Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(2,349)
- Faculty Publications (279)
- November–December 2023
- Article
Iterative Coordination and Innovation: Prioritizing Value over Novelty
By: Sourobh Ghosh and Andy Wu
An innovating organization faces the challenge of how to prioritize distinct goals of novelty and value, both of which underlie innovation. Popular practitioner frameworks like Agile management suggest that organizations can adopt an iterative approach of frequent... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
The Buy-In Effect: When Increasing Initial Effort Motivates Behavioral Follow-Through
By: Holly Dykstra, Shibeal O'Flaherty and A.V. Whillans
Behavioral interventions often focus on reducing friction to encourage behavior change. In
contrast, we provide evidence that adding friction can promote long-term behavior change when
behaviors involve repeated costly efforts over longer time horizons. In... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Navigating the Jagged Technological Frontier: Field Experimental Evidence of the Effects of AI on Knowledge Worker Productivity and Quality
By: Fabrizio Dell'Acqua, Edward McFowland III, Ethan Mollick, Hila Lifshitz-Assaf, Katherine C. Kellogg, Saran Rajendran, Lisa Krayer, François Candelon and Karim R. Lakhani
The public release of Large Language Models (LLMs) has sparked tremendous interest in how humans will use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to accomplish a variety of tasks. In our study conducted with Boston Consulting Group, a global management consulting firm, we examine... View Details
- September 2023
- Article
Addressing Vaccine Hesitancy: Experimental Evidence from Nine Countries during the COVID-19 Pandemic
By: Vincenzo Galasso, Vincent Pons, Paola Profeta, Martin McKee, David Stuckler, Michael Becher, Sylvain Brouard and Martial Foucault
We study the impact of public health messages on intentions to vaccinate and vaccination uptakes, especially among hesitant groups. We performed an experiment comparing the effects of egoistic and altruistic messages on COVID-19 vaccine intentions and behaviour. We... View Details
- September 2023
- Article
Measuring Time Use in Rural India: Design and Validation of a Low-Cost Survey Module
By: Erica Field, Rohini Pande, Natalia Rigol, Simone Schaner, Elena Stacy and Charity Troyer Moore
Time use data can help us understand individual labor supply choices, especially
for women who often provide unpaid care and home production. Although
enumerator-assisted diary-based time use data collection is suitable for
low-literacy populations, it is costly and... View Details
- July–August 2023
- Article
Demand Learning and Pricing for Varying Assortments
By: Kris Ferreira and Emily Mower
Problem Definition: We consider the problem of demand learning and pricing for retailers who offer assortments of substitutable products that change frequently, e.g., due to limited inventory, perishable or time-sensitive products, or the retailer’s desire to... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Much Ado About Nothing? Overreaction to Random Regulatory Audits
By: Samuel Antill and Joseph Kalmenovitz
Regulators often audit firms to detect non-compliance. Exploiting a natural experiment in the lobbying industry, we show that firms overreact to audits and this response distorts prices and reduces welfare. Each year, federal regulators audit a random sample of... View Details
- July 2023
- Article
Before or After? The Effects of Payment Decision Timing in Pay-What-You-Want Contexts
By: Raghabendra P. KC, Vincent Mak and Elie Ofek
We study how payment decision timing—before versus after product delivery—influences consumer payment under pay-what-you-want pricing. We focus on situations where there is minimal change in consumer uncertainty regarding the product before versus after receiving it.... View Details
- July 2023
- Article
Design and Analysis of Switchback Experiments
By: Iavor I Bojinov, David Simchi-Levi and Jinglong Zhao
In switchback experiments, a firm sequentially exposes an experimental unit to a random treatment, measures its response, and repeats the procedure for several periods to determine which treatment leads to the best outcome. Although practitioners have widely adopted... View Details
- July 2023
- Article
So, Who Likes You? Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment
By: Ravi Bapna, Edward McFowland III, Probal Mojumder, Jui Ramaprasad and Akhmed Umyarov
With one-third of marriages in the United States beginning online, online dating platforms have become important curators of the modern social fabric. Prior work on online dating has elicited two critical frictions in the heterosexual dating market. Women, governed by... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Design-Based Confidence Sequences: A General Approach to Risk Mitigation in Online Experimentation
By: Dae Woong Ham, Michael Lindon, Martin Tingley and Iavor Bojinov
Randomized experiments have become the standard method for companies to evaluate the performance of new products or services. In addition to augmenting managers’ decision-making, experimentation mitigates risk by limiting the proportion of customers exposed to... View Details
- June 2023
- Article
Do Job Seekers Value Diversity Information? Evidence from a Field Experiment and Human Capital Disclosures
By: Jung Ho Choi, Joseph Pacelli, Kristina M. Rennekamp and Sorabh Tomar
We examine how information about the diversity of a potential employer's workforce affects individuals’ job-seeking behavior. We embed a field experiment in job recommendation emails from a leading career advice agency in the U.S. The experimental treatment involves... View Details
- 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
- 2023
- Working Paper
Setting Gendered Expectations? Recruiter Outreach Bias in Online Tech Training Programs
By: Jacqueline N. Lane, Karim R. Lakhani and Roberto Fernandez
Competence development in digital technologies, analytics, and artificial intelligence is increasingly important to all types of organizations and their workforce. Universities and corporations are investing heavily in developing training programs, at all tenure... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Culture as a Signal: Evidence from a Natural Field Experiment
By: Wei Cai, Dennis Campbell and Jiehang Yu
The importance of culture as an informal management control system is increasingly acknowledged in academia. While prior research mainly focuses on the value of culture on internal stakeholders (e.g., employees), we examine whether culture serves as a credible signal... View Details
- April 2023
- Article
A Field Experiment on Subgoal Framing to Boost Volunteering: The Trade-off Between Goal Granularity and Flexibility
By: Aneesh Rai, Marissa A. Sharif, Edward H. Chang, Katherine L. Milkman and Angela L. Duckworth
Research suggests that breaking overarching goals into more granular subgoals is beneficial for goal progress. However, making goals more granular often involves reducing the flexibility provided to complete them, and recent work shows that flexibility can also be... View Details
- April 2023
- Article
Learning Down to Train Up: Mentors Are More Effective When They Value Insights from Below
By: Ting Zhang, Dan Wang and Adam D. Galinsky
Although mentorship is vital for individual success, potential mentors often view it as a costly burden. To understand what motivates mentors to overcome this barrier and more fully engage with their mentees, we introduce a new construct, learning direction, which... View Details
- 2023
- Chapter
Marketing Through the Machine’s Eyes: Image Analytics and Interpretability
By: Shunyuan Zhang, Flora Feng and Kannan Srinivasan
he growth of social media and the sharing economy is generating abundant unstructured image and video data. Computer vision techniques can derive rich insights from unstructured data and can inform recommendations for increasing profits and consumer utility—if only the... View Details
- February 2023
- Article
Increasing the Demand for Workers with a Criminal Record
By: Zoë Cullen, Will Dobbie and Mitchell Hoffman
State and local policies increasingly restrict employers’ access to criminal records, but without
addressing the underlying reasons that employers may conduct criminal background checks.
Employers may thus still want to ask about a job applicant’s criminal record... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Life After Death: A Field Experiment with Small Businesses on Information Frictions, Stigma, and Bankruptcy
By: Shai Benjamin Bernstein, Emanuele Colonnelli, Mitchell Hoffman and Benjamin Iverson
In a randomized control trial (RCT) with U.S. small businesses, we document that a large share of firms are not well-informed about bankruptcy. Many assume that bankruptcy necessarily entails the death of a business and do not know about Chapter 11 bankruptcy, where... View Details