Publications

Research Summary

Unintended Consequences of Fundraising Tactics

Charity fundraisers use a variety of methods to increase donations, with three of the most common being matching funds, seed money, and thank you gifts. Field experiments have shown that matching funds (Eckel and Grossman, 2008) and seed money (List and Lucking-Reiley,... View Details

September 1995 (Revised October 1996)
Case

Sunbeam Television (A)

By: V. Kasturi Rangan and E. Scott Lathrop

Sunbeam Television, owner of a television station in Miami (a Fox affiliate), buys Channel 7 (a CBS affiliate) in Boston. They bring to the Boston station the concepts and ideas of their Miami news product--that is, a crisp, content-based design rather than one... View Details

Keywords: Acquisition; Change; Decisions; Design; Television Entertainment; Product; Motivation and Incentives; Value; Entertainment and Recreation Industry; Boston

August 2023 (Revised February 2024)
Case

Toby Norman: Is Passion Enough for Simprints to Thrive?

By: Jon M. Jachimowicz, Amram Migdal and Max Hancock

As co-founder and CEO of Simprints—a social enterprise with the mission to “transform the way the world fights poverty"—Toby Norman was at a crossroads. His organization had developed ground-breaking technology used to verify aid delivery, reached more than 2.5 million... View Details

Keywords: Mission and Purpose; Motivation and Incentives; Social Enterprise; Employees; Growth and Development Strategy

September 2010
Article

Making Self-Regulation More Than Merely Symbolic: The Critical Role of the Legal Environment

By: Jodi L. Short and Michael W. Toffel

Using data from a sample of U.S. industrial facilities subject to the federal Clean Air Act from 1993 to 2003, this article theorizes and tests the conditions under which organizations' symbolic commitments to self-regulate are particularly likely to result in improved... View Details

Keywords: Adoption; Code Law; Environmental Sustainability; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Organizations; Governance Compliance; Strategy; Motivation and Incentives; United States

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Research Summary

An Empirical Approach to Understanding Privacy Valuation

The purpose of this research is to detect the presence of sophisticated economic motives behind individual concerns for privacy. Recent theories of privacy demands in commercial contexts have assumed an economically aware and sophisticated consumer, capable of... View Details

Research Summary

A History of Green Entrepreneurship

By: Geoffrey G. Jones

This research recovers the history of the entrepreneurs and firms who developed green or “sustainable” businesses, identifies the multiple motivations behind their strategies, explores the clustering of green business in specific locations, and shows how the concept of... View Details

2011
Chapter

Health Care Applications: From Hospitals to Physicians, from Productive Efficiency to Quality Frontiers

By: Jon Chilingerian and H. David Sherman

This chapter focuses on health-care applications of DEA. The paper begins with a brief history of health applications and discusses some of the models and the motivation behind the applications. Using DEA to develop quality frontiers in health services is offered as a... View Details

Keywords: Data Envelopment Analysis; Physicians; Hospitals; HMOs; Frontier Analysis; Efficiency; Health Care and Treatment; Performance; Quality

Research Summary

Competitive Arousal

By: Deepak Malhotra

A fourth stream of research examines a phenomenon that my co-authors and I have termed Competitive Arousal. We find that some features of competitive contexts (e.g., time pressure, perceptions of rivalry, and the presence of an audience) can heighten... View Details

August 30, 2022
Article

School Choice Increases Racial Segregation Even When Parents Do Not Care About Race

By: Kalinda Ukanwa, Aziza C. Jones and Broderick L. Turner Jr.

This research examines how school choice impacts school segregation. Specifically, this work demonstrates that even if parents do not take the racial demographics of schools into account, preference differences between Black and White parents for other school... View Details

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Race; Policy; Early Childhood Education; Middle School Education; Secondary Education

April 2013
Article

Rx: Human Nature: How Behavioral Economics Is Promoting Better Health Around the World

By: Nava Ashraf

Why doesn't a woman who continues to have unwanted pregnancies avail herself of the free contraception at a nearby clinic? What keeps people from using free chlorine tablets to purify their drinking water? Behavioral economics has shown us that we don't always act in... View Details

Keywords: Behavior; Economics; Motivation and Incentives; Zambia

May–June 2023
Article

Unmasking Behaviors During the Pandemic with Video Analytics

By: Shunyuan Zhang, Kaiquan Xu and Kannan Srinivasan

In 2020, as the novel coronavirus spread globally, face masks were recommended in public settings to protect against and slow down viral transmission. People complied to varying extents, and their reactions may have been driven by a variety of psychological factors.... View Details

Keywords: COVID-19 Pandemic; Social Influence; Social Norms; Health Pandemics; Behavior

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2003
Conference Paper

Follow the Money: What Really Drives Technology Innovation in Construction

By: John D. Macomber

Technology enthusiasts, academics, and software companies remain concerned about the slow pace of innovation in the construction industry. Tools are widely available that seem to provide eminently sensible and clearly apparent improvement to the process of design and... View Details

Keywords: Buildings and Facilities; Technological Innovation; Construction; Design; Performance Improvement; Motivation and Incentives; Knowledge Management; Adoption; Business Model; Capital Structure; Supply Chain

Robert S. Kaplan is Senior Fellow and Marvin Bower Professor of Leadership Development, Emeritus at the Harvard Business School. He joined the HBS faculty in 1984 after spending 16 years on the faculty of the business school at Carnegie-Mellon University, where he... View Details

Keywords: health care; nonprofit industry

January 2007 (Revised January 2008)
Case

Amanco: Developing the Sustainability Scorecard

By: Robert S. Kaplan and Ricardo Reisen de Pinho

Describes the challenges of using the Balanced Scorecard to implement a triple-bottom-line strategy for delivering excellent economic, environmental, and social performance. The owners and senior executive team of Amanco, a producer of plastic pipe and complete water... View Details

Keywords: Balanced Scorecard; Measurement and Metrics; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Environmental Sustainability; Social Issues; Strategy; Construction Industry; Industrial Products Industry; Latin America; Brazil

Other Article

My Favorite Slide: The Entrepreneurial Gap Applied to Health Care

By: Robert S. Kaplan and Robert Simons

Value-based health care increases physicians’ accountability for patient outcomes. Many have resisted, claiming that patient outcomes are influenced by many forces outside their control, such as patient’s compliance with post-acute and rehab care. The difference... View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Outcome or Result; Motivation and Incentives

Research Summary

Optimal Signaling Policy with Rational and Irrational Agents (with James Burns)

We examine situations in which a single informed agent signals a group of uniformed agents. The uniformed agents must then take an action based on this signal. The motivation for our work comes from real world examples such as terrorist alerts or job safety... View Details

March 2008
Article

Are Accruals Mispriced? Evidence from Tests of an Intertemporal Capital Asset Pricing Model

By: Mozaffar N. Khan

This paper proposes a risk-based explanation for the accrual anomaly. Risk is measured using a four-factor model motivated by the Intertemporal Capital Asset Pricing Model. Tests of the model suggest that a considerable portion of the cross-sectional variation in... View Details

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May 2002
Case

Mellon Investor Services

By: Thomas J. DeLong

James Aramanda, head of Mellon Investor Services, must decide how to change the focus of his business. He works with consultants to create a change strategy to enhance a business that is already doing well. Will he be able to interest his professionals in changing the... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Change and Adaptation; Change Management; Innovation Leadership; Growth and Development Strategy; Business Strategy; Management Teams; Financial Services Industry; Insurance Industry; United States