Publications

SSRN

January 2019
Article

Wage Elasticities in Working and Volunteering: The Role of Reference Points in a Laboratory Study

By: Christine L. Exley and Stephen J. Terry

We experimentally test how effort responds to wages—randomly assigned to accrue to individuals or to a charity—in the presence of expectations-based reference points or targets. When individuals earn money for themselves, higher wages lead to higher effort with... View Details

Keywords: Reference Points; Wage Elasticities; Labor Supply; Effor; Volunteering; Prosocial Behavior; Wages; Motivation and Incentives; Nonprofit Organizations; Behavior

June 2013 (Revised June 2016)
Case

Ensina!

By: John J-H Kim, Alejandra Meraz Velasco and Christine An

In 2011, a group of passionate social entrepreneurs in Rio de Janeiro, with the support and encouragement of several prominent philanthropists and members of government, launch Ensina!, seizing Brazil's unprecedented economic growth and national commitment to... View Details

Keywords: Social Entrepreneurship; Teaching; Business and Government Relations; Education Industry; Brazil

Educators

2021
Working Paper

Information Avoidance and Image Concerns

By: Christine L. Exley and Judd B. Kessler

A rich literature finds that individuals avoid information, even information that is instrumental to their choices. A common hypothesis posits that individuals strategically avoid information to hold particular beliefs or to take certain actions--such as behaving... View Details

Keywords: Image Motivation; Self-image; Information; Behavior; Identity; Personal Characteristics

October 2017
Article

Observability Increases the Demand for Commitment Devices

By: Christine L. Exley and Jeffrey K. Naecker

Previous research often interprets the choice to restrict one’s future opportunity set as evidence for sophisticated time inconsistency. We propose an additional mechanism that may contribute to the demand for commitment technology: the desire to signal to others. We... View Details

Keywords: Motivation and Incentives; Behavior; Decision Choices and Conditions; Attitudes

January 2015 (Revised April 2015)
Case

Zeal: Launching Personalized and Social Learning

By: John J-H Kim and Christine S. An

Set in 2014, this case follows John Danner and his team at Zeal as they consider their product development strategy. In February 2013, serial entrepreneurs John Danner and Sanjay Noronha co-found Zeal, an education technology start up providing a web-based, mobile... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Education Technology; MVP; Product Development; Product Market Fit; Monetization Strategy; SaaS Business Models; Education; Personalized Learning

Educators

01 Dec 2014
News

Innovation: Frozen Assets

(Sora/Corbis) Earlier this year, when former Lululemon CEO Christine Day (AMP 163, 2002) started her new role as CEO of Luvo, a frozen-food upstart with nearly $50 million in backing, she had to get acquainted with a few things. One of... View Details

Keywords: Janelle Nanos

2022
Working Paper

When Do Individuals Give Up Agency? The Role of Decision Avoidance

By: Holly Dykstra, Christine L. Exley and Muriel Niederle

A common policy problem is that individuals reject recommended options and insist on making their own choices. Via a large-scale experiment, we document and investigate what factors contribute to this preference for agency. Our main results show that individuals’... View Details

Keywords: Choice; Decision Making; Policy; Cognition and Thinking

August 2022
Article

The Gender Gap in Self-Promotion

By: Christine L. Exley and Judd B. Kessler

In applications, interviews, performance reviews, and many other environments, individuals are explicitly asked or implicitly invited to assess their own performance. In a series of experiments, we find that women rate their performance less favorably than equally... View Details

Keywords: Self-promotion; Gender Gap; Experiments; Performance Evaluation; Gender

2021
Working Paper

Equity Concerns Are Narrowly Framed

By: Christine L Exley and Judd B. Kessler

Distributional decisions regularly involve multiple payoff components. In a series of experiments, we show that subjects frequently exhibit narrow equity concerns: individuals apply their fairness preferences narrowly, on a specific component of payoffs, rather... View Details

Keywords: Equity; Equality and Inequality; Fairness; Perception; Outcome or Result; Resource Allocation; Behavior

SSRN

Article

The Business Case for Investing in Physician Well-Being

By: Tait D. Shanafelt, Joel Goh and Christine A. Sinsky

Importance: Widespread burnout among physicians has been recognized for more than two decades. Extensive evidence indicates that physician burnout has important personal and professional consequences.
Observations: A lack of awareness regarding... View Details

Keywords: Physicians; Well-being; ROI; Health; Welfare or Wellbeing; Ethics; Investment Return; Health Industry

2010
Article

Estimating the Attributable Cost of Physician Burnout in the United States

By: Shasha Han, Tait D. Shanafelt, Christine A. Sinsky, Karim M. Awad, Liselotte N. Dyrbye, Lynne C. Fiscus, Mickey Trockel and Joel Goh

Background: Although physician burnout is associated with negative clinical and organizational outcomes, its economic costs are poorly understood. As a result, leaders in health care cannot properly assess the financial benefits of initiatives to remediate... View Details

Keywords: Physicians; Burnout; Health; Health Care and Treatment; Employees; Cost; Programs; Policy; Health Industry

2022
Working Paper

The Gender Minority Gaps in Confidence and Self-Evaluations

By: Billur Aksoy, Christine L. Exley and Judd B. Kessler

An increasing share of the population identifies as something other than male or female. Yet, we know very little about the economic preferences and beliefs of gender minorities. In this paper, we document a “gender minority gap” in confidence and in self-evaluations.... View Details

Keywords: Self-evaluation; Confidence; Gender; Identity; Perception; Income