Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(759)
- Faculty Publications (62)
- July 2017
- Article
Inflation Expectations, Learning, and Supermarket Prices: Evidence from Survey Experiments
By: Alberto Cavallo, Guillermo Cruces and Ricardo Perez-Truglia
Information frictions play a central role in the formation of household inflation expectations, but there is no consensus about their origins. We address this question with novel evidence from survey experiments. We document two main findings. First, individuals in... 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
- 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
- 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
- Spring 2016
- Article
Net Neutrality: A Fast Lane to Understanding the Tradeoffs
By: Shane Greenstein, Martin Peitz and Tommaso Valletti
The last decade has seen a strident public debate about the principle of "net neutrality." The economic literature has focused on two definitions of net neutrality. The most basic definition of net neutrality is to prohibit payments from content providers to internet... View Details
- September 2015 (Revised March 2025)
- Technical Note
FIELD Global Capstone: Developing Customer Empathy
By: Jill Avery
The Design Thinking process begins with empathizing with potential customers. Empathizing, being aware of, interpreting, and understanding the thoughts of others, as well as being able to vicariously experience them oneself, requires the careful and deliberate study of... View Details
- Article
How Elastic Are Preferences for Redistribution? Evidence from Randomized Survey Experiments
By: Ilyana Kuziemko, Michael I. Norton, Emmanuel Saez and Stefanie Stantcheva
We analyze randomized online survey experiments providing interactive, customized information on U.S. income inequality, the link between top income tax rates and economic growth, and the estate tax. The treatment has large effects on views about inequality but only... View Details
- Article
Learning Through Noticing: Theory and Evidence from a Field Experiment
By: Rema Hanna, Sendhil Mullainathan and Joshua Schwartzstein
We consider a model of technological learning under which people "learn through noticing": they choose which input dimensions to attend to and subsequently learn about from available data. Using this model, we show how people with a great deal of experience may... View Details
- February 2014
- Article
'Last-place Aversion': Evidence and Redistributive Implications
By: Ilyana Kuziemko, Ryan W. Buell, Taly Reich and Michael Norton
We present evidence from laboratory experiments showing that individuals are "last-place averse." Participants choose gambles with the potential to move them out of last place that they reject when randomly placed in other parts of the distribution. In... View Details
- May 2013
- Article
Health Care's Service Fanatics: How the Cleveland Clinic Leaped to the Top of the Patient-satisfaction Surveys
By: James Merlino and Ananth Raman
The Cleveland Clinic has long had a reputation for medical excellence. But in 2009 the CEO acknowledged that patients did not think much of their experience there, and he decided to act. Since then the Clinic has leaped to the top tier of patient-satisfaction surveys,... View Details
- 2012
- Article
Does Power Corrupt or Enable?: When and Why Power Facilitates Self-interested Behavior
By: K. A. DeCelles, D.S. DeRue, J.D. Margolis and T.L. Ceranic
Does power corrupt a moral identity, or does it enable a moral identity to emerge? Drawing from the power literature, we propose that the psychological experience of power, although often associated with promoting self-interest, is associated with greater self-interest... View Details
- Article
Economic Impacts of Immigration: A Survey
By: Sari Pekkala Kerr and William R. Kerr
This paper surveys recent empirical studies on the economic impacts of immigration. The survey first examines the magnitude of immigration as an economic phenomenon in various host countries. The second part deals with the assimilation of immigrant workers into... View Details
- 2010
- Working Paper
Prosocial Spending and Well-Being: Cross-Cultural Evidence for a Psychological Universal
By: Lara B. Aknin, Christopher P. Barrington-Leigh, Elizabeth W. Dunn, John F. Helliwell, Robert Biswas-Diener, Imelda Kemeza, Paul Nyende, Claire Ashton-James and Michael I. Norton
This research provides the first support for a possible psychological universal: human beings around the world derive emotional benefits from using their financial resources to help others (prosocial spending). Analyzing survey data from 136 countries, we show that... View Details
- 2010
- Chapter
The Paranoid Style in the Study of American Politics
By: David Moss and Mary Oey
What drives policy making in a democracy? The conventional view is that political actors, like economic actors, pursue their self interest, and that special interest groups dominate the policy making process by satisfying policy makers' need for money and other forms... View Details
Keywords: Policy; Government Legislation; Media; Interests; Power and Influence; Public Opinion; United States
- 2009
- Working Paper
Firsthand Experience and the Subsequent Role of Reflected Knowledge in Cultivating Trust in Global Collaboration
By: Mark Mortensen and T. B. Neeley
While scholars contend that firsthand experience—time spent onsite observing the people, places, and norms of a distant locale—is crucial in globally distributed collaboration, how such experience actually affects interpersonal dynamics is poorly understood. Based on... View Details
- November 2008
- Article
Getting off the Hedonic Treadmill, One Step at a Time: The Impact of Regular Religious Practice and Exercise on Well-Being
By: Daniel Mochon, Michael I. Norton and Dan Ariely
Many studies have shown that few events in life have a lasting impact on subjective well-being because of people's tendency to adapt quickly; worse, those events that do have a lasting impact tend to be negative. We suggest that while major events may not provide... View Details
- 2008
- Working Paper
Economic Impacts of Immigration: A Survey
By: Sari Pekkala Kerr and William R. Kerr
This paper surveys recent empirical studies on the economic impacts of immigration. The survey first examines the magnitude of immigration as an economic phenomenon in various host countries. The second part deals with the assimilation of immigrant workers into... View Details
- 2008
- Other Unpublished Work
The Paranoid Style in the Study of American Politics
By: David Moss and Mary Oey
The conventional view is that political actors, like economic actors, pursue their self interest, and that special interest groups dominate the policy making process by satisfying policy makers' need for money and other forms of political support. Indeed, many... View Details
Keywords: Policy; Government Legislation; Media; Interests; Power and Influence; Public Opinion; United States
- 2007
- Working Paper
The New Market for Federal Judicial Law Clerks
By: Christopher Avery, Christine Jolls, Richard Posner and Alvin E. Roth
In the past, judges have often hired applicants for judicial clerkships as early as the beginning of the second year of law school for positions commencing approximately two years down the road. In the new hiring regime for federal judicial law clerks, by contrast,... View Details
- August 2004 (Revised February 2006)
- Case
Marketing James Patterson
By: John A. Deighton
Can a successful novelist use direct-to-consumer marketing to grow his brand? The author, who in a previous career ran a major advertising agency, uses advertising with great success to build his stature as a crime fiction writer. Further, he applies his experience at... View Details