Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(804)
- Faculty Publications (165)
- June 2021
- Article
The Role of Beliefs in Driving Gender Discrimination
By: Katherine B. Coffman, Christine L. Exley and Muriel Niederle
While there is ample evidence of discrimination against women in the workplace, it can be difficult to understand what factors contribute to discriminatory behavior. We use an experiment to both document discrimination and unpack its sources. First, we show that, on... View Details
- 2021
- Article
To Thine Own Self Be True? Incentive Problems in Personalized Law
By: Jordan M. Barry, John William Hatfield and Scott Duke Kominers
Recent years have seen an explosion of scholarship on “personalized law.” Commentators foresee a world in which regulators armed with big data and machine learning techniques determine the optimal legal rule for every regulated party, then instantaneously disseminate... View Details
Keywords: Personalized Law; Regulation; Regulatory Avoidance; Regulatory Arbitrage; Law And Economics; Law And Technology; Law And Artificial Intelligence; Futurism; Moral Hazard; Elicitation; Signaling; Privacy; Law; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Information Technology; AI and Machine Learning
- May 2021 (Revised February 2024)
- Teaching Note
THE YES: Reimagining the Future of E-Commerce with Artificial Intelligence (AI)
By: Ayelet Israeli and Jill Avery
THE YES, a multi-brand shopping app launched in May 2020 offered a new type of buying experience for women’s fashion, driven by a sophisticated algorithm that used data science and machine learning to create and deliver a personalized store for every shopper, based on... View Details
Keywords: Data; Data Analytics; Artificial Intelligence; AI; AI Algorithms; AI Creativity; Fashion; Retail; Retail Analytics; E-Commerce Strategy; Platform; Platforms; Big Data; Preference Elicitation; Predictive Analytics; App Development; ＂Marketing Analytics＂; Advertising; Mobile App; Mobile Marketing; Apparel; Online Advertising; Referral Rewards; Referrals; Female Ceo; Female Entrepreneur; Female Protagonist; Analytics and Data Science; Analysis; Creativity; Marketing Strategy; Brands and Branding; Consumer Behavior; Demand and Consumers; Forecasting and Prediction; Marketing Channels; Digital Marketing; Internet and the Web; Mobile and Wireless Technology; AI and Machine Learning; E-commerce; Digital Platforms; Fashion Industry; Retail Industry; Apparel and Accessories Industry; Consumer Products Industry; United States
- Article
Does Observability Amplify Sensitivity to Moral Frames? Evaluating a Reputation-Based Account of Moral Preferences
By: Valerio Capraro, Jillian J. Jordan and Ben Tappin
A growing body of work suggests that people are sensitive to moral framing in economic games involving prosociality, suggesting that people hold moral preferences for doing the “right thing”. What gives rise to these preferences? Here, we evaluate the explanatory power... View Details
- 2021
- Working Paper
Does Observability Amplify Sensitivity to Moral Frames? Evaluating a Reputation-Based Account of Moral Preferences
By: Valerio Capraro, Jillian J. Jordan and Ben Tappin
A growing body of work suggests that people are sensitive to moral framing in economic games involving prosociality, suggesting that people hold moral preferences for doing the “right thing”. What gives rise to these preferences? Here, we evaluate the explanatory power... View Details
- January 2021 (Revised March 2021)
- Case
THE YES: Reimagining the Future of E-Commerce with Artificial Intelligence (AI)
By: Jill Avery, Ayelet Israeli and Emma von Maur
THE YES, a multi-brand shopping app launched in May 2020 offered a new type of buying experience for women’s fashion, driven by a sophisticated algorithm that used data science and machine learning to create and deliver a personalized store for every shopper, based on... View Details
Keywords: Data; Data Analytics; Artificial Intelligence; AI; AI Algorithms; AI Creativity; Fashion; Retail; Retail Analytics; E-Commerce Strategy; Platform; Platforms; Big Data; Preference Elicitation; Preference Prediction; Predictive Analytics; App Development; ＂Marketing Analytics＂; Advertising; Mobile App; Mobile Marketing; Apparel; Online Advertising; Referral Rewards; Referrals; Female Ceo; Female Entrepreneur; Female Protagonist; Analytics and Data Science; Analysis; Creativity; Marketing Strategy; Brands and Branding; Consumer Behavior; Demand and Consumers; Forecasting and Prediction; Marketing Channels; Digital Marketing; Internet and the Web; Mobile and Wireless Technology; AI and Machine Learning; E-commerce; Digital Platforms; Fashion Industry; Retail Industry; Apparel and Accessories Industry; Consumer Products Industry; United States
- 2021
- Working Paper
Bollywood, Skin Color and Sexism: The Role of the Film Industry in Emboldening and Contesting Stereotypes in India after Independence
By: Sudev Sheth, Geoffrey Jones and Morgan Spencer
This working paper examines the social impact of the film industry in India during the first four decades after Indian Independence in 1947. It shows that Bollywood, the mainstream cinema in India and the counterpart in scale to Hollywood in the United States, shared... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Prioritarianism and Optimal Taxation
By: Matti Tuomala and Matthew C. Weinzierl
Prioritarianism has been at the center of the formal approach to optimal tax theory since its modern starting point in Mirrlees (1971), but most theorists’ use of it is motivated by tractability rather than explicit normative reasoning. We characterize analytically and... View Details
Keywords: Prioritarianism; Optimal Taxation; Utilitarianism; Redistribution; Inverse-optimum; Taxation; Theory
- November 2020
- Article
Accelerator or Brake? Cash for Clunkers, Household Liquidity, and Aggregate Demand
By: Daniel Green, Brian Melzer, Jonathan Parker and Arcenis Rojas
This paper evaluates the Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS) by comparing the vehicle purchases and disposals of households with eligible "clunkers" to those of households with similar, but ineligible, vehicles. CARS caused roughly 500,000 purchases during the program... View Details
Keywords: Automobiles; Purchasing; Government Incentives; Household; Financial Liquidity; Income; Behavior
- 2020
- Working Paper
Designing, Not Checking, for Policy Robustness: An Example with Optimal Taxation
By: Benjami Lockwood, Afras Y. Sial and Matthew C. Weinzierl
Economists typically check the robustness of their results by comparing them across plausible ranges of parameter values and model structures. A preferable approach to robustness—for the purposes of policymaking and evaluation—is to design policy that takes these... View Details
- September 7, 2020
- Article
Remote Networking as a Person of Color
By: Laura Morgan Roberts and Anthony J. Mayo
In remote work situations, where people cannot rely on impromptu elevator conversations or water cooler chats with coworkers, the answer isn’t to turn inward. In fact, the need for networking is even more important. In particular, our interactions with people whose... View Details
- August 2020
- Article
Trust in State and Non-State Actors: Evidence from Dispute Resolution in Pakistan
By: Daron Acemoglu, Ali Cheema, Asim I. Khwaja and James A. Robinson
Lack of trust in state institutions is a pervasive problem in many developing countries. This paper investigates whether information about improved public services can help build trust in state institutions and move people away from non-state actors. We find that... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
The Seeds of Ideology: Historical Immigration and Political Preferences in the United States
By: Paola Giuliano and Marco Tabellini
We study the long run effects of immigration on American political ideology. Exploiting
cross-county variation in the presence of European immigrants between 1900
and 1930, we establish a novel result: historical European immigration is associated
with stronger... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Social Interactions in Pandemics: Fear, Altruism, and Reciprocity
By: Laura Alfaro, Ester Faia, Nora Lamersdorf and Farzad Saidi
In SIR models, homogeneous or with a network structure, infection rates are assumed to be exogenous. However, individuals adjust their behavior. Using daily data for 89 cities worldwide, we document that mobility falls in response to fear, as approximated by Google... View Details
- May 2020
- Article
To Be or Not to Be Your Authentic Self? Catering to Others' Expectations and Interests Hinders Performance
By: Francesca Gino, Ovul Sezer and Laura Huang
When approaching interpersonal first meetings (e.g., job interviews), people often cater to the target’s interests and expectations to make a good impression and secure a positive outcome such as being offered the job (pilot study). This strategy is distinct from other... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
On the Representativeness of Voter Turnout
By: Louis Kaplow and Scott Duke Kominers
Prominent theory research on voting uses models in which expected pivotality drives voters' turnout decisions and hence determines voting outcomes. It is recognized, however, that such work is at odds with Downs's paradox: in practice, many individuals turn out for... View Details
- March 2020
- Article
Is This My Group or Not? The Role of Ensemble Coding of Emotional Expressions in Group Categorization
By: Amit Goldenberg, Timothy D. Sweeny, Emmanuel Shpigel and James J. Gross
When exposed to others’ emotional responses, people often make rapid decisions as to whether these others are members of their group or not. These group categorization decisions have been shown to be extremely important to understanding group behavior. Yet, despite... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Topic Preference Detection: A Novel Approach to Understand Perspective Taking in Conversation
By: Michael Yeomans and Alison Wood Brooks
Although most humans engage in conversations constantly throughout their lives, conversational mistakes are commonplace— interacting with others is difficult, and conversation re-quires quick, relentless perspective-taking and decision making. For example: during every... View Details
- Article
Designing Social Networks: Joint Tasks and the Formation and Endurance of Network Ties
By: Sharique Hasan and Rembrand Koning
Can managers influence the formation of organizational networks? In this article, we evaluate the effect of joint tasks on the creation of network ties with data from a novel field experiment with 112 aspiring entrepreneurs. During the study, we randomized individuals... View Details
- February 2020
- Article
The Many Minds Problem: Disclosure in Dyadic vs. Group Conversation
By: Gus Cooney, Adam M. Mastroianni, Nicole Abi-Esber and Alison Wood Brooks
What causes people to disclose their preferences or withhold them? Declare their love for each other or keep it a secret? Gossip with a coworker or bite one’s tongue? We argue that to understand disclosure, we need to understand a critical and often overlooked aspect... View Details