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- Article
How to Make the Other Side Play Fair: The Final-Offer Arbitration Challenge Gives Negotiators a Valuable New Tool
By: Max H. Bazerman and Daniel Kahneman
In legal disputes, contested insurance claims, and similarly adversarial negotiations, one party is likely to open with an inflated claim or a lowball offer. And if the other side’s position is unreasonable, it may make little sense to be reasonable yourself. But if... View Details
- September 2016
- Article
When 3+1>4: Gift Structure and Reciprocity in the Field
By: Duncan S. Gilchrist, Michael Luca and Deepak Malhotra
Do higher wages elicit reciprocity and lead to increased productivity? In a field experiment with 266 employees, we find that paying higher wages, per se, does not have a discernible effect on productivity (in a context with no future employment opportunities).... View Details
- August 2016
- Article
Independent Directors' Dissent on Boards: Evidence from Listed Companies in China
By: Juan Ma and Tarun Khanna
In this paper, we examine the circumstances under which so-called "independent" directors voice their independent views on public boards in a sample of Chinese firms. First, we ask why independent directors dissent, i.e. how they justify such dissent to public... View Details
- August 2016
- Case
VMD Medical Imaging Center
By: Susanna Gallani and Eva Labro
VMD Medical Imaging Center, a local independent provider of medical imaging services, is facing some important challenges. Despite efficiency improvements and cost cutting initiatives carried out over the past few years, their profitability is shrinking; their prices... View Details
- July 2016
- Case
Cataumet Boats, Inc.
By: W. Earl Sasser and Mark Davis
Jaime Giancola, an MBA student, has recently completed an operations management course in which aggregate production planning (APP) was one of the topics. She believes that her family's business, Cataumet Boats, which her grandparents started and which her mother and... View Details
- 2019
- Working Paper
Improving Working Conditions in Global Supply Chains: The Role of Institutional Environments and Monitoring Program Design
By: Jodi L. Short, Michael W. Toffel and Andrea R. Hugill
Activism seeking to improve labor conditions in global supply chains has led transnational corporations to adopt codes of conduct and monitor suppliers for compliance, but it is unclear whether these formal organizational structures raise labor standards. Drawing on... View Details
Keywords: Monitoring; Supplier Relationship; Sustainability; Sustainability Management; Sustainable Operations; Sustainable Supply Chains; NGO; Globalization; Corporate Accountability; Operations; Supply Chain; Supply Chain Management; Labor; Working Conditions; Business Processes; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Performance Evaluation; Safety; Risk and Uncertainty; Apparel and Accessories Industry; Electronics Industry; China; Indonesia; India; Bangladesh
- June 2016
- Article
Managing the High Intensity Workplace: An 'Always Available' Culture Breeds a Variety of Dysfunctional Behaviors
By: Erin M. Reid and Lakshmi Ramarajan
People today are under intense pressure to be “ideal workers”—totally committed to their jobs and always on call. But after interviewing hundreds of professionals in many fields, the authors have concluded that selfless dedication to work is often unnecessary and... View Details
- 2016
- Blog
Building A Culture of Health - John A. Quelch: Creating A Culture of Health
By: John A. Quelch
All American companies are in the health business whether they like it or not. The private sector directly pays for one-fifth of the whopping 17.5% of GDP spent on healthcare in the United States. Rather than viewing health merely as an insurance expense to be... View Details
Keywords: Building A Culture Of Health; Intersection Of Healthcare And Business; Impact Of Healthcare On Business; Population Health Footprint; Healthcare As An Investment; Change; Education; Health; Human Resources; Labor; Leadership; Management; Marketing; Operations; Performance; Personal Development and Career; Problems and Challenges; Risk and Uncertainty; Strategy; Value; Health Industry; Insurance Industry; Canada; North America; United States
- May 24, 2016
- Article
Build a Culture of Health
By: John A. Quelch
Every company, large and small, has an impact on health. It does so in four ways: first, through the healthfulness and safety of the products and services it sells; second, through its attention to employee health and well-being in its work practices and benefits;... View Details
Keywords: Public Health; Four Pillars; Public Health Footprint; Culture Of Health Plan Of Action; Change; Education; Health; Human Resources; Knowledge; Labor; Leadership; Management; Operations; Outcome or Result; Personal Development and Career; Programs; Risk and Uncertainty; Strategy; Value; Consumer Products Industry; Chemical Industry; Health Industry; United States; Europe
- Article
Crowdsourcing City Government: Using Tournaments to Improve Inspection Accuracy
By: Edward Glaeser, Andrew Hillis, Scott Duke Kominers and Michael Luca
The proliferation of big data makes it possible to better target city services like hygiene inspections, but city governments rarely have the in-house talent needed for developing prediction algorithms. Cities could hire consultants, but a cheaper alternative is to... View Details
- 2016
- Working Paper
Who Gets Hired?: The Importance of Finding an Open Slot
By: Edward P. Lazear, Kathryn L. Shaw and Christopher Stanton
Despite seeming to be an important requirement for hiring, the concept of a slot is absent from virtually all of economics. Macroeconomic studies of vacancies and search come closest, but the implications of slot-based hiring for individual worker outcomes has not been... View Details
- Article
Landing the First Job: The Value of Intermediaries in Online Hiring
By: Christopher Stanton and Catherine Thomas
Online markets for remote labor services allow workers and firms to contract with each other directly. Despite this, intermediaries—called outsourcing agencies—have emerged in these markets. This paper shows that agencies signal to employers that inexperienced workers... View Details
- Article
Tax Aversion in Labor Supply
By: Judd B. Kessler and Michael I. Norton
In a real-effort laboratory experiment, labor supply decreases more with the introduction of a tax than with a financially equivalent drop in wages. This “tax aversion” is large in magnitude: when we decompose the productivity decrease that arises from taxation, we... View Details
Keywords: Taxes; Labor Supply; Productivity; Experiments; Wages; Human Capital; Performance Productivity; Taxation
- March 2016 (Revised September 2021)
- Case
South Africa: A Fractured Rainbow?
By: Richard H.K. Vietor and Haviland Sheldahl-Thomason
Twenty years after the end of Apartheid, South Africa's democracy persists, albeit with problems. A tripartite coalition — the African National Congress, the labor unions, and the Communist Party — still controls the political system but with diminishing economic... View Details
- 2016
- Working Paper
Junior Achievement: Training Teenagers for Business Careers after World War II
This article traces the growing popularity of Junior Achievement's "Company Program" in the two decades after World War II. The program provided high school students with the opportunity to form teams and start mini-corporations that would last for most of the school... View Details
- February 2016 (Revised March 2018)
- Case
Labor, Capital, and Government: The Anthracite Coal Strike of 1902
By: David Moss and Marc Campasano
In late October 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt felt relieved after months of anxiety and uncertainty. Workers in Pennsylvania's anthracite coal industry had been on strike for five months, threatening to leave eastern cities in the cold without enough heating fuel... View Details
- 2016
- Article
Do External Labor Market Job Switches Affect the Gender Compensation Gap?
By: Boris Groysberg, Paul M. Healy and Eric Lin
This paper investigates how external mobility influences the gender compensation gap for job switching executives. Using proprietary data for 2,034 executive placements from a global search firm, we find job switching narrows the gender gap by 45%, from 11% to 6%. We... View Details
- January 2016 (Revised February 2016)
- Case
Citizens United and Corporate Speech
By: David Moss and Marc Campasano
The story of Citizens United began in late 2007, as leading members of the Republican and Democratic parties were preparing for the 2008 presidential primaries. Democrats expected a three-way contest in their party between Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, Senator (and... View Details
- November 2015 (Revised October 2017)
- Case
Nestlé's Creating Shared Value Strategy
By: Michael E. Porter, Mark R. Kramer, Kerry Herman and Sarah McAra
This case considers Nestlé’s creating shared value (CSV) strategy, which focused on the three categories of nutrition, water, and rural development. In the packaged food and beverage industry, pressure had mounted since the 1990s to improve supply chain sustainability... View Details
- November 2015
- Case
Upwork: Reimagining the Future of Work
By: Feng Zhu, Rory McDonald, Marco Iansiti and Aaron Smith
Upwork, the world's largest freelance talent platform, was the result of a merger between the two leading online freelancing companies in 2014, Elance and oDesk. After the merger, the company operated as Elance-oDesk and continued to manage two online... View Details