Publications

SSRN

07 Apr 2016
News

Brief, face-to-face canvassing reduces transgender prejudice, study says

15 Jan 2022
News

Tiktok Isn’t Silly. It’s Serious

April 2019
Article

Mitigating Malicious Envy: Why Successful Individuals Should Reveal Their Failures

By: Alison Wood Brooks, Karen Huang, Nicole Abi-Esber, Ryan W. Buell, Laura Huang and Brian Hall

People often feel malicious envy, a destructive interpersonal emotion, when they compare themselves to successful peers. Across three online experiments and a field experiment of entrepreneurs, we identify an interpersonal strategy that can mitigate feelings of... View Details

Keywords: Emotions; Perception; Interpersonal Communication; Communication Strategy

January 2021
Case

Egon Zehnder: Beyond Search?

By: Ashish Nanda and Margaret Cross

In 2019, Egon Zehnder chair Jill Ader and CEO Edilson Camara faced a critical question: how should the global executive search firm approach its burgeoning advisory service offering? Since 2003, the firm’s advisory practice had grown as a conglomeration of grassroots... View Details

Keywords: Professional Services Firms; Executive Search Firms; Professionalism; Partnership; Executive Coaching; Leadership Development; Expansion; Decision Making; Strategy; Switzerland; London

Educators

Research Summary

Overview

I am currently a Principal or Co-Principal Investigator of five field-based randomized controlled trials, each of which examines the management of lay health workers in developing countries, with an eye toward generating theoretical insights and policy guidance on how... View Details

2021
Working Paper

'Just Letting You Know…': Underestimating Others' Desire for Constructive Feedback

By: Nicole Abi-Esber, Jennifer Abel, Juliana Schroeder and Francesca Gino

People often avoid giving feedback to others even when it would help fix a problem immediately. Indeed, in a pilot field study (N=155), only 2.6% of individuals provided feedback to survey administrators that the administrators had food or marker on their faces.... View Details

Keywords: Feedback; Helping; Prosocial Behavior; Relationships; Social Psychology; Theory; Perception

15 Aug 2016
Blog Post

Writing a Case as a Student at HBS

There is a lot to get used to during your first semester atHBS – attending class, making new friends, finding an internship, and doing homework again. While reading and preparing cases for each class may seem daunting and time-consuming at first, it becomes second... 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

Keywords: Price; Behavior; Valuation; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving

July 2018
Article

Personality Traits of Entrepreneurs: A Review of Recent Literature

By: Sari Pekkala Kerr, William R. Kerr and Tina Xu

We review the extensive literature since 2000 on the personality traits of entrepreneurs. We first consider baseline personality traits like the Big-5 model, self-efficacy and innovativeness, locus of control, and the need for achievement. We then consider risk... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurs; Venturing; Personality Traits; Characteristics; Big-5; Risk Attitudes; Goals; Skills; Entrepreneurship; Personal Characteristics; Goals and Objectives; Competency and Skills; Success; Demographics; Research

Karim R. Lakhani is the Dorothy & Michael Hintze Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. He specializes in technology management, innovation, digital transformation and artificial... View Details

Keywords: biotechnology; communications; computer; health care; high technology; information technology industry; internet; pharmaceuticals; software; video games

TeachingInterests

Investing for Impact

By: Archie L. Jones

The Field Course: Investing for Impact was born out of the efforts of HBS students and faculty in the spring of 2020 and offered for the first time in fall semester of 2021.

This course seeks to help students understand why certain... View Details

Article

The Impact of the 'Open' Workspace on Human Collaboration

By: Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban

Organizations’ pursuit of increased workplace collaboration has led managers to transform traditional office spaces into “open,” transparency-enhancing architectures with fewer walls, doors, and other spatial boundaries, yet there is scant direct empirical research on... View Details

10 Aug 2016
News

The meaning of trust in the age of Airbnb

Article

Contingent Match Incentives Increase Donations

By: Lalin Anik, Michael I. Norton and Dan Ariely

We propose a new means by which non-profits can induce donors to give today and commit to giving in the future: contingent match incentives, in which matching is made contingent on the percentage of others who give (e.g., "if X% of others give, we will match all... View Details

Keywords: Matching Donations; Social Proof; Prosocial Behavior; Charitable Giving; Plausibility; Motivation and Incentives; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving

An emerging form of remote work allows employees to work‐from‐anywhere, so that the worker can choose to live in a preferred geographic location. While traditional work‐from‐home (WFH) programs offer the worker temporal flexibility,... View Details

April 2005 (Revised April 2005)
Background Note

An Overview of Project Finance - 2004 Update

By: Benjamin C. Esty and Aldo Sesia

Introduces the field of project finance and provides a statistical overview of the project-financed investments over the last five years. Defines project finance and contrasts it with other well-known financing structures. Describes the evolution of project finance,... View Details

Keywords: Project Finance; Investment; Projects; Trends

Educators

April 2021
Article

Work-From-Anywhere: The Productivity Effects of Geographical Flexibility

By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Cirrus Foroughi and Barbara Larson

An emerging form of remote work allows employees to work-from-anywhere, so that the worker can choose to live in a preferred geographic location. While traditional work-from-home (WFH) programs offer the worker temporal flexibility, work-from-anywhere (WFA) programs... View Details

Keywords: Geographic Flexibility; Work-from-anywhere; Remote Work; Telecommuting; Geographic Mobility; USPTO; Employees; Geographic Location; Performance Productivity

December 2020
Article

Consumer Reactance to Promotional Favors

By: Marco Bertini and Aylin Aydinli

Promotional favors are an increasingly popular but seldom researched form of price promotion where the receipt of the saving by consumers depends on an action on their part that is nonmonetary in nature, such as completing a questionnaire, posting a review, or making a... View Details

Keywords: Promotional Favors; Conditional Discounts; Psychological Reactance; Price Promotions; Pricing; Marketing; Price; Consumer Behavior

2011
Book

The Innovator's DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators

By: Jeffrey H. Dyer, Hal B. Gregersen and Clayton M. Christensen

Some people are just natural innovators, right? With no apparent effort, they discover ideas for new products, services, and entire businesses. It may look like innovators are born, not made. But according to Jeffrey Dyer, Hal Gregersen, and Clay Christensen anyone can... View Details

Keywords: Competency and Skills; Disruptive Innovation; Competitive Advantage