Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(120,120)
- Faculty Publications (2,004)
- 2021
- Working Paper
Cognitive Biases: Mistakes or Missing Stakes?
By: Benjamin Enke, Uri Gneezy, Brian Hall, David Martin, Vadim Nelidov, Theo Offerman and Jeroen van de Ven
Despite decades of research on heuristics and biases, empirical evidence on the effect of large incentives—as present in relevant economic decisions—on cognitive biases is scant. This paper tests the effect of incentives on four widely documented biases: base rate... View Details
- March 29, 2021
- Editorial
Research: A Little Recognition Can Provide a Big Morale Boost
By: Shibeal O'Flaherty, Michael Sanders and A.V. Whillans
As organizations large and small face the twin challenges of increasingly strained budgets and burned out workforces, what can managers do to keep employees engaged—without breaking the bank? In this piece, the authors share new research on the power of symbolic awards... View Details
- Article
A Multicountry Perspective on Gender Differences in Time Use During COVID-19
By: Laura M. Giurge, Ashley V. Whillans and Ayse Yemiscigil (shared authorship)
The COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally altered how people spend time, with possible consequences for subjective well-being. Using diverse samples of remote workers from the United States, Canada, Denmark, Brazil, and Spain (n = 31,141), following a preregistered... View Details
- March 2021 (Revised May 2021)
- Case
Managing Science Communication at Bayer
By: Joshua Schwartzstein and Adi Sunderam
- March 2021 (Revised September 2021)
- Case
Applied: Using Behavioral Science to Debias Hiring
By: Ashley Whillans and Jeff Polzer
The UK government’s Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) needed to hire a new associate and were trying to increase the diversity of their job candidates. This decision was based on academic research showing that recruiters and managers often fell into common traps like... View Details
- March 2021
- Supplement
Applied: Using Behavioral Science to Debias Hiring (B)
By: Ashley Whillans and Jeff Polzer
At the end of 2018, Applied faced questions of stakeholder management and scale. Glazebrook wanted clients to get rid of CVs altogether. To do this, they would have to help hiring managers and recruiters easily build task-based assessments of the skills that their... View Details
- March 2021
- Article
Active Choice, Implicit Defaults, and the Incentive to Choose
By: John Beshears, James J. Choi, David Laibson and Brigitte C. Madrian
Home-delivered prescriptions have no delivery charge and lower copayments than prescriptions picked up at a pharmacy. Nevertheless, when home delivery is offered on an opt-in basis, the take-up rate is only 6%. We study a program that makes active choice of either home... View Details
- March 2021
- Article
Bayesian Signatures of Confidence and Central Tendency in Perceptual Judgment
By: Yang Xiang, Thomas Graeber, Benjamin Enke and Samuel Gershman
This paper theoretically and empirically investigates the role of Bayesian noisy cognition in perceptual judgment, focusing on the central tendency effect: the well-known empirical regularity that perceptual judgments are biased towards the center of the... View Details
- March 2021
- Article
Experimenting During the Shift to Virtual Team Work: Learnings from How Teams Adapted Their Activities During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Past research has focused on understanding the characteristics of work that are fully virtual or fully collocated. The present study seeks to expand our understanding of team work by studying knowledge workers' experiences as they were suddenly forced to transition to... View Details
- 2021
- Article
Leisure Beliefs and the Subjective Well-being of Nations
By: Lucia Macchia and A.V. Whillans
Here, we construct a data set of 79 countries (N = 220,000) and explore whether differences in the prioritization of time (leisure) vs. money (work) explain cross-country differences in happiness. Consistent with our predictions, countries whose citizens value leisure... View Details
Keywords: Leisure; Work; Subjective Well-being; Public Policy; Employment; Happiness; Governance; Policy
- March 2021
- Article
Parental Burnout Around the Globe: A 42-Country Study
By: Isabelle Roskam, Joyce Aguiar, Ege Akgun, Gizem Arikan, Mariana Artavia, Herve Avalosse, Kaisa Aunola, Michael Bader, Claire Bahati, Elizabeth J. Barham, Elaine Besson, Wim Beyers, Emilie Boujut, Maria Elena Brianda, Anna Brytek-Matera, Neomie Carbonneau, Filipa Cesar, Bin-Bin Chen, Geraldine Dorard, Luciana Carla dos Santos Elias, Sandra Dunsmuir, Natalia Egorova, Nicolas Favez, Anne-Marie Fontaine, Heather Foran, Julia Fricke, Kaichiro Furutani, Laura Gallee, Myrna Gannage, Maria Gaspar, Lucie Godbout, Amit Goldenberg, James J. Gross, Maria Ancuta Gurza, Ruby Hall, Muhammad Aamir Hashmi, Ogma Hatta, Mai Helmy, Thi Van Hoang, Mai Trang Huynh, Emerence Kaneza, Taishi Kawamoto, Goran Knezevic, Bassantea Lodegaena Kpassagou, Ljiljana B. Lazarevic, Sarah Le Vigouroux, Astrid Lebert-Charron, Vanessa Leme, Gao-Xian Lin, Carolyn MacCann, Denisse Manrique-Millones, Marisa Marias, Maria Isabel Miranda-Orrego, Marina Miscioscia, Clara Morgades-Bamba, Seyyedeh Fatemeh Mousavi, Badra Moutassem-Mimouni, Ana Muntean, Hugh Murphy, Alexis Ndayizigiye, Josue Ngnombouowo Tenkue, Sally Olderbak, Sophie Ornawka, Fatumo Osman, Daniela Oyarce-Cadiz, Pablo A Perez-Diaz, Konstantinos V Petrides, Claudia Pineda-Marin, Katharina Prandstetter, Alena Prikhidko, Ricardo T Ricci, Fernando Salinas-Quiroz, Raquel Sanchez-Rodriguez, Ainize Sarrionandia, Celine Scola, Vincent Sezibera, Paola Silva, Alessandra Simonelli, Bart Soenens, Emma Sorbring, Matilda Sorkkila, Charlotte Schrooyen, Elena Stanculescu, Elena Starchenkova, Dorota Szczygiel, Javier Tapia, Thi Minh Thuy Tri, Melissa Tremblay, A. Meltem Ustandag-Budak, Maday Valdes Pacheco, Hedwig van Bakel, Lesley Verhofstadt, Jaqueline Wendland, Saengduean Yotanyamaneewong and Moira Mikolajczak
High levels of stress in the parenting domain can lead to parental burnout, a condition that has severe consequences for both parents and children. It is not yet clear, however, whether parental burnout varies by culture, and if so, why it might do so. In this study,... View Details
- March 2021
- Article
The Crowd Emotion Amplification Effect
By: Amit Goldenberg, Erika Weisz, Timothy D. Sweeney, Mina Cikara and James Gross
How do people go about reading a room or taking the temperature of a crowd? When people catch a brief glimpse of an array of faces, they can only focus their attention on some of the faces. We propose that perceivers preferentially attend to faces exhibiting strong... View Details
- January 2021 (Revised March 2021)
- Case
Juno (A): Leveraging Student Power
By: Joshua Schwartzstein, Kathleen L. McGinn and Amy Klopfenstein
In March 2020, Chris Abkarians and Nikhil Agarwal were in the midst of preparing the annual auction for their student loan assistance startup, Juno. Both current MBA students at Harvard Business School, the duo founded Juno in 2018 to leverage student bargaining power... View Details
Keywords: Decision Making; Decision Choices and Conditions; Decisions; Cost vs Benefits; Education; Higher Education; Finance; Borrowing and Debt; Strategy; Adaptation; Alignment; Negotiation; Agreements and Arrangements; Negotiation Participants; Negotiation Process; Negotiation Tactics; Negotiation Deal; Negotiation Offer; Negotiation Types; Financial Services Industry; Education Industry; North and Central America; United States; Massachusetts; Boston
- January 2021 (Revised March 2021)
- Supplement
Juno (B): Leveraging Student Power
By: Joshua Schwartzstein, Kathleen L. McGinn and Amy Klopfenstein
In March 2020, Juno co-founders Chris Abkarians and Nikhil Agarwal decided to pitch banks in anticipation of their annual auction while negotiating directly with private lender Eager. Responses from the majority of private lenders—including Juno’s 2019 partner—were not... View Details
Keywords: Decision Making; Decision Choices and Conditions; Decisions; Cost vs Benefits; Judgments; Education; Higher Education; Finance; Borrowing and Debt; Strategy; Adaptation; Alignment; Negotiation; Negotiation Deal; Negotiation Offer; Negotiation Participants; Negotiation Process; Negotiation Types; Financial Services Industry; Education Industry; North and Central America; United States; Massachusetts; Boston
- January 2021 (Revised March 2021)
- Supplement
Juno (C): Leveraging Student Power
By: Joshua Schwartzstein, Kathleen L. McGinn and Amy Klopfenstein
In May 2020, Juno co-founders Chris Abkarians and Nikhil Agarwal decided to hold the annual auction for their student loan assistance startup. Five lenders submitted bids, and the co-founders ultimately opted to select Eager Bank as their partner for the 2020-2021... View Details
Keywords: Decision Making; Decision Choices and Conditions; Decisions; Cost vs Benefits; Judgments; Education; Higher Education; Finance; Borrowing and Debt; Strategy; Adaptation; Alignment; Negotiation; Agreements and Arrangements; Negotiation Deal; Negotiation Offer; Negotiation Participants; Negotiation Process; Negotiation Tactics; Negotiation Types; Financial Services Industry; Education Industry; North and Central America; United States; Massachusetts; Boston
- 2021
- Working Paper
Does Observability Amplify Sensitivity to Moral Frames? Evaluating a Reputation-Based Account of Moral Preferences
By: Valerio Capraro, Jillian J. Jordan and Ben Tappin
A growing body of work suggests that people are sensitive to moral framing in economic games involving prosociality, suggesting that people hold moral preferences for doing the “right thing”. What gives rise to these preferences? Here, we evaluate the explanatory power... View Details