Publications

2015
Article

Percentage Cost Discounts Always Beat Percentage Benefit Bonuses: Helping Consumers Evaluate Nominally Equivalent Percentage Changes

By: Bhavya Mohan, Pierre Chandon and Jason Riis

Marketing offers that are framed as a "percentage change" in consumer cost vs. benefit can have highly non-linear impacts in terms of actual value for consumers. Even though two offers might appear identical, we show that consumers are better off choosing the offer... View Details

SSRN

Personal selling represents one of the most important elements in the marketing mix, and appropriate management of the sales force is vital to achieving the organization’s objectives. Among the various instruments of sales management, compensation plays a pivotal... View Details

August 2021
Article

Hoping for the Worst? A Paradoxical Preference for Bad News

By: Kate Barasz and Serena Hagerty

Nine studies investigate when and why people may paradoxically prefer bad news—e.g., hoping for an objectively worse injury or a higher-risk diagnosis over explicitly better alternatives. Using a combination of field surveys and randomized experiments, the research... View Details

Keywords: Decision Avoidance; Difficult Decisions; Judgment And Decision Making; Medical Decision-making; Decision Making; Behavior

Register to Read

September–October 2020
Article

Managing Churn to Maximize Profits

By: Aurelie Lemmens and Sunil Gupta

Customer defection threatens many industries, prompting companies to deploy targeted, proactive customer retention programs and offers. A conventional approach has been to target customers either based on their predicted churn probability or their responsiveness to a... View Details

Keywords: Churn Management; Defection Prediction; Loss Function; Stochastic Gradient Boosting; Customer Relationship Management; Consumer Behavior; Profit

SSRN

2016
Working Paper

Do Network Dynamics Undermine Idea-based Network Advantages? Experimental Results from an Entrepreneurship Bootcamp

By: Rembrand Koning

Do networks plentiful in ideas provide early stage startups with performance advantages? On the one hand, network positions that provide access to a multitude of ideas are thought to increase team performance. On the other hand, research on network formation argues... View Details

Keywords: Networks; Performance; Business Startups; Business Strategy

21 May 2012
Research & Ideas

OSHA Inspections: Protecting Employees or Killing Jobs?

measures. When he and colleague David I. Levine heard of a program at California OSHA to conduct randomized inspections of workplaces, they realized they had the perfect real-world experiment to settle the debate over workplace... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

06 Dec 2022
HBS Seminar

Elizabeth Lyons, UC San Diego

16 Mar 2011
Working Paper Summaries

Driven by Social Comparisons: How Feedback about Coworkers’ Effort Influences Individual Productivity

Keywords: by Francesca Gino & Bradley R. Staats; Banking

Research Summary

Resource-Based Entrepreneurship

By: Myra M. Hart

Myra M. Hart is investigating the relationship between an entrepreneur's industry-specific experience and the success of large-scale startups. Her work focuses on the links between the entrepreneur's knowledge and reputation resources-developed in the same or a... View Details

2024
Working Paper

The Effect of a System for Sharing Best Practices Within Pre-existing Peer Networks

By: Shelley Xin Li and Tatiana Sandino

Peer networks, such as enterprise social networks (ESNs), can facilitate knowledge transfer across employees. However, such systems can also lead to information overload or difficulty in finding useful information. We examine data from a natural field experiment where... View Details

Keywords: Social and Collaborative Networks; Communication Technology; Knowledge Sharing; Sales

March 2022
Article

How Much Does Your Boss Make? The Effects of Salary Comparisons

By: Zoë B. Cullen and Ricardo Perez-Truglia

The vast majority of the pay inequality in an organization comes from differences in pay between employees and their bosses. But are employees aware of these pay disparities? Are employees demotivated by this inequality? To address these questions, we conducted a... View Details

Keywords: Salary; Inequality; Managers; Career Concerns; Pay Transparency; Wages; Equality and Inequality; Perception; Behavior

August 2017 (Revised August 2018)
Case

Busbud: Building a Data Company

By: Srikant M. Datar, Alistair Croll and Caitlin N. Bowler

The case features the work of LP Maurice (HBS '08) as he decides to take on the fragmented bus travel industry and launch an online business that aggregates and shares bus schedules for routes around the world. His first challenge: finding that the data he needs is... View Details

Keywords: Data Science; Analytics and Data Science; Business Startups; Knowledge Acquisition; Customers; Measurement and Metrics; Transportation Industry

Educators

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21 Mar 2019
Blog Post

What I Didn't Know About HBS Faculty

the largest oil company in the world, Saudi Aramco, prior to attending HBS. One of Khalid’s most profound experiences at HBS so far has been the relationship he has forged with faculty members. Here, Khalid shares his View Details

Web

How I Spent My HBS 2+2 Deferral: Sam Perez Diarte - MBA

Blog Blog MBA Voices Filter Results Arrow Down Arrow Up Read posts from Author Alumni Author Career and Professional Development Staff Author HBS Community Author HBS Faculty Author MBA Admissions Author MBA Students Topics Topics 1st Year (RC) 2+2 Program 2nd Year... View Details

November 7, 2017
Article

Temporary Sharing Prompts Unrestrained Disclosures That Leave Lasting Negative Impressions

By: Reto Hofstetter, Roland Rüppell and Leslie John

With the advent of social media, the impressions people make on others are based increasingly on their digital disclosures. Yet digital disclosures can come back to haunt, making it challenging for people to manage the impressions they make. In field and online... View Details

Keywords: Disclosure; Privacy; Self-presentation; Impression Formation; Behavior; Perspective; Internet and the Web; Social Media