Publications

Summer 2012
Article

Epistemic Contests and the Legitimacy of the World Trade Organization: The Brazil–USA Cotton Dispute and the Incremental Balancing of Interests

By: Arthur A. Daemmrich

The World Trade Organization (WTO) features prominently in studies of international institutions, often cast either as a tool of rich-world domination over the poorer South or as a neutral mediator facilitating a tariff-free world of economic prosperity. This article... View Details

Keywords: Organizations; Trade; Conflict and Resolution; Consumer Products Industry; Brazil; United States

2023
Working Paper

'It Wouldn’t Have Mattered Anyway': When Overdetermined Outcomes Justify Our Sins

By: Stephanie C. Lin, Julian J. Zlatev and Dale T. Miller

We identify and document an “overdetermined outcome defense” which occurs when one learns that circumstances besides one’s own actions were sufficient to produce a negative effect (e.g., deciding not to go to the gym, but later discovering that the gym had been... View Details

Keywords: Moral Sensibility; Decision Making; Outcome or Result; Behavior

Article

Reverse the Curse of the Top-5

By: Robert S. Kaplan

The past 40 years has seen a large increase in the number of articles submitted to journals ranked in the top-5 of their discipline. This increase is the rational response, by faculty, to the overweighting of publications in these journals by university promotions and... View Details

Keywords: Information Publishing; Journals and Magazines; Power and Influence; Research

2017
Article

Frictions or Mental Gaps: What's Behind the Information We (Don't) Use and When Do We Care?

By: Benjamin Handel and Joshua Schwartzstein

Consumers suffer significant losses from not acting on available information. These losses stem from frictions such as search costs, switching costs, and rational inattention, as well as what we call mental gaps resulting from wrong priors/worldviews, or relevant... View Details

Keywords: Information; Consumer Behavior

Web

The Founding of U.S. Steel and the Power of Public Opinion | Baker Library | Bloomberg Center | Harvard Business School

had an international presence in the world economy. “U.S. Steel was a giant—or a monster, depending on one’s perspective,” B. Mark Smith writes in Toward Rational Exuberance: The Evolution of the Modern Stock Market . 3 At Harvard... View Details

20 Nov 2007
Working Paper Summaries

The “Fees → Savings” Link, or Purchasing Fifty Pounds of Pasta

Keywords: by Michael I. Norton & Leonard Lee; Retail

Web

A New Vision – The Human Relations Movement – Baker Library | Bloomberg Center, Historical Collections

the then-dominant paradigm of scientific management had led managers to believe. The social system, which defined a worker’s relation to her work and to her companions, was not the product of rational engineering but of actual,... View Details

15 Dec 2010
Working Paper Summaries

Cognitive Barriers to Environmental Action: Problems and Solutions

Keywords: by Lisa L.Shu & Max H. Bazerman

03 Oct 2023
Research Event

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

actually choose to pursue the happiness itself, then the success will come in adequate quantity to give you the life that you really want. Goldberg: Let me ask you this this, I love this question from Destiny. As you build your life you will inevitably change. How do... View Details

Keywords: by HBS Staff

19 Jun 2014
Working Paper Summaries

Wisdom or Madness? Comparing Crowds with Expert Evaluation in Funding the Arts

Keywords: by Ethan R. Mollick & Ramana Nanda

Web

Behavioral Finance & Financial Stability

about how market participants form expectations? The authors study the rationality of individual and consensus forecasts of macroeconomic and financial variables. They use a diagnostic expectations version of a dispersed information... View Details

24 Oct 2016
Research & Ideas

Bernie Madoff Explains Himself

remorseful in the recording, but he displays some self-recognition. “It wasn’t like I was being blackmailed into doing something, or that I was afraid of getting caught doing it,” he continues. “I, sort of, you know, I sort of View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Financial Services

31 Oct 2023
Research & Ideas

Beyond the 'Business Case' in DEI: 6 Steps Toward Meaningful Change

you can still profit while marginalizing groups of workers.” “It's about the fact that there are barriers to inclusion and there has been a history of exclusion and continuing race and gender hierarchies,” Williams said. “It's not a View Details

Keywords: by Katherine Hutt Scott and Barbara DeLollis

2002
Book

Searching for a Corporate Savior: The Irrational Quest for Charismatic CEOs

By: Rakesh Khurana

Corporate CEOs are headline news. Stock prices rise and fall at word of their hiring and firing. Business media debate their merits and defects as if individual leaders determined the health of the economy. Yet we know surprisingly little about how CEOs are selected... View Details

Keywords: Managerial Roles; Selection and Staffing; Personal Characteristics; Experience and Expertise; Investment Activism; Corporate Strategy

Purchase

12 Apr 2022
Book

Racism, Colonialism, and Britain's Legacy of Violence

Britain’s 20th century empire was the largest in human history, with a quarter of the world’s land and nearly 700 million people. Yet the empire drew its strength from violence. That’s the conclusion Harvard Business School Professor Caroline Elkins draws in her new... View Details

Keywords: by Avery Forman

Web

Photography and Print Advertising - The High Art of Photographic Advertising - Baker Library | Bloomberg Center

the vast array of manufactured goods. As Elspeth Brown notes in The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture 1884–1929 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), at that time “the influence of applied... View Details

06 Jun 2011
Research & Ideas

Why Leaders Lose Their Way

nothing wrong, or they rationalize that their deviations are acceptable to achieve a greater good. During the financial crisis, Lehman CEO Richard Fuld refused to recognize that Lehman was undercapitalized. His denial turned balance sheet... View Details

Keywords: by Bill George

September 2011 (Revised July 2012)
Case

Building Watson: Not So Elementary, My Dear!

By: Willy Shih

This case is set inside IBM Research's efforts to build a computer that can successfully take on human challengers playing the game show Jeopardy! It opens with the machine named Watson offering the incorrect answer "Toronto" to a seemingly simple question during the... View Details

Keywords: Technological Innovation; Standards; Product Development; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Mathematical Methods; Research and Development; Information Technology