Publications

May 2019
Supplement

Kjell and Company: Motivating Salespeople with Incentive Compensation (C)

By: Doug J. Chung

Kjell & Company was a Swedish retail electronics chain. The company’s products consisted of home electronics and accessories. The company was noted for its excellent customer service and a fair “one-for-all” HR policy. Historically, the salespeople had been compensated... View Details

Keywords: Salesforce Management; Compensation and Benefits; Change Management; Behavior; Electronics Industry; Sweden

2009
Working Paper

Social Influence Given (Partially) Deliberate Matching: Career Imprints in the Creation of Academic Entrepreneurs

By: Pierre Azoulay, Christopher C. Liu and Toby E. Stuart

Actors often match with associates on a small set of dimensions that matter most for the particular relationship at hand. In so doing, they are exposed to unanticipated social influences because counterparts have more interests, attitudes, and preferences than would-be... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Patents; Marketplace Matching; Mathematical Methods; Science-Based Business; Power and Influence; Social and Collaborative Networks; Biotechnology Industry

Research Summary

Overview

By: Eva Ascarza

Professor Ascarza’s research primarily focuses on providing researchers and marketers a better understanding of how to manage customer retention so as to reduce churn and increase firm’s profitability. She addresses these issues by building empirical models of customer... View Details

2025
Working Paper

Discrimination, Rejection, and Job Search

By: Anne Boring, Katherine Coffman, Dylan Glover and María José González-Fuentes

We investigate how candidates’ willingness to apply responds to (potential) discrimination and rejection using a simulated labor market. Past work has shown that “blinding” job applications reduces discrimination and increases the rate at which women are hired. Our... View Details

Keywords: Job Search; Prejudice and Bias; Selection and Staffing; Demographics

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

Keywords: Prescriptive Analytics; Heterogeneous Treatment Effects; Optimization; Observed Rank Utility Condition (OUR); Between-treatment Heterogeneity; Machine Learning; Decision Making; Analysis; Mathematical Methods

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... View Details

2021
Working Paper

Diversity and Performance in Entrepreneurial Teams

By: Sophie Calder-Wang, Paul A. Gompers and Kevin Huang

We study the role of diversity and performance in the entrepreneurial teams. We exploit a unique dataset of MBA students who participated in a required course to propose and start a real micro-business that allows us to examine horizontal diversity (i.e., within the... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Groups and Teams; Diversity; Performance

Prior research suggests employees benefit from highly passionate teammates because passion spreads easily from one employee to the next. We develop theory to propose that life in high-passion teams may not be as uniformly advantageous as previously assumed. More... View Details

Web

Organizational Behavior - Faculty & Research

that were associated with increasing their passion. In a subsequent pre-registered experiment (N = 1,063), we provide causal evidence for these effects and their underlying mechanism, finding that passion contagion is particularly... View Details

June 2025
Article

Riding the Passion Wave or Fighting to Stay Afloat? A Theory of Differentiated Passion Contagion

By: Emma Frank, Kai Krautter, Wen Wu and Jon M. Jachimowicz

Prior research suggests that employees benefit from highly passionate teammates because passion spreads easily from one employee to the next. We develop theory to propose that life in high-passion teams may not be as uniformly advantageous as previously assumed. We... View Details

Keywords: Passion; Emotional Contagion; Emotions; Groups and Teams; Employees; Power and Influence; Performance Improvement

2021
Working Paper

Dirty Money: How Banks Influence Financial Crime

By: Joseph Pacelli, Janet Gao, Jan Schneemeier and Yufeng Wu

On September 21st, 2020, a consortium of international journalists leaked nearly 2,500 suspicious activity reports (SAR) obtained from the U.S. Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, exposing nearly $2 trillion of money laundering activity. The event raises important... View Details

Keywords: Financial Institutions; Crime and Corruption; Policy

SSRN

12 Apr 2013
HBS Seminar

Gary Frazier, USC Marshall School of Business

03 May 2019
HBS Seminar

Stephanie Cheng & Ran Song, Harvard University & Harvard Law School

July 2021
Article

How Trust and Distrust Shape Perception and Memory

By: Ann-Christin Posten and Francesca Gino

Trust is a key ingredient in decision making, as it allows us to rely on the information we receive. Although trust is usually viewed as a positive element of decision making, we suggest that its effects on memory are costly rather than beneficial. Across nine studies... View Details

Keywords: Distrust; Memory; Similarity; Misinformation; Trust; Perception; Decision Making

January 2017 (Revised May 2019)
Case

Kjell and Company: Motivating Salespeople with Incentive Compensation (A)

By: Doug J. Chung

Kjell & Company was a Swedish retail electronics chain. The company’s products consisted of home electronics and accessories. The company was noted for its excellent customer service and a fair “one-for-all” HR policy. Historically, the salespeople had been compensated... View Details

Keywords: Salesforce Management; Compensation and Benefits; Change; Decision Making; Electronics Industry; Sweden

Educators

Web

Research - Global

Gilman and Nina Roussille This paper provides causal evidence on how wage inequality among workers affects the labor movement using three complementary research designs: a vignette experiment with union organizers, a natural policy... View Details

17 Apr 2014
Working Paper Summaries

Poverty and Crime: Evidence from Rainfall and Trade Shocks in India

Keywords: by Lakshmi Iyer & Petia Topalova

July 2006
Article

Bringing History (Back) into International Business

By: G. Jones and Tarun Khanna

We argue that the field of international business should evolve its rhetoric from the relatively uncontroversial idea that 'history matters' to exploring how it matters. We discuss four conceptual channels through which history matters, illustrating each with a major... View Details