Publications

January 2004 (Revised July 2007)
Case

Lumen and Absorb Teams at Crutchfield Chemical Engineering, The

By: Teresa M. Amabile and Elizabeth Schatzel

Large discrepancies have developed between two elite technology development teams at Crutchfield Chemical Engineering in terms of motivation and creativity. To investigate, Paul Burke, director of corporate technology development, commissioned a study of the day-by-day... View Details

Keywords: Leadership; Managerial Roles; Projects; Groups and Teams; Behavior; Creativity; Motivation and Incentives

November 1996 (Revised February 1997)
Case

Historical Society of Pennsylvania, The

By: Stephen A. Greyser and Stephanie L. Woerner

The Historical Society of Pennsylvania (HSP) runs one of the nation's most important research libraries and a museum focusing on colonial history. Financial analysis shows that the society has absorbed increased costs of operation over the past decade through slow but... View Details

Keywords: Finance; Cost; Human Resources; Leadership Style; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques; Managerial Roles; Mission and Purpose; Corporate Strategy; Pennsylvania

16 Jan 2013
Research & Ideas

The Messy Link Between Slave Owners and Modern Management

critique of capitalism—one that could broaden the understanding of today's business practices. The work is part of her current book project, "From Slavery to Scientific Management: Capitalism and Control in America, 1754-1911," and the forthcoming edited... View Details

Keywords: by Katie Johnston

Research Summary

Research Summary

By: Leslie A. Perlow

There has been tremendous change in the workplace — ubiquitous technology, 24/7 globalization, hyper-efficiency and now significant changes in work location. Professor Perlow’s research explores the implications for the ways we work and live, and what we can do to... View Details

16 Oct 2023
HBS Case

Advancing Black Talent: From the Flight Ramp to 'Family-Sustaining' Careers at Delta

company. In December 2020, Bastian announced that Delta would become a charter member of the newly formed OneTen corporate coalition, a group of business leaders from more than 30 large companies who aimed to collectively hire and advance... View Details

Keywords: by Lane Lambert; Air Transportation

09 Apr 2024
Book

Why Work Rituals Bring Teams Together and Create More Meaning

with as many uses as possible for a six-sided die. Before the task, each group performed a ritual involving patting their shoulders and stomping their feet. Some groups performed the tasks facing one another, creating a collective ritual,... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

Research Summary

Overview

When information is digitized, it can be aggregated and shared nearly instantly. I am interested in how this acceleration in the aggregation and availability of information, via digitization, affects firms and firm strategy. Platforms have emerged as marketplaces for... View Details

Keywords: Market Platforms; Social Media; Information Disclosure; Platform Strategy; Innovation Strategy; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Technological Innovation; Intellectual Property; Information; Technology Platform; Information Industry; Information Technology Industry; Technology Industry; Web Services Industry

Forthcoming
Article

Legislators' Demand for Firms' Financial Statements: Evidence from U.S. Congressional Redistricting Events

By: Matthew Ma, Jing Pan, Ethan Rouen and Laura Wellman

We investigate whether U.S. House representatives and their staff seek financial information from constituent firms to inform their legislative decisions. We exploit shifts in U.S. congressional districts (i.e., the reconfiguration of federal district lines or... View Details

Keywords: Redistricting; Lobbying; Legislators; Voting Behavior; Corporate Disclosure; Government Legislation; Voting; Behavior

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May 2025
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

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2015
Working Paper

Crowdsourced Digital Goods and Firm Productivity: Evidence from Open Source Software

By: Frank Nagle

As firms increasingly rely on crowdsourced digital goods, understanding their impact on productivity becomes critical. This study measures the firm-level productivity impact of one such good, non-pecuniary (free) open source software (OSS). The results show a... View Details

Keywords: Open Source Distribution; Performance Productivity; Software

SSRN

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2010
Other Unpublished Work

Saving Face by Making Meaning: The Negative Effects of Brand Communities' Self-serving Response to Brand Extensions

By: Jill Avery

An ethnographic study of a brand community following the launch of the Porsche Cayenne SUV finds that brand extensions can negatively affect the value of their parent brands. By studying the collective response to brand extensions of existing consumers and by... View Details

Keywords: Brands; Brand Management; Brand Positioning; Brand Equity; Internet; Social Media; Customers; Customer Focus and Relationships; Customer Satisfaction; Marketing; Brands and Branding; Marketing Strategy; Auto Industry

October 1995 (Revised March 1996)
Case

Booz.Allen & Hamilton: Vision 2000

In 1993, Booz.Allen & Hamilton forsook its previous, highly local organizational structure. It was motivated by a desire to serve multinational clients more effectively and to provide greater value to clients with more localized business by collecting best practices... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Change and Adaptation; Service Operations; Service Delivery; Organizational Structure; Global Strategy; Service Industry

14 Nov 2023
Research & Ideas

The Network Effect: Why Companies Should Care About Employees’ LinkedIn Connections

and 2018. In total, the study extracted and analyzed more than 2 billion professional connections—the “most comprehensive collection of employee-level connections in the world,” the paper says. Based on the analysis, the study found that... View Details

Keywords: by Ben Rand

2015
Chapter

Consuming Brands

By: Jill Avery and Anat Keinan

Traditional definitions of branding often underestimate the value a brand has for infusing a choice situation with meaning. This chapter explores how people consume brands and presents three perspectives on the meaning of brands that have diverse theoretical roots in... View Details

Keywords: Brand Building; Brand Management; Marketing; Brands and Branding

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21 Jan 2010
Working Paper Summaries

Going Through the Motions: An Empirical Test of Management Involvement in Process Improvement

Keywords: by Anita L. Tucker; Health

29 Nov 2022
Research & Ideas

How Much More Would Holiday Shoppers Pay to Wear Something Rare?

manufacturers—because all of a sudden you have a platform that collects these data on willingness to pay.” The impact on profits could be considerable if retailers made fewer items. When they completely ignored rarity as a factor in their... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Retail

June 2023
Article

The Salary Taboo: Privacy Norms and the Diffusion of Information

By: Zoë Cullen and Ricardo Perez-Truglia

The limited diffusion of salary information has implications for labor markets, such as wage discrimination policies and collective bargaining. Access to salary information is believed to be limited and unequal, but there is little direct evidence on the sources of... View Details

Keywords: Search Costs; Privacy; Norms; Compensation; Financial Industry; Field Experiment; Knowledge Dissemination; Equality and Inequality; Gender; Compensation and Benefits; Societal Protocols

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January 2020
Teaching Note

How to Encourage Others to Give and When to Pass the Torch? Insights from The Philanthropy Connection

By: Christine Exley and Kathleen McGinn

This case follows the co-founder and president, Marla Felcher, of The Philanthropy Connection (TPC). TPC is a nonprofit organization that centers around collective giving: members of TPC make an annual contribution that is then distributed to select nonprofit... View Details

Keywords: Giving And Philanthropy; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; Motivation and Incentives; Nonprofit Organizations

Article

Thin Slices of Workgroups

By: Patricia Satterstrom, Jeffrey T. Polzer, Lisa Kwan, Oliver P. Hauser, Wannawiruch Wiruchnipawan and Marina Burke

In this paper, we explore whether perceivers can accurately assess the effectiveness of groups, how perceivers use group properties to inform their judgment, and the contextual and individual differences that allow some perceivers to be more accurate. Across seven... View Details

Keywords: Group Perception; Group Effectiveness; Thin Slices; Social Sensitivity; Attentional Focus; Groups and Teams; Performance Effectiveness; Perception