Publications

2015
Article

Percentage Cost Discounts Always Beat Percentage Benefit Bonuses: Helping Consumers Evaluate Nominally Equivalent Percentage Changes

By: Bhavya Mohan, Pierre Chandon and Jason Riis

Marketing offers that are framed as a "percentage change" in consumer cost vs. benefit can have highly non-linear impacts in terms of actual value for consumers. Even though two offers might appear identical, we show that consumers are better off choosing the offer... View Details

SSRN

15 Apr 2025
HBS Seminar

Hal Hershfield, University of California, Los Angeles

A Practical Approach to Sales Compensation: What Do We Know Now? What Should We Know in the Future?

Personal selling represents one of the most important elements in the marketing mix, and appropriate management of the sales force is vital to achieving the organization’s objectives. Among the various instruments of sales management, compensation plays a pivotal... View Details

Jill J. Avery

Dr. Jill Avery is a Senior Lecturer of Business Administration and C. Roland Christensen Distinguished Management Educator in the marketing unit at Harvard Business School. She is a respected authority on branding and brand management, customer relationship... View Details

Keywords: consumer products; arts; advertising; automobiles; retailing; fashion; hotels ＆ motels; food; beverage

23 Feb 2015
Research & Ideas

How to Break the Expert’s Curse

a beginner, that could actually have powerful implications for how advising takes place in an organization. It has implications for how experts can better understand those who have less experience than they do." Note to managers: If your... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Education

Working Paper

The Returns to Skills During the Pandemic: Experimental Evidence from Uganda

By: Livia Alfonsi, Vittorio Bassi, Imran Rasul and Elena Spadini

The Covid-19 pandemic represents one of the most significant labor market shocks to the world economy in recent times. We present evidence from a field experiment to understand whether and why skilled and unskilled workers were differentially impacted by the shock, in... View Details

Keywords: COVID-19 Pandemic; System Shocks; Labor; Competency and Skills; Development Economics; Uganda

SSRN

Purchase

June 2017
Article

Creating Reciprocal Value Through Operational Transparency

By: Ryan W. Buell, Tami Kim and Chia-Jung Tsay

We investigate whether organizations can create value by introducing visual transparency between consumers and producers. Although operational transparency has been shown to improve consumer perceptions of service value, existing theory posits that increased contact... View Details

Keywords: Operational Transparency; Service Management; Production Management; Organizational Performance; Behavioral Operations; Service Operations; Service Delivery; Consumer Behavior; Labor; Organizational Design; Operations; Service Industry; United States; Kenya

There is a growing belief that scalable and low-cost AI assistance can improve firm decision-making and economic performance. However, running a business involves a myriad of open-ended problems, making it hard to generalize from recent studies showing that generative... View Details

Research Summary

Overview

Over the last decade, technology companies like Amazon, Google, and Netflix have pioneered data-driven research and development processes centered on massive experimentation. However, as companies increase the breadth and scale of their experiments to millions of... 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

Keywords: Friction; Behavior; Environmental Sustainability; Transportation; Outcome or Result

April 2021
Article

Work-From-Anywhere: The Productivity Effects of Geographical Flexibility

By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Cirrus Foroughi and Barbara Larson

An emerging form of remote work allows employees to work-from-anywhere, so that the worker can choose to live in a preferred geographic location. While traditional work-from-home (WFH) programs offer the worker temporal flexibility, work-from-anywhere (WFA) programs... View Details

Keywords: Geographic Flexibility; Work-from-anywhere; Remote Work; Telecommuting; Geographic Mobility; USPTO; Employees; Geographic Location; Performance Productivity

June 28, 2011
Article

Using Implementation Intentions Prompts to Enhance Influenza Vaccination Rates

By: Katherine L Milkman, John Beshears, James J. Choi, David Laibson and Brigitte C. Madrian

We evaluate the results of a field experiment designed to measure the effect of prompts to form implementation intentions on realized behavioral outcomes. The outcome of interest is influenza vaccination receipt at free on-site clinics offered by a large firm to its... View Details

Keywords: Behavioral Economics; Nudge; Libertarian Paternalism; Public Health; Flu Shot; Behavior; Consumer Behavior; Health Care and Treatment; Cognition and Thinking

26 Mar 2024
HBS Seminar

Szu-Chi Huang, Stanford Graduate School of Business

16 May 2016
HBS Seminar

Jared Curhan, MIT Sloan School of Management

24 Oct 2024
Blog Post

Trailblazing Success with Global Reach and Impact: Scott Wallinger (AMP 82, 1979)

years of forestry business experience. HBS was transformative. For the first time, I was learning about international business and gaining insights from people across different industries. The case method challenged me to think critically, and my classmates’ diverse... View Details

03 Mar 2022
HBS Seminar

Daniela Saban, Stanford

13 May 2014
Working Paper Summaries

The Contaminating Effects of Building Instrumental Ties: How Networking Can Make Us Feel Dirty

Keywords: by Tiziana Casciaro, Francesca Gino & Maryam Kouchaki; Legal Services

November 7, 2017
Article

Temporary Sharing Prompts Unrestrained Disclosures That Leave Lasting Negative Impressions

By: Reto Hofstetter, Roland Rüppell and Leslie John

With the advent of social media, the impressions people make on others are based increasingly on their digital disclosures. Yet digital disclosures can come back to haunt, making it challenging for people to manage the impressions they make. In field and online... View Details

Keywords: Disclosure; Privacy; Self-presentation; Impression Formation; Behavior; Perspective; Internet and the Web; Social Media