Publications

April 2023
Case

Twitter: The Freedom to Speak Freely and Be Heard

By: Randolph B. Cohen, Carin-Isabel Knoop and Mel Martin

In April 2022, serial entrepreneur Elon Musk announced that he would be interested in purchasing the social media site Twitter for $44 billion. With more than 100 million twitter followers, Musk had historically leveraged the site to engage with the customers of his... View Details

Keywords: Values and Beliefs; Acquisition; Social Media; Power and Influence; Technology Industry; Communications Industry; Public Relations Industry; United States

Educators

Article

Extension Request Avoidance Predicts Greater Time Stress Among Women

By: Ashley V. Whillans, Jaewon Yoon, Aurora Turek and Grant E. Donnelly

In nine studies using archival data, surveys, and experiments, we identify a factor that predicts gender differences in time stress and burnout. Across academic and professional settings, women are less likely to ask for more time when working under adjustable... View Details

Keywords: Burnout; Time Stress; Workplace Practices; Deadlines; Time Management; Gender; Well-being

Winter 2024
Article

Is Pay Transparency Good?

By: Zoë B. Cullen

Countries around the world are enacting pay transparency policies to combat pay discrimination. Since 2000, 71 percent of OECD countries have done so. Most are enacting transparency horizontally, revealing pay between coworkers doing similar work within a firm. While... View Details

Keywords: Policy; Wages; Knowledge Sharing; Job Design and Levels; Negotiation; Performance Productivity; Compensation and Benefits; Motivation and Incentives

July 2019
Article

I Know Why You Voted for Trump: (Over)inferring Motives Based on Choice

By: Kate Barasz, Tami Kim and Ioannis Evangelidis

People often speculate about why others make the choices they do. This paper investigates how such inferences are formed as a function of what is chosen. Specifically, when observers encounter someone else's choice (e.g., of political candidate), they use the chosen... View Details

Keywords: Self-other Difference; Social Perception; Inference-making; Preferences; Consumer Behavior; Prediction; Prediction Error; Decision Choices and Conditions; Perception; Behavior; Forecasting and Prediction

28 Sep 2007
Working Paper Summaries

Digital Interactivity: Unanticipated Consequences for Markets, Marketing, and Consumers

Keywords: by John A. Deighton & Leora Kornfeld

2023
Working Paper

Channeled Attention and Stable Errors

By: Tristan Gagnon-Bartsch, Matthew Rabin and Joshua Schwartzstein

We develop a framework for assessing when somebody will eventually notice that she has a misspecified model of the world, premised on the idea that she neglects information that she deems—through the lens of her misconceptions—to be irrelevant. In doing so, we... View Details

Keywords: Attentional Stability; Cognition and Thinking; Attitudes; Information; Theory

May 2024
Article

The Effect of Configural Processing on Mentalization

By: Katrina Fincher, Ting Zhang, Asteya Percaya, Adam Galinsky and Michael W. Morris

Eight studies (N = 2,561) reveal that how we perceptually process a person’s face affects our capacity to understand their mind. Studies 1A and B indicate this relationship functions via two separate pathways: (a) indirectly by increasing our sensitivity to the... View Details

Keywords: Perception; Cognition and Thinking

Purchase

2015
Working Paper

Coactive Vicarious Learning: Towards a Relational Theory of Vicarious Learning in Organizations

By: Christopher G. Myers

Vicarious learning—a process of individual belief and behavior change that occurs through being exposed to, and making meaning of, another's experience—has long been recognized as a key driver of individual, team and organizational success. Yet existing perspectives on... View Details

Keywords: Organizations; Learning

SSRN

November 29, 2011
Article

The Role of The Board in Creating a Sustainable Strategy

By: Robert G. Eccles, Ioannis Ioannou and George Serafeim

While conceptually elegant, the belief that a corporation's role is to maximize value for shareholders is under increasing challenge as society's expectations for companies change. An equally elegant new concept that takes account of these dual pressures has yet to... View Details

Keywords: Value Creation; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Corporate Strategy; Business and Shareholder Relations; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Performance Expectations; Governing and Advisory Boards; Management Practices and Processes; Decisions; Risk and Uncertainty; Cost vs Benefits; Information

October 2017
Case

Still Leading (B10): Louis Gossett Jr.— A New Role Erasing Racism

By: Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Ai-Ling Jamila Malone

Louis (Lou) Gossett Jr.’s exemplary life included a groundbreaking career in entertainment and a bold and audacious goal to erase racism. From the Broadway stage to television and the movie screen, Gossett earned major accolades in his field, notably becoming the first... View Details

Keywords: Leadership; Advanced Leadership Initiative; Advanced Leadership; Change; Transition; Entrepreneurship; Social Entrepreneurship; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; Prejudice and Bias

Educators

Purchase

November 2011
Article

How Great Companies Think Differently

By: Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Corporate leaders have long subscribed to the belief that the sole purpose of business is to make money. That narrow view, deeply embedded in the American capitalist system, molds the actions of most corporations, constraining them to focus on maximizing short-term... View Details

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Profit; Leadership; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Business and Shareholder Relations; Behavior; Social Issues; Competitive Advantage

Purchase

24 Oct 2023
HBS Case

From P.T. Barnum to Mary Kay: Lessons From 5 Leaders Who Changed the World

What makes a leader great? A dose of luck, for sure. But specific leadership traits mark extraordinary individuals time and time again and help elevate the standouts from the vast middle. That’s the overarching takeaway from an extensive and growing collection of... View Details

Keywords: by Avery Forman

14 Nov 2011
Working Paper Summaries

The Impact of Corporate Sustainability on Organizational Process and Performance

Keywords: by Robert G. Eccles, Ioannis Ioannou & George Serafeim; Accounting

Research Summary

Selective Attention and Learning

By: Joshua R. Schwartzstein

What do we notice, and how does this affect what we learn? Standard economic models of learning ignore memory by assuming that we remember everything. But there is growing recognition that memory is imperfect. Further, memory imperfections do not stem from limited... View Details

2024
Working Paper

Behavioral Attenuation

By: Thomas Graeber, Benjamin Enke, Ryan Oprea and Jeffrey Yang

We report a large-scale examination of behavioral attenuation: due to information-processing constraints, the elasticity of people’s decisions with respect to economic fundamentals is generally too small. We implement more than 30 experiments, 20 of which were... View Details

Keywords: Decisions; Behavior; Cognition and Thinking; Behavioral Finance

Register to Read

April 2023
Article

Inattentive Inference

By: Thomas Graeber

This paper studies how people infer a state of the world from information structures that include additional, payoff-irrelevant states. For example, learning from a customer review about a product’s quality requires accounting for the reviewer’s otherwise irrelevant... View Details

Keywords: Cognition and Thinking; Information Types; Behavior; Knowledge Acquisition

January 2017
Article

The Dark Side of Going Abroad: How Broad Foreign Experiences Increase Immoral Behavior

By: Jackson G. Lu, Jordi Quoidbach, F. Gino, Alek Chakroff, William W. Maddux and Adam D. Galinsky

Due to the unprecedented pace of globalization, foreign experiences are increasingly common and valued. Past research has focused on the benefits of foreign experiences, including enhanced creativity and reduced intergroup bias. In contrast, the present work uncovers a... View Details

Keywords: Moral Sensibility; Globalization; Behavior