Publications

July 2014
Article

Smart Money? The Effect of Education on Financial Outcomes

By: Shawn A. Cole, Anna Paulson and Gauri Kartini Shastry

Household financial decisions are important for household welfare, economic growth and financial stability. Yet, our understanding of the determinants of financial decision-making is limited. Exploiting exogenous variation in state compulsory schooling laws in both... View Details

Keywords: Personal Finance; Investment; Decisions; Behavior; Financial Condition

29 Oct 2018
Research & Ideas

Hunting for a Hot Job in High Tech? Try 'Digitization Economist'

academic economics department. Amazon is far from alone in this trend. Some 50 tech companies “have been snapping up economists at a remarkable scale,” says Michael Luca, the Lee J. Styslinger III Associate Professor of Business... View Details

Keywords: by Roberta Holland; Technology; Education

Research Summary

The Role of the Internet in Enhancing Service and Reducing Cost

Is delivering service (both internal and external) facilitated by the Internet a zero sum game in which costs associated with delivering superior service must always be passed on to customers in the form of higher prices? Does the quantity and type of service... View Details

Karim R. Lakhani

Karim R. Lakhani is the Dorothy & Michael Hintze Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. He specializes in technology management, innovation, digital transformation and artificial... View Details

Keywords: biotechnology; communications; computer; health care; high technology; information technology industry; internet; pharmaceuticals; software; video games

May 2011
Article

The Wise Leader

By: Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi

In an era of increasing discontinuity, wise leadership has nearly vanished. Many leaders find it difficult to reinvent their corporations rapidly enough to cope with new technologies, demographic shifts, and consumption trends. They can't develop truly global... View Details

Keywords: Communication Intention and Meaning; Interpersonal Communication; Experience and Expertise; Values and Beliefs; Knowledge Sharing; Knowledge Use and Leverage; Leadership; Leadership Development; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Personal Characteristics; Power and Influence

Purchase

18 Apr 2024
Blog Post

African American Student Union Spotlight on Emerging Markets

The HBS African American Student Union (AASU) aims to create a close-knit community for its members from the time they choose to join HBS, through their transition to the second year, and beyond graduation. In this feature, we highlight the View Details

2024
Working Paper

Lost in Transmission

By: Thomas Graeber, Shakked Noy and Christopher Roth

For many decisions, people rely on information received from others by word of mouth. How does the process of verbal transmission distort economic information? In our experiments, participants listen to audio recordings containing economic forecasts and are paid to... View Details

Keywords: Information Trnasmission; Word Of Mouth; Word-of-Mouth; Narratives; Reliability; Knowledge Sharing; Spoken Communication; Cognition and Thinking

2024
Working Paper

Behavioral Attenuation

By: Thomas Graeber, Benjamin Enke, Ryan Oprea and Jeffrey Yang

We report a large-scale examination of behavioral attenuation: due to information-processing constraints, the elasticity of people’s decisions with respect to economic fundamentals is generally too small. We implement more than 30 experiments, 20 of which were... View Details

Keywords: Decisions; Behavior; Cognition and Thinking; Behavioral Finance

Register to Read

David Ager is a Senior Lecturer in Executive Education. He engages CEOs, CHROs, and their teams to design and deliver customized executive development experiences for executive, senior and high potential leaders. The companies hail from diverse sectors including... View Details

July 2009
Article

Bad Riddance or Good Rubbish? Ownership and Not Loss Aversion Causes the Endowment Effect

By: C. K. Morewedge, L. L. Shu, D. T. Gilbert and T. D. Wilson

People typically demand more to relinquish the goods they own than they would be willing to pay to acquire those goods if they didn't already own them (the endowment effect). The standard economic explanation of this phenomenon is that people expect the pain of... View Details

Keywords: Value; Judgments; Consumer Behavior; Attitudes

05 Jul 2006
Working Paper Summaries

Schumpeter’s Plea: Rediscovering History and Relevance in the Study of Entrepreneurship

Keywords: by Geoffrey G. Jones & Dan Wadhwani

Research Summary

Motivation and Incentive Design

Professor Ashraf's research in motivation and incentives focuses on how to design incentives in sectors where it is important that individuals are motivated by service, such as healthcare or environmental conservation. An important lever is the... View Details

01 Sep 2020
News

Navigating the Populism Phenomenon

2010
Article

Budgeting, Psychological Contracts, and Budgetary Misreporting

By: Susanna Gallani, Ranjani Krishnan, Eric J. Marinich and Michael D. Shields

This study examines the effect of psychological contract breach on budgetary misreporting. Psychological contracts are mental models or schemas that govern how employees understand their exchange relationships with their employers. Psychological contract breach leads... View Details

Keywords: Budgeting; Psychological Contracts; Misreporting; Budgets and Budgeting; Employees; Trust

20 Oct 2010
Op-Ed

Export Competitiveness: Reversing the Logic

the current economic and financial crisis, countries around the globe are looking for ways to reignite economic growth. Traditionally, export-led growth has been perceived as one of the most promising... View Details

Keywords: by Christian Ketels

2018
Working Paper

Towards a New Approach for Upgrading Europe's Competitiveness

By: Christian Ketels and Michael E. Porter

The traumatic experience of the European sovereign debt crisis, followed by the outcome of the British referendum on leaving the European Union, has sent shockwaves through Europe. For the first time since the signing of the Treaties of Rome six decades ago, the very... View Details

Keywords: Competitiveness; Economy; Policy; Problems and Challenges; Europe; European Union