Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(2,963)
- Faculty Publications (967)
- 2022
- Working Paper
Feeling Seen: Leader Eye Gaze Promotes Psychological Safety, Participation, and Voice
By: Nicole Abi-Esber, Alison Wood Brooks and Ethan Burris
Psychological safety is a hallmark of effective team functioning. Although prior work shows that characteristics of the leader influence employee judgments of psychological safety (and subsequent decisions to speak up), we know very little about “the specific behaviors... View Details
- January 10, 2022
- Article
The Link Between Income, Income Inequality, and Prosocial Behavior Around the World: A Multiverse Approach
By: Lucia Macchia and Ashley V. Whillans
The questions of whether high-income individuals are more prosocial than low-income individuals and whether income inequality moderates this effect have received extensive attention. We shed new light on this topic by analyzing a large-scale dataset with a... View Details
- January 2022
- Article
Rational Habit Formation: Experimental Evidence from Handwashing in India
By: Reshmaan Hussam, Atonu Rabbani, Giovanni Reggiani and Natalia Rigol
We test the predictions of the rational addiction model, reconceptualized as rational habit formation, in the context of handwashing in rural India. To track handwashing, we design soap dispensers with timed sensors. We test for rational habit formation by informing... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
TalkToModel: Explaining Machine Learning Models with Interactive Natural Language Conversations
By: Dylan Slack, Satyapriya Krishna, Himabindu Lakkaraju and Sameer Singh
Practitioners increasingly use machine learning (ML) models, yet they have become more complex and harder to understand. To address this issue, researchers have proposed techniques to explain model predictions. However, practitioners struggle to use explainability... View Details
- January 2022
- Article
Why Is Corporate Virtue in the Eye of the Beholder? The Case of ESG Ratings
By: Dane Christensen, George Serafeim and Anywhere Sikochi
Despite the rising use of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) ratings, there is substantial disagreement across rating agencies regarding what rating to give to individual firms. As what drives this disagreement is unclear, we examine whether a firm’s ESG... View Details
- Article
Megastudies Improve the Impact of Applied Behavioural Science
By: Katherine L. Milkman, Dena Gromet, Hung Ho, Joseph S. Kay, Timothy W. Lee, Pepi Pandiloski, Yeji Park, Aneesh Rai, Max Bazerman, John Beshears, Lauri Bonacorsi, Colin Camerer, Edward Chang, Gretchen Chapman, Robert Cialdini, Hengchen Dai, Lauren Eskreis-Winkler, Ayelet Fishbach, James J. Gross, Samantha Horn, Alexa Hubbard, Steven J. Jones, Dean Karlan, Tim Kautz, Erika Kirgios, Joowon Klusowski, Ariella Kristal, Rahul Ladhania, Jens Ludwig, George Loewenstein, Barbara Mellers, Sendhil Mullainathan, Silvia Saccardo, Jann Spiess, Gaurav Suri, Joachim H. Talloen, Jamie Taxer, Yaacov Trope, Lyle Ungar, Kevin G. Volpp, Ashley V. Whillans, Jonathan Zinman and Angela L. Duckworth
Policy-makers are increasingly turning to behavioural science for insights about how to improve citizens’ decisions and outcomes. Typically, different scientists test different intervention ideas in different samples using different outcomes over different time... View Details
- Article
A Prescriptive Analytics Framework for Optimal Policy Deployment Using Heterogeneous Treatment Effects
By: Edward McFowland III, Sandeep Gangarapu, Ravi Bapna and Tianshu Sun
We define a prescriptive analytics framework that addresses the needs of a constrained decision-maker facing, ex ante, unknown costs and benefits of multiple policy levers. The framework is general in nature and can be deployed in any utility maximizing context, public... View Details
- Article
Counterfactual Explanations Can Be Manipulated
By: Dylan Slack, Sophie Hilgard, Himabindu Lakkaraju and Sameer Singh
Counterfactual explanations are useful for both generating recourse and auditing fairness between groups. We seek to understand whether adversaries can manipulate counterfactual explanations in an algorithmic recourse setting: if counterfactual explanations indicate... View Details
- December 2021
- Article
Entrepreneurial Learning and Strategic Foresight
By: Aticus Peterson and Andy Wu
We study how learning by experience across projects affects an entrepreneur's strategic foresight. In a quantitative study of 314 entrepreneurs across 722 crowdfunded projects supplemented with a program of qualitative interviews, we counterintuitively find that... View Details
- December 2021
- Article
Left- and Right-Leaning News Organizations Use Negative Emotional Content and Elicit User Engagement Similarly
By: Andrea Bellovary, Nathaniel Young and Amit Goldenberg
Negativity has historically dominated news content; however, little research has examined how news organizations use affect on social media, where content is generally positive. In the current project we ask a few questions: Do news organizations on Twitter use... View Details
Keywords: Negative Press; Twitter; Political Affiliation; Affect; News; Media; Internet and the Web; Emotions; Perspective; Social Media
- December 2021
- Article
Negativity Spreads More Than Positivity on Twitter after Both Positive and Negative Political Situations
By: Jonas Paul Schöne, Brian Parkinson and Amit Goldenberg
What type of emotional language spreads further in political discourses on social media? Previous research has focused on situations that primarily elicited negative emotions, showing that negative language tended to spread further. The current project extends existing... View Details
- Article
Extension Request Avoidance Predicts Greater Time Stress Among Women
By: Ashley V. Whillans, Jaewon Yoon, Aurora Turek and Grant E. Donnelly
In nine studies using archival data, surveys, and experiments, we identify a factor that predicts gender differences in time stress and burnout. Across academic and professional settings, women are less likely to ask for more time when working under adjustable... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Cognitive Uncertainty in Intertemporal Choice
By: Benjamin Enke and Thomas Graeber
This paper studies the relevance of cognitive uncertainty – subjective uncertainty over one's utility-maximizing action – for understanding and predicting intertemporal choice. The main idea is that when people are cognitively noisy, such as when a decision is complex,... View Details
- October 15, 2021
- Article
Virtuous Victims
By: Jillian J. Jordan and Maryam Kouchaki
How do people perceive the moral character of victims? We find, across a range of transgressions, that people frequently see victims of wrongdoing as more moral than non-victims who have behaved identically. Across 15 experiments (total n = 9,355), we document this... View Details
- Article
Behavioral and Neural Representations en route to Intuitive Action Understanding
By: Leyla Tarhan, Julian De Freitas and Talia Konkle
When we observe another person’s actions, we process many kinds of information—from how their body moves to the intention behind their movements. What kinds of information underlie our intuitive understanding about how similar actions are to each other? To address this... View Details
- October 2021
- Article
Communicating Resource Scarcity and Interpersonal Connection
By: Grant E. Donnelly, Anne V. Wilson, Ashley V. Whillans and Michael I. Norton
Consumers often cite insufficient time or money as an excuse for rejecting social invitations. We explore the effectiveness of these excuses in preserving interpersonal relationships. Six studies—including perceptions of couples planning their wedding—demonstrate that... View Details
- October 2021
- Article
Overcoming the Cold Start Problem of CRM Using a Probabilistic Machine Learning Approach
By: Nicolas Padilla and Eva Ascarza
The success of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) programs ultimately depends on the firm's ability to understand consumers' preferences and precisely capture how these preferences may differ across customers. Only by understanding customer heterogeneity, firms can... View Details
- September 2021 (Revised November 2022)
- Case
Community Solutions
By: Brian Trelstad and Tom Quinn
Community Solutions was an anti-homelessness nonprofit founded in 2011 after protagonist Rosanne Haggerty grew frustrated with the limited impact of traditional housing and outreach strategies. It set an ambitious goal, reached in some partner communities, of ending... View Details
Keywords: Change; Change Management; Disruption; Transformation; Communication; Communication Strategy; Decision Making; Cost vs Benefits; Decision Choices and Conditions; Decisions; Forecasting and Prediction; Social Entrepreneurship; Ethics; Values and Beliefs; Capital Budgeting; Capital Markets; Country; Government Administration; Government Legislation; Housing; Disruptive Innovation; Innovation and Invention; Innovation Strategy; Knowledge Sharing; Leading Change; Resource Allocation; Mission and Purpose; Performance Evaluation; Performance Improvement; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; Opportunities; Social Enterprise; Nonprofit Organizations; Human Needs; Public Opinion; Social Issues; Societal Protocols; Poverty; Welfare; Well-being; System; Equality and Inequality; Consulting Industry; Real Estate Industry; United States; New York (city, NY); Florida; Texas
- September 2021 (Revised December 2021)
- Case
Spire, the CubeSat Revolution, and the Government as a Space Data Customer
By: Matthew Weinzierl, Mehak Sarang and Brendan L. Rosseau
This case outlines the rise of Spire Global, a young space company using CubeSats to provide weather data and weather prediction services. In addition to tracing the evolution of a space startup from novel idea to publicly-traded company, the case also examines the... View Details
- September 2021
- Article
Income More Reliably Predicts Frequent Than Intense Happiness
By: Jon M. Jachimowicz, Ruo Mo, Adam Eric Greenberg, Bertus Jeronimus and Ashley V. Whillans
There is widespread consensus that income and subjective well-being are linked, but when and why they are connected is subject to ongoing debate. We draw on prior research that distinguishes between the frequency and intensity of happiness to suggest that higher income... View Details