Publications

Educators

16 Jun 2015
Working Paper Summaries

Paying Up for Fair Pay: Consumers Prefer Firms with Lower CEO-to-Worker Pay Ratios

Keywords: by Bhavya Mohan, Michael I. Norton & Rohit Deshpandé

27 Oct 2011
Research & Ideas

Horrible Boss Workarounds

what employees can do to resist them. As she states in a recent column in Harvard Business Review, "The best cure for horrible bosses is wonderful colleagues." Bad boss behavior #1: failure to communicate. At any level of... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

05 Oct 2016
Research & Ideas

Why Don't More People Get Flu Shots at Work?

professor in Harvard Business School’s Negotiation, Organizations & Markets Unit. Beshears is an expert in behavioral economics, which uses insights from psychology and economics to explain individual decision making and help people... View Details

Keywords: by Roberta Holland; Health

2025
Chapter

Employer-Based Short-Term Savings Accounts

By: Sarah Holmes Berk, John Beshears, Jay Garg, James J. Choi and David Laibson

We study the introduction of a choice architecture design intended to increase short-term savings among employees at five U.K. firms. Employees were offered the opportunity to opt into a payroll deduction program that auto-deposits funds from each paycheck into a... View Details

Keywords: Personal Finance; Compensation and Benefits; Well-being; Behavior; Investment Funds; Employees; United Kingdom

30 Aug 2020
Working Paper Summaries

Consumers Punish Firms that Cut Employee Pay in Response to COVID-19

Keywords: by Bhavya Mohan, Serena Hagerty, and Michael Norton

27 Feb 2006
Research & Ideas

Take Responsibility for Rising Stars

behaviors of the individuals you choose go through the organization like a rifle shot; they can be felt at the line level within months. We can't afford to hire or promote people with the wrong values. It's a path to mediocrity."... View Details

Keywords: by Jeffrey M. Cohn, Rakesh Khurana & Laura Reeves

22 Feb 2000
Research & Ideas

The Mind of the Market: Extending the Frontiers of Marketing Thought

And, it might seem appropriate to ask, how do such philosophical questions relate to marketing? Zaltman's eponymous research tool, the Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique, called ZMET for short, was designed to illuminate exactly these kinds of View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

November 2023
Article

Brokerage House Initial Public Offerings and Analyst Forecast Quality

By: Mark Bradshaw, Michael Drake, Joseph Pacelli and Brady Twedt

We examine how brokerage firm initial public offerings (IPOs) influence the research quality of sell-side analysts employed by the brokerage. Our main results focus on earnings forecast bias and absolute forecast errors as proxies for research quality. Using a... View Details

Keywords: IPOs; Research Analysts; ＂Brokerage Industry; Initial Public Offering; Employees; Behavior; Outcome or Result

September–October 2024
Article

Working Around the Clock: Temporal Distance, Intrafirm Communication, and Time Shifting of the Employee Workday

By: Jasmina Chauvin, Prithwiraj Choudhury and Tommy Pan Fang

This paper examines the effects of temporal distance generated by time zone separation on communication in geographically distributed organizations. We build on prior research, which highlights time zone separation as a significant challenge, but argue that employees... View Details

Keywords: Communication; Employees; Behavior; Equality and Inequality

August 2009
Teaching Note

Mina O'Reilly at Logan Airport's TSA (TN)

By: Michel Anteby and Erin McFee

Teaching Note for [409116]. View Details

Keywords: Safety; Labor; Employees; Behavior; Decisions; Air Transportation Industry; Boston

05 May 2010
What Do You Think?

Is Denial Endemic to Management?

Summing Up How best is denial managed? Denial is endemic to management. It is a natural part of human nature, closely related to the survival instinct. It can be useful or disastrous. And it can be managed. That sums up at least many of... View Details

Keywords: by Jim Heskett

January–February 2015
Article

Social Comparisons and Deception Across Workplace Hierarchies: Field and Experimental Evidence

By: Benjamin Edelman and Ian Larkin

We examine how unfavorable social comparisons differentially spur employees of varying hierarchical levels to engage in deception. Drawing on literatures in social psychology and workplace self-esteem, we theorize that negative comparisons with peers could cause either... View Details

Keywords: Behavior; Rank and Position; Employees

01 Dec 2011
What Do You Think?

Thinking Slow: An Argument for Bureaucracy?

fallacy of the assumptions on which it is based: a world of rational humans who are unemotional, well-informed, and take the long-term view in economic decisions. In contrast, behavioral economics emphasizes... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

23 May 2000
Research & Ideas

Minding the Muse: The Impact of Downsizing on Corporate Creativity

disrupted by substantial changes in membership during the downsizing had poorer work environments and lower levels of creative behavior than those that remained stable amidst the chaos. Overall, lower creativity resulted from the degraded... View Details

Keywords: by Peter K. Jacobs

July – August 2008
Article

Help Employees Give Away Some of That Bonus

By: Michael I. Norton and Elizabeth W. Dunn

Employees who spend some or all of their bonuses on others-thereby creating what the authors call a "prosocial" workplace-are happier as a result. Managers can enhance that effect by providing opportunities to share the wealth. View Details

Keywords: Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; Compensation and Benefits; Employees; Behavior; Happiness

October 2024
Article

Canary Categories

By: Eric Anderson, Chaoqun Chen, Ayelet Israeli and Duncan Simester

Past customer spending in a category is generally a positive signal of future customer spending. We show that there exist “canary categories” for which the reverse is true. Purchases in these categories are a signal that customers are less likely to return to that... View Details

Keywords: Churn; Churn Management; Churn/retention; Assortment Planning; Retail; Retailing; Retailing Industry; Preference Heterogeneity; Assortment Optimization; Customers; Retention; Consumer Behavior; Forecasting and Prediction; Retail Industry