employment; Wages; Gender; Banks and Banking; Perception

April 2014
Article

Between Self-interest and Reciprocity: The Social Bright Side of Self-control Failure

By: Eliran Halali, Yoella Bereby-Meyer and Nachshon Meiran

Despite the importance of reciprocity in many areas of social life, little is known about possible factors affecting it and its interplay with the self-interest motive to maximize one’s own gains. In this study, we examined the role of cognitive control in reciprocal... View Details

Keywords: Cognitive Control; Ego Depletion; Fairness; Trust Game; Ultimatum Game; Reciprocity; Self-control Failure

2018
Working Paper

Need for Speed: The Impact of Website Performance on Online Retail

By: Santiago Gallino, Nil Karacaoglu and Antonio Moreno

The share of e-commerce sales is rapidly increasing and so are the associated losses generated by website outages and slow websites. We leverage novel retail and website performance data to investigate the impact of website performance on online sales. This question is... View Details

Keywords: Online Retail; Quasi-experiments; Abandonment; Synthetic Control; Internet and the Web; Performance; Service Operations

2019
Working Paper

The Comprehensive Effects of a Digital Paywall Sales Strategy

By: Doug J. Chung, Ho Kim and Reo Song

This paper explores the multiple and comprehensive effects of a digital paywall sales strategy, an increasingly common means of go-to-market for media firms. Specifically, we examine the effects of a digital paywall on a media firm’s two sources of income—subscription... View Details

Keywords: Digital Paywall; Demand Substitution; Spillover Effect; Synthetic Control; Sales; Strategy; Media; Newspapers; Publishing Industry

June 1998
Article

Using Delegation and Control Systems to Mitigate the Trade-off between the Performance-Evaluation and Belief-Revision Uses of Accounting Standards

By: V.G. Narayanan and A. Davila

Keywords: System; Performance Evaluation; Accounting

2019
Working Paper

On Her Own Account: How Strengthening Women's Financial Control Affects Labor Supply and Gender Norms

By: Natalia Rigol, Erica Field, Rohini Pande, Simone Schaner and Charity Troyer-Moore

Can greater control over earned income incentivize women to work and influence gender norms? In collaboration with Indian government partners, we provided rural women with individual bank accounts and randomly varied whether their wages from a public workfare program... View Details

Keywords: Gender Norms; Economics; Gender; Employment; Income; Societal Protocols; India

Winter 2009
Article

Is Private Equity Out of Control in Latin America?: The Impact of Structures on Private Equity Transactions in Latin America 1988-2007

By: Roberto Charvel

This article explores the private equity industries in 25 Latin American countries from 1988 to 2007. View Details

Keywords: Latin America; Entrepreneurial Finance; Business Startups; Business Cycles; Development Economics; Economic Systems; Corporate Entrepreneurship; Assets; Capital Markets; Venture Capital; Capital Structure; Private Equity; Latin America; North and Central America

1986
Other Unpublished Work

Capital Flight, Policy Credibility, and the Option Value of Foreign Exchange

By: K. A. Froot and S. van Wijnbergen

Keywords: Trade Policy; Capital Controls; Liberalization; Currency; International Finance; Capital

March 2022
Article

Estimating the Effectiveness of Permanent Price Reductions for Competing Products Using Multivariate Bayesian Structural Time Series Models

By: Fiammetta Menchetti and Iavor Bojinov

Researchers regularly use synthetic control methods for estimating causal effects when a sub-set of units receive a single persistent treatment, and the rest are unaffected by the change. In many applications, however, units not assigned to treatment are nevertheless... View Details

Keywords: Causal Inference; Partial Interference; Synthetic Controls; Bayesian Structural Time Series; Mathematical Methods

04 May 2016
What Do You Think?

What Does Boaty McBoatface Tell Us About Brand Control on the Internet?

When Should Control Over a Brand Be Ceded to the Public? The verdict is in. Our hardly scientific poll has endorsed the name of Boaty McBoatface for the new research vessel being commissioned by the UK’s... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett; Advertising

2019
Article

Sustaining Open Innovation Through a 'Center of Excellence'

By: Elizabeth E. Richard, Jeffrey R. Davis, Jin Hyun Paik and Karim R. Lakhani

This paper presents NASA’s experience using a Center of Excellence (CoE) to scale and sustain an open innovation program as an effective problem-solving tool and includes strategic management recommendations for other organizations based on lessons... View Details

Keywords: Crowdsourcing; Culture Change; Open Innovation; Center Of Excellence; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Organizational Culture; Change Management

2021
Article

How Top Managers Use the Entrepreneurial Gap to Drive Strategic Change

By: Robert L. Simons and Antonio Davila

Prior research provides strong evidence for the association between business strategy and the design and use of management control systems. We complement this research by examining the role of management control systems in situations of strategic change. We report the... View Details

Keywords: Management Control Systems; Accountability; Strategic Change; Organization Change And Adaptation; Organizational Performance; Management Systems; Organizational Structure; Corporate Accountability; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Performance

Winter 2011
Article

Developing Good Measures to Advance Management Accounting and Control Research: A Discussion of 'Corporate Frugality: Theory, Measurement and Practice'

By: Tatiana Sandino

November 2020
Article

When the Boss Comes to Town: The Effects of Headquarters' Visits on Facility-Level Misconduct

By: Jonas Heese and Gerardo Pérez Cavazos

We study the effects of headquarters’ visits on facility-level misconduct. We use the staggered introduction of airline routes to identify exogenous travel-time reductions between headquarters and facilities and test whether such reductions affect facility-level... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Misconduct; Visits By Management; Flight Routes; Control Systems; Compliance Programs; Performance Pressure; Business or Company Management; Management Systems; Governance Controls; Governance Compliance; Performance Expectations