Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(1,623)
- Faculty Publications (94)
- 2020
- Working Paper
Engineering Serendipity: When Does Knowledge Sharing Lead to Knowledge Production?
By: Jacqueline N. Lane, Ina Ganguli, Patrick Gaule, Eva C. Guinan and Karim R. Lakhani
We investigate how knowledge similarity between two individuals is systematically related to the likelihood that a serendipitous encounter results in knowledge production. We conduct a natural field experiment at a medical research symposium, where we exogenously... View Details
- 2019
- White Paper
Impact-Weighted Financial Accounts: The Missing Piece for an Impact Economy
By: George Serafeim, T. Robert Zochowski and Jennifer Downing
Reimagining capitalism is an imperative. We need to create a more inclusive and sustainable form of capitalism that works for every person and the planet. Massive environmental damage, growing income and wealth disparity, stress, and depression within developed... View Details
- 2019
- Chapter
Problem, Person, and Pathway: A Framework for Social Innovators
By: Julie Battilana, Brittany Butler, Marissa Kimsey, Johanna Mair, Christopher Marquis and Christian Seelos
As the appetite for learning about social innovation intensifies, how can we better prepare practitioners for the work of addressing the world’s pressing social problems at the relevant scale? This chapter presents the “3P” framework that we developed to help address... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
When Does Gamified Training Improve Performance? The Roles of Office and Leader Engagement
By: Ryan W. Buell, Wei Cai and Tatiana Sandino
Gamified training is a novel management control system in which companies use gamification
techniques to engage and motivate employees to learn. This study empirically examines the
performance consequences of gamified training using data from a natural field... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Social Attachment to Place and Psychic Costs of Geographic Mobility: How Distance from Hometown and Vacation Flexibility Affect Job Performance
By: Prithwiraj Choudhury and Ohchan Kwon
Using a natural experiment and field interviews, this paper studies how social attachment to place imposes psychic costs on workers who experience geographic mobility. This is especially salient when workers are assigned to locations far from their hometown, which may... View Details
- Article
The Asymmetric Experience of Positive and Negative Economic Growth: Global Evidence Using Subjective Well-being Data
By: Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, George Ward, Femke De Keulenaer, Bert Van Landeghem, Georgios Kavetsos and Michael I. Norton
Are individuals more sensitive to losses than gains in terms of economic growth? We find that measures of subjective well-being are more than twice as sensitive to negative as compared to positive economic growth. We use Gallup World Poll data from over 150 countries,... View Details
- 2017
- Article
Handgun Waiting Periods Reduce Gun Deaths
By: Michael Luca, Deepak Malhotra and Christopher Poliquin
Handgun waiting periods are laws that impose a delay between the initiation of a purchase and final acquisition of a firearm. We show that waiting periods, which create a “cooling off” period among buyers, significantly reduce the incidence of gun violence. We estimate... View Details
- August 2017 (Revised December 2018)
- Case
Tamarin App: Natural Language Processing
By: Srikant M. Datar and Caitlin N. Bowler
In this case, students explore the challenges of using sentiment analysis to monitor and understand public perception around a software application, Tamarin SEO App. Technical topics include building a filtering classifier using naive Bayes and sentiment analysis This... View Details
- Article
Understanding the Advice of Commissions-Motivated Agents: Evidence from the Indian Life Insurance Market
By: Santosh Anagol, Shawn Cole and Shayak Sarkar
We conduct a series of field experiments to evaluate the quality of advice provided by life insurance agents in India. Agents overwhelmingly recommend unsuitable, strictly dominated products, which provide high commissions to the agent. Agents cater to the beliefs of... View Details
Keywords: Advice; Customers; Insurance; Service Operations; Motivation and Incentives; Ethics; India
- 2016
- Working Paper
Delaying Firearm Purchases Reduces Gun Violence
By: Michael Luca, Deepak Malhotra and Christopher Poliquin
Handgun waiting periods are laws that impose a two to seven-day delay between the purchase and delivery of a firearm. While states might institute waiting periods for different reasons (e.g., to allow for background checks), these delays also create a “cooling off”... View Details
- Article
Gathering Data for Archival, Field, Survey, and Experimental Accounting Research
By: Robert Bloomfield, Mark W. Nelson and Eugene F. Soltes
In the published proceedings of the first Journal of Accounting Research Conference, Vatter (1966) lamented that “Gathering direct and original facts is a tedious and difficult task, and it is not surprising that such work is avoided.” For the 50th JAR Conference,... View Details
- May 2016
- Article
Return Migration and Geography of Innovation in MNEs: A Natural Experiment of Knowledge Production by Local Workers Reporting to Return Migrants
I study whether return migrants facilitate knowledge production by local employees working for them at geographically distant R&D locations. Using unique personnel and patenting data for 1,315 employees at the Indian R&D center of a Fortune 500 technology firm, I... View Details
- Article
Learning from Potentially Biased Statistics: Household Inflation Perceptions and Expectations in Argentina
By: Alberto Cavallo, Guillermo Cruces and Ricardo Perez-Truglia
When forming expectations, households may be influenced by perceived bias in the information they receive. In this paper, we study how individuals learn from potentially biased statistics using data from both a natural experiment and a survey experiment during a... 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
- June 2015 (Revised October 2016)
- Case
Denver Museum of Nature & Science
By: Jill Avery and Jim Rosenberg
Digital was on Vice President of Strategic Partnerships and Programs Bridget Coughlin's mind these days. DMNS had been dabbling in digital for the past few years, but had never fully committed to it. The time had come to establish a strategic vision, and to decide... View Details
- March 2015
- Article
Vulnerable Banks
By: Robin Greenwood, Augustin Landier and David Thesmar
We present a model in which fire sales propagate shocks across bank balance sheets. When a bank experiences a negative shock to its equity, a natural way to return to target leverage is to sell assets. If potential buyers are limited, then asset sales depress prices,... View Details
- February 2015
- Article
'Open' Disclosure of Innovations, Incentives and Follow-on Reuse: Theory on Processes of Cumulative Innovation and a Field Experiment in Computational Biology
By: Kevin J. Boudreau and Karim R. Lakhani
Most of society's innovation systems―academic science, the patent system, open source, etc.―are "open" in the sense that they are designed to facilitate knowledge disclosure among innovators. An essential difference across innovation systems is whether disclosure is of... View Details
- November 2014
- Article
The Dynamics of Firm Lobbying
By: William R. Kerr, William F. Lincoln and Prachi Mishra
We study the determinants of the dynamics of firm lobbying behavior using a panel data set covering 1998–2006. Our data exhibit three striking facts: (i) few firms lobby, (ii) lobbying status is strongly associated with firm size, and (iii) lobbying status is highly... View Details
- Article
Toward Resource Independence—Why State-Owned Entities Become Multinationals: An Empirical Study of India's Public R&D Laboratories
By: Prithwiraj Choudhury and Tarun Khanna
In this paper, we build on the standard resource dependence theory and its departure suggested by Vernon to offer a novel explanation for why state-owned entities (SOEs) might seek a global footprint and global cash flows: to achieve resource independence from... View Details
- September 2014
- Article
OSHA Inspections Should Be Welcome: Results from a Natural Field Experiment in California
By: David I. Levine and Michael W. Toffel
For companies with strong internal occupational safety and health auditing programs, OSHA inspections might seem a formality that risk uncovering, at most, nitpicky deviations from the thousands of pages of safety regulations. For those with poor safety practices, OSHA... View Details