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- 2024
- Working Paper
Content Moderation with Opaque Policies
By: Scott Duke Kominers and Jesse M. Shapiro
A sender sends a signal about a state to a receiver who takes an action that determines a payoff. A moderator can block some or all of the sender's signal before it reaches the receiver. When the moderator's policy is transparent to the receiver, the moderator can... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Contributing to Growth? The Role of Open Source Software for Global Startups
By: Nataliya Langburd Wright, Frank Nagle and Shane Greenstein
How does participating in open source software (OSS) communities spur entrepreneurial growth?
To address this question, we analyze novel data matching accounts from GitHub—the largest OSS
hosting platform—to the universe of global software venture-backed firms... View Details
- January–February 2024
- Article
Shared Service Delivery Can Increase Client Engagement: A Study of Shared Medical Appointments
By: Ryan W. Buell, Kamalini Ramdas, Nazlı Sönmez, Kavitha Srinivasan and Rengaraj Venkatesh
Problem Definition: Clients and service providers alike often consider one-on-one service delivery to be ideal, assuming – perhaps unquestioningly – that devoting individualized attention best improves client outcomes. In contrast, in shared service delivery, clients... View Details
- December 2023
- Article
Discerning Saints: Moralization of Intrinsic Motivation and Selective Prosociality at Work
By: Mijeong Kwon, Julia Lee Cunningham and Jon M. Jachimowicz
Intrinsic motivation has received widespread attention as a predictor of positive work outcomes, including employees’ prosocial behavior. In the current research, we offer a more nuanced view by proposing that intrinsic motivation does not uniformly increase prosocial... View Details
- 2023
- Article
Post Hoc Explanations of Language Models Can Improve Language Models
By: Satyapriya Krishna, Jiaqi Ma, Dylan Slack, Asma Ghandeharioun, Sameer Singh and Himabindu Lakkaraju
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in performing complex tasks. Moreover, recent research has shown that incorporating human-annotated rationales (e.g., Chain-of-Thought prompting) during in-context learning can significantly enhance... View Details
- December 2023
- Article
Save More Today or Tomorrow: The Role of Urgency in Precommitment Design
By: Joseph Reiff, Hengchen Dai, John Beshears, Katherine L. Milkman and Shlomo Benartzi
To encourage farsighted behaviors, past research suggests that marketers may be wise to invite consumers to pre-commit to adopt them “later.” However, the authors propose that people will draw different inferences from different types of pre-commitment offers, and that... View Details
- October 2023
- Case
Lasell University in 2023: Securing the Future
By: John Jong-Hyun Kim and Mary C. Sauer
In a groundbreaking move on September 20, 2022, Lasell University's President, Michael B. Alexander, announced an extraordinary 33% reduction in tuition, room, board, and fees, signaling a pivotal shift in higher education. Situated in an affluent Boston suburb,... View Details
- September 2023 (Revised December 2023)
- Case
TetraScience: Noise and Signal
By: Thomas R. Eisenmann and Tom Quinn
In 2019, TetraScience CEO “Spin” Wang needed advice. Five years earlier, he had cofounded a startup that saw early success with a hardware product designed to help laboratory scientists in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical spaces more easily collect data from... View Details
Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Business Growth and Maturation; Business Organization; Restructuring; Forecasting and Prediction; Digital Platforms; Analytics and Data Science; AI and Machine Learning; Organizational Structure; Network Effects; Competitive Strategy; Biotechnology Industry; Pharmaceutical Industry; United States; Boston
- 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
- July 2023
- Article
So, Who Likes You? Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment
By: Ravi Bapna, Edward McFowland III, Probal Mojumder, Jui Ramaprasad and Akhmed Umyarov
With one-third of marriages in the United States beginning online, online dating platforms have become important curators of the modern social fabric. Prior work on online dating has elicited two critical frictions in the heterosexual dating market. Women, governed by... View Details
- June 2023
- Article
Can Purpose Foster Stakeholder Trust in Corporations
By: Ranjay Gulati and Franz Wohlgezogen
As part of institutional changes toward more responsible capitalism, firms increasingly articulate a purpose beyond simply profit as a central tenet of their governance. Management scholarship has noted the potential advantages of such purpose-focus for stakeholder... 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
- 2023
- Working Paper
Culture as a Signal: Evidence from a Natural Field Experiment
By: Wei Cai, Dennis Campbell and Jiehang Yu
The importance of culture as an informal management control system is increasingly acknowledged in academia. While prior research mainly focuses on the value of culture on internal stakeholders (e.g., employees), we examine whether culture serves as a credible signal... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Turning Points in Inflation: A Structural Breaks Approach with Micro Data
By: Alberto Cavallo and Gaston Garcia Zavaleta
We introduce a novel methodology for detecting inflation turning points that combines high-frequency, disaggregated price data with standard structural break techniques to provide policymakers with more precise and timely signals of inflation dynamics. The methodology... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Sending Signals: Strategic Displays of Warmth and Competence
By: Bushra S. Guenoun and Julian J. Zlatev
Using a combination of exploratory and confirmatory approaches, this research examines how
people signal important information about themselves to others. We first train machine learning
models to assess the use of warmth and competence impression management... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Life After Death: A Field Experiment with Small Businesses on Information Frictions, Stigma, and Bankruptcy
By: Shai Benjamin Bernstein, Emanuele Colonnelli, Mitchell Hoffman and Benjamin Iverson
In a randomized control trial (RCT) with U.S. small businesses, we document that a large share of firms are not well-informed about bankruptcy. Many assume that bankruptcy necessarily entails the death of a business and do not know about Chapter 11 bankruptcy, where... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Leadership and the Value of Persistence
By: James J. Anton, Alan Jaske and Dennis Yao
Consider a leader’s decision whether to persist with an unsuccessful R&D project
or to terminate the project in favor of a new project with an uncertain value. How
does that decision affect the effort exerted by the manager assigned to the project? To
study this... View Details
- December 2022
- Article
Scarlet Letters: Rehabilitation Through Transgression Transparency and Personal Narrative Control
By: Erin L. Frey, Ethan Bernstein and Nick Rekenthaler
When employees commit transgressions, organizations often use tools of organizational control to prevent them from transgressing again. We investigate whether organizations can use transgression transparency to rehabilitate transgressors. Although making transgressions... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
The Issuance and Design of Sustainability-linked Loans
By: Maria Loumioti and George Serafeim
Sustainability-linked loans (i.e., syndicated loans for which pricing is linked to a sustainability performance indicator) have rapidly evolved into a significant private debt product. We find that sustainability-linked lending has been available mostly to borrowers... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Adjusting Prices in the Long-tail: The Role of Competitive Monitoring
By: Ayelet Israeli and Eric Anderson
Most e-commerce retailers offer a long-tail of very low demand products. Individually, these items may have low sales but collectively they are critical to the overall e-commerce business model. Because of their minimal sales, pricing is a constant challenge. The... View Details