Publications

Forthcoming
Article

Imagining the Future: Memory, Simulation and Beliefs

By: Pedro Bordalo, Giovanni Burro, Katherine B. Coffman, Nicola Gennaioli and Andrei Shleifer

How do people form beliefs about novel risks, with which they have little or no experience? Motivated by survey data on beliefs about Covid we collected in 2020, we build a model based on the psychology of selective memory. When a person thinks about an event,... View Details

Keywords: Expectations; Memory; COVID-19 Pandemic; Risk and Uncertainty; Cognition and Thinking

2022
Case

Can Salesforce Compete in the Carbon Accounting Market?

By: Andrew J. Hoffman

This case describes Salesforce's development of Sustainability Cloud, a suite of software tools built to help companies measure, track, and report carbon emissions and other sustainability metrics. The goal of this case is to provide students with a background and... View Details

Keywords: Environmental Accounting; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Corporate Accountability; Applications and Software

March 2022 (Revised December 2022)
Case

Perch

By: Jeffrey F. Rayport, Stacy Straaberg and Julia Kelley

In May 2021, Perch CEO Chris Bell needed to decide whether his e-commerce aggregator company, which bought and scaled Amazon Marketplace brands, should acquire up to three acquisition targets. The prospective acquisitions, Web Deals Direct, HomeCo, and Future Brands,... View Details

October 15, 2021
Article

Virtuous Victims

By: Jillian J. Jordan and Maryam Kouchaki

How do people perceive the moral character of victims? We find, across a range of transgressions, that people frequently see victims of wrongdoing as more moral than non-victims who have behaved identically. Across 15 experiments (total n = 9,355), we document this... View Details

Keywords: Moral Judgment; Restorative Justice; Punishment; Compensation; Person Perception; Moral Sensibility; Judgments; Perception

June 2020 (Revised January 2024)
Case

TraceTogether

By: Mitchell B. Weiss and Sarah Mehta

By April 7, 2020, over 1.4 million people worldwide had contracted the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). Governments raced to curb the spread of COVID-19 by scaling up testing, quarantining those infected, and tracing their possible contacts. It had taken Singapore’s... View Details

Keywords: COVID-19; Contact Tracing; Government Administration; Crisis Management; Health; Health Pandemics; Innovation and Invention; Innovation Leadership; Innovation Strategy; Technological Innovation; Social Issues; Information Technology; Mobile and Wireless Technology; Applications and Software; Technology Adoption; Health Industry; Public Administration Industry; Singapore

July 2020
Article

Higher Economic Inequality Intensifies the Financial Hardship of People Living in Poverty by Fraying the Community Buffer

By: Jon M. Jachimowicz, Barnabas Szaszi, Marcel Lukas, David Smerdon, Jaideep Prabhu and Elke U. Weber

The current research investigates whether higher economic inequality disproportionately intensifies the financial hardship of low-income individuals. We propose that higher economic inequality increases financial hardship for low-income individuals by reducing their... View Details

Keywords: Economic Inequalty; Economy; Income; Equality and Inequality; Poverty; Civil Society or Community

December 2017
Case

La Ceiba: Navigating Microfinance and Relationships in Honduras (A)

By: Christine L. Exley, John Beshears and Alison Wood Brooks

This case follows the program director of La Ceiba, a Honduras-based microfinance institution, as he navigates four challenging negotiation scenarios involving the organization's loan clients. Students are asked to adopt the perspective of the Program Director and to... View Details

Keywords: Negotiation; Power; Apology; Negotiation Process; Microfinance; Power and Influence; Situation or Environment

August 2017
Article

Voter Registration Costs and Disenfranchisement: Experimental Evidence from France

By: Céline Braconnier, Jean-Yves Dormagen and Vincent Pons

A large-scale randomized experiment conducted during the 2012 French presidential and parliamentary elections shows that voter registration requirements have significant effects on turnout, resulting in unequal participation. We assigned 20,500 apartments to one... View Details

Keywords: Elections; Politics; Voting; Political Elections; Behavior; France

March 2017
Teaching Plan

The Maine Food Cluster Project

By: Karen Mills

The case introduces Craig Denekas, the head of the Libra Foundation, an unusual, private foundation based in Maine, which owns three locally based food companies. Denekas has initiated a project to explore how to grow the food sector in Maine, benefiting not only... View Details

Keywords: Maine; Clusters; Libra Foundation; Locally-based Companies; Food Industry; Development Economics; Industry Clusters; Food; Food and Beverage Industry; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Maine

2017
Working Paper

Elite Ideas and Incremental Policy Change: The Expansion of Primary Education in India

By: Akshay Mangla

This paper analyzes India’s recent enactment of universal primary education. Given the clientelistic features of Indian democracy, this programmatic policy change presents a puzzle. Drawing on interviews and official documents, I find that committed state elites... View Details

Keywords: India; Political Economy; Ideas; Institutional Change; Education; Change Management; India

September 2017
Article

The Advocacy Trap: When Legitimacy Building Inhibits Organizational Learning

By: Tiona Zuzul and Amy C. Edmondson

This paper describes a relationship between legitimacy building and learning for a new firm in a nascent industry. Through a longitudinal study of a new firm in the nascent smart city industry, we found that the firm failed to make progress on important internal... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Learning; Advocacy; Organizations; Learning; Organizational Culture; Entrepreneurship

2015
Chapter

The Business Model: Nature and Benefits

By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and John Heilbron

This paper considers the nature of the business model and its strategic relevance to negotiations. We elaborate a substantive definition of the business model as decisions enforced by the authority of the firm; this definition enables the analysis of business models... View Details

Keywords: Business Models; Value Capture; Value-Based Business Strategy; Ambivalent Value; Business Model; Value; Negotiation Deal