Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(3,302)
- Faculty Publications (578)
- October 2023
- Article
Coordination and Bandwagon Effects: How Past Rankings Shape the Behavior of Voters and Candidates
By: Riako Granzier, Vincent Pons and Clémence Tricaud
Candidates’ placements in polls or past elections can be powerful coordination devices for both parties and voters. Using a regression discontinuity design in French elections, we show that candidates who place first by only a small margin in the first round are more... View Details
- October 2023
- Article
Speedy Activists: Firm Response Time to Sociopolitical Events Influences Consumer Behavior
By: Jimin Nam, Maya Balakrishnan, Julian De Freitas and Alison Wood Brooks
Organizations face growing pressure from their consumers and stakeholders to take public stances on sociopolitical issues. However, many are hesitant to do so lest they make missteps, promises they cannot keep, appear inauthentic, or alienate consumers, employees, or... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Words Can Hurt: How Political Communication Can Change the Pace of an Epidemic
By: Jessica Gagete-Miranda, Lucas Argentieri Mariani and Paula Rettl
While elite-cue effects on public opinion are well-documented, questions remain as
to when and why voters use elite cues to inform their opinions and behaviors. Using
experimental and observational data from Brazil during the COVID-19 pandemic, we
study how leader... View Details
Keywords: Elites; Public Engagement; Politics; Political Affiliation; Political Campaigns; Political Influence; Political Leadership; Political Economy; Survey Research; COVID-19; COVID-19 Pandemic; COVID; Cognitive Psychology; Cognitive Biases; Political Elections; Voting; Power and Influence; Identity; Behavior; Latin America; Brazil
- 2023
- Working Paper
How People Use Statistics
By: Pedro Bordalo, John J. Conlon, Nicola Gennaioli, Spencer Yongwook Kwon and Andrei Shleifer
We document two new facts about the distributions of answers in famous statistical problems: they are i) multi-modal and ii) unstable with respect to irrelevant changes in the problem. We offer a model in which, when solving a problem, people represent each hypothesis... View Details
- August 2023
- Case
Reimagining Hindustan Unilever (A)
By: Sunil Gupta and Rachna Tahilyani
In the fall of 2019, the CEO and MD of Hindustan Unilever (HUL), India’s largest fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) firm, is wondering what to do about their experiments to digitize distribution. Despite three years of intense efforts, their apps to empower retailers... View Details
- August 2023
- Supplement
Reimagining Hindustan Unilever (B)
By: Sunil Gupta and Rachna Tahilyani
In April 2023, as the CEO and MD of Hindustan Unilever (HUL), India’s largest fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) firm, prepared to hand over the firm’s reins to his successor, he proudly reflected on the last decade. His quest to digitally transform HUL into an... View Details
- August 2023 (Revised August 2023)
- Case
Sky Therapeutics: Innovating in Digital Therapeutics
By: Satish Tadikonda, Olivia Reszczynski and William Marks
Shad Faraz and Alex Youssef were intrigued by the opportunities in the relatively new area of Digital Therapeutics. Despite initial successes, early entrants had struggled with reimbursement and revenue-predictability challenges. However, venture investors still... View Details
- July 2023
- Case
Difficult Observations
By: David G. Fubini, William Fubini and Patrick Sanguineti
In this short vignette on ethics in consulting, Daniel Lee, a new Associate assigned to work with an important client executive, must decide whether to report the executive's behavior toward his team. Though the executive's style seems harsh and intimidating toward his... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Algorithm Failures and Consumers' Response: Evidence from Zillow
By: Isamar Troncoso, Runshan Fu, Nikhil Malik and Davide Proserpio
In November 2021, Zillow announced the closure of its iBuyer business. Popular media largely attributed this to a failure of its proprietary forecasting algorithm. We study the response of consumers to Zillow’s iBuyer business closure. We show that after the iBuyer... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Anti-Political-Establishment Citizens: An In-Depth Study from Two Latin American Countries
By: Loreto Cox and Natalia Garbiras-Diaz
Building on citizens’ animosity towards politicians, anti-establishment parties and
candidates have achieved significant electoral success. While recent studies examine
the supply-side, we know little about what drives citizens’ anti-establishment sentiments and how... View Details
- July 2023
- Article
Before or After? The Effects of Payment Decision Timing in Pay-What-You-Want Contexts
By: Raghabendra P. KC, Vincent Mak and Elie Ofek
We study how payment decision timing—before versus after product delivery—influences consumer payment under pay-what-you-want pricing. We focus on situations where there is minimal change in consumer uncertainty regarding the product before versus after receiving it.... View Details
- July 11, 2023
- Article
How Reputation Does (and Does Not) Drive People to Punish Without Looking
By: Jillian J. Jordan and Nour S. Kteily
Punishing wrongdoers can confer reputational benefits, and people sometimes punish without careful consideration. But are these observations related? Does reputation drive people to people to “punish without looking”? And if so, is this because unquestioning... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
The Complexity of Economic Decisions
By: Xavier Gabaix and Thomas Graeber
We propose a theory of the complexity of economic decisions. Leveraging a macroeconomic framework of production functions, we conceptualize the mind as a cognitive economy, where a task’s complexity is determined by its composition of cognitive operations. Complexity... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Black Empowerment and White Mobilization: The Effects of the Voting Rights Act
By: Andrea Bernini, Giovanni Facchini, Marco Tabellini and Cecilia Testa
How did southern whites respond to the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA)? Leveraging
newly digitized data on county-level voter registration by race between 1956 and
1980, and exploiting pre-determined variation in exposure to the federal intervention,
we document that... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Setting Gendered Expectations? Recruiter Outreach Bias in Online Tech Training Programs
By: Jacqueline N. Lane, Karim R. Lakhani and Roberto Fernandez
Competence development in digital technologies, analytics, and artificial intelligence is increasingly important to all types of organizations and their workforce. Universities and corporations are investing heavily in developing training programs, at all tenure... View Details
- May–June 2023
- Article
Need for Speed: The Impact of In-Process Delays on Customer Behavior in Online Retail
By: Santiago Gallino, Nil Karacaoglu and Antonio Moreno
The impact of delays has been widely studied in various offline services. The focus of this study is online services, and we explore the impact of in-process delays—measured by website speed—on customer behavior. We leverage novel retail and website speed data to... View Details
- May 2023
- Article
Political Ideology and International Capital Allocation
By: Elisabeth Kempf, Mancy Luo, Larissa Schäfer and Margarita Tsoutsoura
Does investors' political ideology shape international capital allocation? We provide evidence from two settings—syndicated corporate loans and equity mutual funds—to show ideological alignment with foreign governments affects the cross-border capital allocation by... View Details
- April 12, 2023
- Article
Using AI to Adjust Your Marketing and Sales in a Volatile World
By: Das Narayandas and Arijit Sengupta
Why are some firms better and faster than others at adapting their use of customer data to respond to changing or uncertain marketing conditions? A common thread across faster-acting firms is the use of AI models to predict outcomes at various stages of the customer... View Details
- April 3, 2023
- Article
Getting a Clearer View of Your Company’s Carbon Footprint
By: Robert S. Kaplan, Karthik Ramanna and Stefan Reichelstein
E-liability accounting is a new technique that will help customers factor in a product’s environmental footprint into their purchasing decisions and will help create a competition dynamic that leads to reduced carbon outputs. This article describes two pilot studies—by... View Details
- March 2023 (Revised June 2023)
- Teaching Note
Ransomware Attack at Springhill Medical Center
By: Suraj Srinivasan and Li-Kuan (Jason) Ni
Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 123-065. In July, 2019, Springhill Medical Center (“SMC”) in Mobile, Alabama fell prey to a malicious ransomware attack that crippled the hospital’s internal network systems and public-facing web page. While the hospital rushed to... View Details
Keywords: Disruption; Communication; Communication Strategy; Decision Making; Decision Choices and Conditions; Judgments; Corporate Accountability; Corporate Disclosure; Corporate Governance; Governance Controls; Policy; Employees; News; Cybersecurity; Digital Strategy; Information Infrastructure; Information Management; Internet and the Web; Crisis Management; Business or Company Management; Resource Allocation; Risk Management; Negotiation Tactics; Failure; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Attitudes; Behavior; Perception; Reputation; Trust; Public Opinion; Social Issues; Health Industry; Alabama; United States