Publications

Article

Learning from Potentially Biased Statistics: Household Inflation Perceptions and Expectations in Argentina

By: Alberto Cavallo, Guillermo Cruces and Ricardo Perez-Truglia

When forming expectations, households may be influenced by perceived bias in the information they receive. In this paper, we study how individuals learn from potentially biased statistics using data from both a natural experiment and a survey experiment during a... View Details

Keywords: Inflation Expectations; Bayesian Estimation; Inflation and Deflation; Information; Household; Behavior; Argentina

Article

Excusing Selfishness in Charitable Giving: The Role of Risk

By: Christine L. Exley

Decisions involving charitable giving often occur under the shadow of risk. A common finding is that potential donors give less when there is greater risk that their donation will have less impact. While this behavior could be fully rationalized by standard economic... View Details

Keywords: Charitable Giving; Prosocial Behavior; Altruism; Risk Preferences; Risk and Uncertainty; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; Behavior

October 2021
Article

Can Self-Regulation Save Digital Platforms?

By: Michael A. Cusumano, Annabelle Gawer and David B. Yoffie

This article explores some of the critical challenges facing self-regulation and the regulatory environment for digital platforms. We examine several historical examples of firms and industries that attempted self-regulation before the Internet. All dealt with similar... View Details

Keywords: Self-regulation; Government Regulation; Digital Platforms; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms

November 2015
Article

Why Organizations Don't Learn: Our Traditional Obsessions—Success, Taking Action, Fitting In, and Relying on Experts—Undermine Continuous Improvement

By: F. Gino and B. Staats

For any enterprise to be competitive, continuous learning and improvement are key—but not always easy to achieve. After a decade of research, the authors have concluded that four biases stand in the way: we focus too heavily on success, are too quick to act, try too... View Details

Keywords: Organizations; Learning

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2011
Case

The Secrets to Managing Business Analytics Projects

By: Thomas H. Davenport, Stijn Viaene and Annabel Van den Bunder

Managers have used business analytics to inform their decision making for years. And while few companies would qualify as being what management innovation and strategy expert Thomas H. Davenport has dubbed "analytic competitors," more and more businesses are moving in... View Details

Keywords: Analytics; Business or Company Management; Information Management

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2015
Working Paper

Measurement Errors of Expected-Return Proxies and the Implied Cost of Capital

By: Charles C.Y. Wang

Despite their popularity as proxies of expected returns, the implied cost of capital's (ICC) measurement error properties are relatively unknown. Through an in-depth analysis of a popular implementation of ICCs by Gebhardt, Lee, and Swaminathan (2001) (GLS), I show... View Details

Keywords: Measurement and Metrics; Cost of Capital; Investment Return

SSRN

17 May 2017
Research & Ideas

Minorities Who 'Whiten' Job Resumes Get More Interviews

resumes than candidates who reveal their race—and this discriminatory practice is just as strong for businesses that claim to value diversity as those that don’t. These research findings should provide a startling wakeup call for business executives: A View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

16 Feb 2024
Research & Ideas

Is Your Workplace Biased Against Introverts?

aspects of it,” he says. Checking the passion bias at work The tendency to define passion by how it’s expressed is human nature. But there are steps that employees and managers alike can take to rein in this hidden View Details

Keywords: by Ben Rand

Research Summary

Selection, Reallocation, and Spillover: Identifying the Sources of Gains from Multinational Production (with Maggie Chen)

By: Laura Alfaro

Quantifying the gains from multinational production has been a vital topic of economic research. Positive productivity gains are often attributed to knowledge spillover from multinational to domestic firms. An alternative, less stressed explanation is firm selection... View Details

Keywords: Gains From Multinational Production; Firm Selection; Knowledge Spillover

05 Dec 2023
Research & Ideas

Lessons in Decision-Making: Confident People Aren't Always Correct (Except When They Are)

University of California, Santa Barbara. How does one measure confidence? In the first phase of the study, the team invited more than 2,000 people to perform 15 classic cognitive bias tasks, including: The “knapsack problem”—a strategic... View Details

Keywords: by Kara Baskin

2023
Article

Estimating Causal Peer Influence in Homophilous Social Networks by Inferring Latent Locations.

By: Edward McFowland III and Cosma Rohilla Shalizi

Social influence cannot be identified from purely observational data on social networks, because such influence is generically confounded with latent homophily, that is, with a node’s network partners being informative about the node’s attributes and therefore its... View Details

Keywords: Causal Inference; Homophily; Social Networks; Peer Influence; Social and Collaborative Networks; Power and Influence; Mathematical Methods

Purchase

May 2018
Article

Selection and Market Reallocation: Productivity Gains from Multinational Production

By: Laura Alfaro and Maggie X. Chen

Assessing the productivity gains from multinational production has been a vital topic of economic research and policy debate. Positive aggregate productivity gains are often attributed to within-firm productivity improvement; however, an alternative, less emphasized... View Details

Keywords: Productivity Gains; Multinational Production; Selection; Market Reallocation; And Within-firm Productivity; Multinational Firms and Management; Production; Performance Productivity; Competition; Mathematical Methods

2006
Working Paper

Managing Functional Biases in Organizational Forecasts: A Case Study of Consensus Forecasting in Supply Chain Planning

To date, little research has been done on managing the organizational and political dimensions of generating and improving forecasts in corporate settings. We examine the implementation of a supply chain planning process at a consumer electronics company, concentrating... View Details

Keywords: Prejudice and Bias; Business or Company Management; Supply Chain Management; Forecasting and Prediction; Planning; Electronics Industry

Article

Normative Judgments and Individual Essence

By: Julian De Freitas, Kevin P. Tobia, George E. Newman and Joshua Knobe

A growing body of research has examined how people judge the persistence of identity over time—that is, how they decide that a particular individual is the same entity from one time to the next. While a great deal of progress has been made in understanding the types... View Details

Keywords: Concepts; Essentialism; Normative Factors; Persistence; True Self; Morality; Identity; Moral Sensibility; Perception

26 Apr 2024
HBS Case

Deion Sanders' Prime Lessons for Leading a Team to Victory

Leaders intent on boosting team performance could learn from the old-school, military-style approach of Deion Sanders, a former star athlete and now the unorthodox coach behind the revival of two college football teams. “When I’m teaching executives, most of them say... View Details

Keywords: by Avery Forman; Sports

23 May 2023
Research & Ideas

Face Value: Do Certain Physical Features Help People Get Ahead?

matters and well-applied filters, makeup, or hairstyles could optimize the visual aspect of charisma. However, knowing a potential employee’s “charisma score”—a measure the researchers created—could also uncover hidden bias and force... View Details

Keywords: by Kara Baskin

Forthcoming
Article

Human-Algorithm Collaboration with Private Information: Naïve Advice Weighting Behavior and Mitigation

By: Maya Balakrishnan, Kris Ferreira and Jordan Tong

Even if algorithms make better predictions than humans on average, humans may sometimes have private information which an algorithm does not have access to that can improve performance. How can we help humans effectively use and adjust recommendations made by... View Details

Keywords: AI and Machine Learning; Analytics and Data Science; Forecasting and Prediction; Digital Marketing

Article

Consistent Belief in a Good True Self in Misanthropes and Three Interdependent Cultures

By: Julian De Freitas, Hagop Sarkissian, George E. Newman, Igor Grossman, Felipe De Brigard, Andres Luco and Joshua Knobe

People sometimes explain behavior by appealing to an essentialist concept of the self, often referred to as the true self. Existing studies suggest that people tend to believe that the true self is morally virtuous; that is deep inside, every person is motivated to... View Details

Keywords: Concepts; Social Cognition; Moral Reasoning; True Self; Culture; Misanthropy; Behavior; Values and Beliefs; Moral Sensibility

2018
Working Paper

Is Overconfidence a Motivated Bias? Experimental Evidence

By: Jennifer M. Logg, Uriel Haran and Don A. Moore

Are overconfident beliefs driven by the motivation to view oneself positively? We test the relationship between motivation and overconfidence using two distinct, but often conflated, measures: better-than-average (BTA) beliefs and overplacement. Our results suggest... View Details

Keywords: Self-perception; Overconfidence; Motivation; Better-Than-Average Effect; Specifically; Personal Characteristics; Perception; Motivation and Incentives; Cognition and Thinking

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