Publications

21 Apr 2023
Research & Ideas

The $15 Billion Question: Have Loot Boxes Turned Video Gaming into Gambling?

worries do not apply for the vast majority of the players, they add. The results suggest that companies generate revenue by exploiting behavioral biases of whales, leading them to overspend on loot boxes. Given the concentration of... View Details

Keywords: by Scott Van Voorhis; Video Game; Media & Broadcasting

June 2013
Article

What Is Privacy Worth?

By: Alessandro Acquisti, Leslie K. John and George Loewenstein

Understanding the value that individuals assign to the protection of their personal data is of great importance for business, law, and public policy. We use a field experiment informed by behavioral economics and decision research to investigate individual privacy... View Details

Keywords: Safety; Rights; Valuation; Ethics; Identity

07 Feb 2022
Research & Ideas

Digital Transformation: A New Roadmap for Success

childcare—businesses cannot function. Competitors have found themselves coming together to make sure shared suppliers survive these times of unprecedented turmoil. 7. Safeguard ethics and take a proactive approach to governance and... View Details

Keywords: by Linda A. Hill, Ann Le Cam, Sunand Menon, and Emily Tedards

03 Oct 2023
Research Event

Build the Life You Want: Arthur Brooks and Oprah Winfrey Share Happiness Tips

would right now say that America seems like a particularly happy place. And I was wondering, both of you should address this, it's like what is the source of a kind of national unhappiness? I mean, we we see this in politics, obviously. A-- A level of View Details

Keywords: by HBS Staff

05 Dec 2016
Research & Ideas

How To Deceive Others With Truthful Statements (It's Called 'Paltering,' And It's Risky)

paltered in some or most of their negotiations, whereas a smaller number, 21 percent, said that they lied by commission. Perhaps they palter more often because it doesn’t make them feel as badly as outright lying. The researchers found that negotiators consider... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

06 Jun 2011
Research & Ideas

Why Leaders Lose Their Way

highly successful in their respective fields and at the peak of their careers. This makes their behavior especially perplexing, raising questions about what caused them to lose their way: Why do leaders known for integrity and leadership... View Details

Keywords: by Bill George

September 2017
Article

The Belief in a Favorable Future

By: Todd Rogers, Don A. Moore and Michael I. Norton

People believe that future others’ preferences and beliefs will change to align with their own. People holding a particular view (e.g., support of President Trump) are more likely to believe that future others will share their view than to believe that future others... View Details

Keywords: Social Cognition; Judgment; Prediction; Forecasting; False Consensus; Donation; Open Data; Open Materials; Preregistered; Forecasting and Prediction; Perception; Values and Beliefs; Behavior

April 2014
Article

Evil Genius? How Dishonesty Can Lead to Greater Creativity

By: F. Gino and S. Wiltermuth

We propose that dishonest and creative behavior have something in common: they both involve breaking rules. Because of this shared feature, creativity may lead to dishonesty (as shown in prior work), and dishonesty may lead to creativity (the hypothesis we tested in... View Details

Keywords: Moral Sensibility; Creativity; Attitudes

15 Feb 2011
First Look

First Look: Feb. 15

who recalled childhood memories judged the ethically questionable behavior of others more harshly, suggesting that childhood memories lead to altruistic punishment. Finally, in Experiment 4, compared to a... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

11 Feb 2014
First Look

First Look: February 11

http://people.hbs.edu/mluca/Papers%20on%20RIS/Land%20Reform.pdf August 2013 Psychological Science Evil Genius? How Dishonesty Can Lead to Greater Creativity By: Gino, F., and S. Wiltermuth Abstract—We propose that dishonest and creative View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

15 Jan 2008
First Look

First Look: January 15, 2008

the paper: http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/08-044.pdf See No Evil: When We Overlook Other People's Unethical Behavior Authors:Francesca Gino, Don A. Moore, and Max H. Bazerman Abstract It is common for people to be more critical of... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

December 2019
Article

Brokers and Order Flow Leakage: Evidence from Fire Sales

By: Andrea Barbon, Marco Di Maggio, Francesco Franzoni and Augustin Landier

Using trade-level data, we study whether brokers play a role in spreading order flow information. We focus on large portfolio liquidations, which result in temporary drops in stock prices, and identify the brokers that intermediate these trades. We show that these... View Details

Keywords: Predatory Trading; Back Running; Fire Sales; Brokers; Stocks; Price; Information; Knowledge Dissemination; Ethics

October 2017 (Revised March 2020)
Case

Medicetra Medtech Company, Inc.

By: Doug J. Chung

Medicetra MedTech Company is a dental equipment distributor, and senior management is deciding whether to implement a new incentive compensation program for the sales force. For many years, Medicetra had paid salespeople only a fixed salary. Although the current plan... View Details

Keywords: Sales Compensation; Sales Force Retention; Employee Fairness; Salesforce Management; Compensation and Benefits; Motivation and Incentives; Retention; Fairness; Performance Improvement

Educators

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24 Oct 2016
Research & Ideas

Bernie Madoff Explains Himself

between right and wrong is not sufficient to avoid falling into the behavioral traps people can face when under pressure to succeed. Answering a single question, Madoff exhibits several all-too-familiar cognitive biases, psychological... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Financial Services

November 2020 (Revised March 2022)
Teaching Note

Social Salary Setting at Spiber

By: Ashley Whillans and John Beshears

Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 920-050. The case tells the story of Spiber, a Japanese technology start-up company. To reflect the company’s values, the leadership team implemented a new and unique salary-setting process: each employee had the authority to choose their... View Details

Keywords: Compensation; General Management; Employee Benefits; Incentives; Motivation; Compensation and Benefits; Fairness; Motivation and Incentives; Management; Happiness; Negotiation; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues; Japan

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09 Apr 2018
Sharpening Your Skills

The Dark Side of Performance Bonuses

several years ago, is that those bank bonuses also caused loan officers to perceive reality differently—they believed those loans would succeed. It’s not just financial incentives that are under study. Employers seek to change the View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

2021
Conference Presentation

An Algorithmic Framework for Fairness Elicitation

By: Christopher Jung, Michael J. Kearns, Seth Neel, Aaron Leon Roth, Logan Stapleton and Zhiwei Steven Wu

We consider settings in which the right notion of fairness is not captured by simple mathematical definitions (such as equality of error rates across groups), but might be more complex and nuanced and thus require elicitation from individual or collective stakeholders.... View Details

Keywords: Algorithmic Fairness; Machine Learning; Fairness; Framework; Mathematical Methods