Publications

2007
Working Paper

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

By: Michael I. Norton and Leonard Lee

Many consumers have had the experience of entering discount membership clubs to make a few purchases, only to leave with enough pasta to outlast a nuclear winter. We suggest that the presence of membership fees can lead consumers to infer a "fees → savings" link,... View Details

Keywords: Price; Profit; Spending; Consumer Behavior; Retail Industry

The authors explore the effects of having a large dominant competitor and show conditions under which focusing on a competitive threat, rather than hiding it, can actually help a brand. Through lab and field studies, the authors demonstrate that highlighting a large... View Details

2015
Chapter

Consumer Neuroscience: Revealing Meaningful Relationships Between Brain and Consumer Behavior

By: Hilke Plassmann and Uma R. Karmarkar

The goal of this chapter is to give an overview of the nascent field of consumer neuroscience and discuss when and how it is useful to integrate the "black box" of the consumer's brain into consumer psychology. To reach this goal, we first briefly outline several... View Details

Keywords: Consumer Behavior; Cognition and Thinking

2012
Working Paper

The International Politics of IFRS Harmonization

By: Karthik Ramanna

The globalization of accounting standards as seen through the proliferation of IFRS worldwide is one of the most important developments in corporate governance over the last decade. I offer an analysis of some international political dynamics of countries' IFRS... View Details

Keywords: Accounting Standards; Globalization; IASB; IFRS; Politics; Financial Reporting; International Accounting; Global Strategy; Corporate Governance; Policy; Government and Politics; Standards; China; India; Canada

SSRN

Hakeem Belo-Osagie is an accomplished Nigerian professional and entrepreneur. He earned a degree in Political Philosophy and Economics from Oxford University as well as a law degree from Cambridge University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

He is the... View Details

Article

Productivity Orientation and the Consumption of Collectable Experiences

By: Anat Keinan and Ran Kivetz

This research examines why consumers desire unusual and novel consumption experiences and voluntarily choose leisure activities, vacations, and celebrations that are predicted to be less pleasurable. For example, consumers sometimes choose to stay at freezing ice... View Details

Keywords: Experience and Expertise; Innovation and Invention; Marketing Strategy; Consumer Behavior; Performance Productivity

25 May 2016
News

The Harvard Medalists of 2016

Jeffrey J. Bussgang

General Partner, Flybridge Capital Partners

Former entrepreneur turned VC, HBS Senior Lecturer, author of three, dad of three, husband of one, civic leader, and fan of all Boston sports.

Jeffrey J. Bussgang is a Senior... View Details

May, 2019
Article

Who Would You Like to Work With?: Use of Individual Characteristics and Social Networks in Team Formation Systems

By: Diego Gomez-Zara, Matthew Paras, Marlon Twyman, Jacqueline N. Lane, Leslie A. DeChurch and Noshir Contractor

People and organizations are increasingly using online platforms to assemble teams. In response, HCI researchers have theorized frameworks and created systems to support team assembly. However, little is known about how users search for and choose teammates on these... View Details

Keywords: Team Formation; Groups and Teams; Recruitment; Networks; Diversity

08 Feb 2008
Working Paper Summaries

Psychological Influence in Negotiation: An Introduction Long Overdue

Keywords: by Deepak Malhotra & Max H. Bazerman

July–August 2013
Article

Relaxing the Taboo on Telling Our Own Stories: Upholding Professional Distance and Personal Involvement

By: Michel Anteby

Scholars studying organizations are typically discouraged from telling, in print, their own stories. The expression "telling our own stories" is used as a proxy for field research projects that, in their written form, explicitly rely on a scholar's personal involvement... View Details

Keywords: Fieldwork; Research Practiced; Distance; Involvement; Taboo; Practice; Ethics; Education Industry

2015
Article

Percentage Cost Discounts Always Beat Percentage Benefit Bonuses: Helping Consumers Evaluate Nominally Equivalent Percentage Changes

By: Bhavya Mohan, Pierre Chandon and Jason Riis

Marketing offers that are framed as a "percentage change" in consumer cost vs. benefit can have highly non-linear impacts in terms of actual value for consumers. Even though two offers might appear identical, we show that consumers are better off choosing the offer... View Details

SSRN

The field of customer experience (CX) design — which aims to ensure that customers have positive touch points with companies while buying and consuming their products and services — has grown quickly in recent years. Research has shown that memorable experiences,... View Details

March 2012
Article

Performance Pressure as a Double-edged Sword: Enhancing Team Motivation but Undermining the Use of Team Knowledge

By: Heidi K. Gardner

In this paper, I develop and empirically test the proposition that performance pressure acts as a double-edged sword for teams, providing positive effects by enhancing the team's motivation to achieve good results while simultaneously triggering process losses. I... View Details

Keywords: Motivation and Incentives; Knowledge Use and Leverage; Behavior; Groups and Teams; Performance

2010
Article

An Organizational Approach to Undoing Gender: The Unlikely Case of Offshore Oil Platforms

By: Robin J. Ely and Debra E. Meyerson

This case study of two offshore oil platforms illustrates how an organizational initiative designed to enhance safety and effectiveness created a culture that unintentionally released men from societal imperatives for "manly" behavior, prompting them to let go of... View Details

Keywords: Safety; Goals and Objectives; Behavior; Organizational Culture; Performance Effectiveness; Gender; Emotions

December 2022
Article

Fostering Perceptions of Authenticity via Sensitive Self-Disclosure

By: Li Jiang, Leslie K. John, Reihane Boghrati and Maryam Kouchaki

Leaders’ perceived authenticity—the sense that leaders are acting in accordance with their “true self”—is associated with positive outcomes for both employees and organizations alike. How might leaders foster this impression? We show that sensitive self-disclosure, in... View Details

Keywords: Authenticity; Weaknesses; Self-disclosure; Leaders; Impression Management; Leadership Style; Motivation and Incentives

Article

The Functional Alibi

By: Anat Keinan, Ran Kivetz and Oded Netzer

Spending money on hedonic luxuries often seems wasteful, irrational, and even immoral. We propose that adding a small utilitarian feature to a luxury product can serve as a functional alibi, justifying the indulgent purchase and reducing indulgence guilt. We... View Details

Keywords: Consumer Behavior; Product Marketing

Purchase

2022
Working Paper

Politics at Work

By: Emanuele Colonnelli, Valdemar Pinho Neto and Edoardo Teso

We study how individual political views shape firm behavior and labor market outcomes. Using new micro-data on the political affiliation of business owners and private-sector workers in Brazil over the 2002–2019 period, we first document the presence of political... View Details

Keywords: Private Sector; Employees; Prejudice and Bias; Brazil