Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(157)
- Faculty Publications (41)
- December 2017
- Article
Discordant vs. Harmonious Selves: The Effects of Identity Conflict and Enhancement on Sales Performance in Employee-Customer Interactions
By: Lakshmi Ramarajan, Nancy Rothbard and Steffanie Wilk
Across multiple studies, we examine how identity conflict and enhancement within people affect performance in tasks that involve interactions between people through two mechanisms: role-immersion, operationalized as intrinsic motivation, and role-taking,... View Details
- Article
The Career Effects of Scandal: Evidence from Scientific Retractions
By: Pierre Azoulay, Alessandro Bonatti and Joshua Lev Krieger
We investigate how the scientific community's perception of a scientist's prior work changes when one of his articles is retracted. Relative to non-retracted control authors, faculty members who experience a retraction see the citation rate to their earlier,... View Details
- October 2017
- Article
The Size of the LGBT Population and the Magnitude of Anti-Gay Sentiment Are Substantially Underestimated
By: Katherine Baldiga Coffman, Lucas C. Coffman and Keith M. Marzilli Ericson
We demonstrate that widely used measures of anti-gay sentiment and the size of the LGBT population are misestimated, likely substantially. In a series of online experiments using a large and diverse but non-representative sample, we compare estimates from the standard... View Details
- August 2016
- Article
The Role of (Dis)similarity in (Mis)predicting Others' Preferences
By: Kate Barasz, Tami Kim and Leslie K. John
Consumers readily indicate liking options that appear dissimilar—for example, enjoying both rustic lake vacations and chic city vacations or liking both scholarly documentary films and action-packed thrillers. However, when predicting other consumers’ tastes for the... View Details
- 2016
- Article
Recursive Mentalizing and Common Knowledge in the Bystander Effect
By: Kyle A. Thomas, Julian De Freitas, Peter DiScioli and Steven Pinker
The more potential helpers there are, the less likely any individual is to help. A traditional explanation
for this bystander effect is that responsibility diffuses across the multiple bystanders, diluting the responsibility of each. We investigate an... View Details
- 2016
- Working Paper
Paying (for) Attention: The Impact of Information Processing Costs on Bayesian Inference
By: Scott Duke Kominers, Xiaosheng Mu and Alexander Peysakhovich
Human information processing is often modeled as costless Bayesian inference.
However, research in psychology shows that attention is a computationally costly and potentially limited resource. We study a Bayesian individual for whom computing posterior beliefs is... View Details
- April 2015
- Article
Anxious and Egocentric: How Specific Emotions Influence Perspective Taking
By: Andrew R. Todd, Matthias Forstmann, Pascal Burgmer, Alison Wood Brooks and Adam D. Galinsky
People frequently feel anxious. Although prior research has extensively studied how feeling anxious shapes intrapsychic aspects of cognition, much less is known about how anxiety affects interpersonal aspects of cognition. Here, we examine the influence of incidental... View Details
Keywords: Anxiety; Egocentrism; Emotion; Perspective Taking; Risk and Uncertainty; Perspective; Emotions
- 2014
- Article
Thought Calibration: How Thinking Just the Right Amount Increases One’s Influence and Appeal
By: Daniella Kupor, Zakary L. Tormala, Michael I. Norton and Derek D. Rucker
Previous research suggests that people draw inferences about their attitudes and preferences based on their own thoughtfulness. The current research explores how observing other individuals make decisions more or less thoughtfully can shape perceptions of those... View Details
- November 2012
- Article
An Age Penalty in Racial Preferences
By: Deborah A. Small, Devin G. Pope and Michael I. Norton
We document an age penalty in racial discrimination: charitable behavior toward African American children decreases-and negative stereotypical inferences increase-with the age of those children. Using data from an online charity that solicits donations for school... View Details
- June 2012
- Article
Consequence-Cause Matching: Looking to the Consequences of Events to Infer Their Causes
By: Robyn A. LeBoeuf and Michael I. Norton
We show that people non-normatively infer event causes from event consequences. For example, people inferred that a product failure (computer crash) had a large cause (widespread computer virus) if it had a large consequence (job loss), but that the identical failure... View Details
- March 2011 (Revised December 2012)
- Case
Demand Media
By: John Deighton and Leora Kornfeld
Google search had helped Demand Media grow to be a $1.9 billion online publisher. Then, social media and smartphone apps began to change the way people navigated the Internet. How should Demand Media respond? The business ran on a radically new model in which a stable... View Details
- Article
Temporal View of the Costs and Benefits of Self-Deception
By: Zoe Chance, Michael I. Norton, Francesca Gino and Dan Ariely
Researchers have documented many cases in which individuals rationalize their regrettable actions. Four experiments examine situations in which people go beyond merely explaining away their misconduct to actively deceiving themselves. We find that those who exploit... View Details
- Article
The Social Utility of Feature Creep
By: Debora V. Thompson and Michael I. Norton
Previous research shows that consumers frequently choose products with too many features that they later find difficult to use. Our research shows that this seemingly suboptimal behavior may in fact confer benefits when factoring in the social context of consumption.... View Details
- Article
Coarse Thinking and Persuasion
By: Sendhil Mullainathan, Joshua Schwartzstein and Andrei Shleifer
We present a model of uninformative persuasion in which individuals "think coarsely": they group situations into categories and apply the same model of inference to all situations within a category. Coarse thinking exhibits two features that persuaders take advantage... View Details
- June 2008
- Article
How Are Preferences Revealed?
By: John Beshears, James J. Choi, David Laibson and Brigitte C. Madrian
Revealed preferences are tastes that rationalize an economic agent's observed actions. Normative preferences represent the agent's actual interests. It sometimes makes sense to assume that revealed preferences are identical to normative preferences. But there are many... View Details
- November 2006
- Article
Patent Citations as a Measure of Knowledge Flows: The Influence of Examiner Citations
By: Juan Alcacer and Michelle Gittelman
Analysis of patent citations is a core methodology in the study of knowledge diffusion. However, citations made by patent examiners have not been separately reported, adding unknown noise to the data. We leverage a recent change in the reporting of patent data showing... View Details
- February 1994
- Background Note
Causal Inference
Discusses what causation is and what one can (and cannot) learn about causation from observational (nonexperimental) data. View Details
- Forthcoming
- Article
An AI Method to Score Celebrity Visual Potential from Human Faces
By: Flora Feng, Shunyuan Zhang, Xiao Liu, Kannan Srinivasan and Cait Lamberton
It has long been a mantra of marketing practice that, particularly in low-involvement situations, spokespeople should be physically attractive. This paper suggests there is a higher probability of gaining fame and influence (i.e., celebrity potential) than is captured... View Details
- Research Summary
Overview
By: Eva Ascarza
Professor Ascarza’s research primarily focuses on providing researchers and marketers a better understanding of how to manage customer retention so as to reduce churn and increase firm’s profitability. She addresses these issues by building empirical models of customer... View Details
- Research Summary
Overview
Engaged with field work in East Africa, South Asia, and in several large hybrid organizations in the United States, Professor Whillans places a focus on exploring questions with strong theoretical motivation in the social psychological literature and relevant... View Details