Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(5,224)
- Faculty Publications (1,037)
- 2011
- Chapter
How Does Simplified Disclosure Affect Individuals' Mutual Fund Choices?
By: John Beshears, James J. Choi, David Laibson and Brigitte C. Madrian
We use an experiment to estimate the effect of the SEC's Summary Prospectus, which simplifies mutual fund disclosure. Our subjects chose an equity portfolio and a bond portfolio. Subjects received either statutory prospectuses or Summary Prospectuses. We find no... View Details
- 2011
- Working Paper
How Foundations Think: The Ford Foundation as a Dominating Institution in the Field of American Business Schools
By: Rakesh Khurana, Kenneth Kimura and Marion Fourcade
The question of institutional change has become central to organizational research (Powell, 2008). Recent scholarship has demonstrated, often through carefully researched cases, that institutions can and sometimes do change. According to this research, there are two... View Details
- 2012
- Working Paper
Issuer Quality and Corporate Bond Returns
By: Robin Greenwood and Samuel G. Hanson
We show that the credit quality of corporate debt issuers deteriorates during credit booms, and that this deterioration forecasts low excess returns to corporate bondholders. The key insight is that changes in the pricing of credit risk disproportionately affect the... View Details
- 2011
- Working Paper
Naiveté and Cynicism in Negotiations and Other Competitive Contexts
By: Chia-Jung Tsay, Lisa L. Shu and Max Bazerman
A wealth of literature documents how the common failure to think about the self-interests of others contributes to suboptimal outcomes. Yet sometimes, an excess of cynicism appears to lead us to over-think the actions of others and make negative attributions about... View Details
- Article
Optimal Value and Growth Tilts in Long-Horizon Portfolios
By: Jakub W. Jurek and Luis M. Viceira
We develop an analytical solution to the dynamic portfolio choice problem of an investor with power utility defined over wealth at a finite horizon, who faces a time-varying investment opportunity set, parameterized using a flexible vector autoregression. We apply this... View Details
- January – February 2011
- Article
Stop Holding Yourself Back
By: Anne Morriss, Robin J. Ely and Frances X. Frei
After working with hundreds of leaders in a wide variety of organizations and in countries all over the globe, the authors found one very clear pattern: when it comes to meeting their leadership potential, many people unintentionally get in their own way. Five barriers... View Details
- 2011
- Article
The Consumer Psychology of Mail-in Rebates
By: John T. Gourville and Dilip Soman
Consumers who buy a product intending to use an accompanying mail-in rebate often do not redeem the rebate. To explain this behavior, we argue that consumers use an anchoring and adjustment approach to predicting the likelihood of redeeming a rebate. In keeping with... View Details
- 2011
- Working Paper
The Importance of Work Context in Organizational Learning from Error
By: Lucy H. MacPhail and Amy C. Edmondson
This paper examines the implications of work context for learning from errors in organizations. Prior research has shown that attitudes and behaviors related to error vary between groups within organizations but has not investigated or theorized the ways in which... View Details
- Article
The Social Utility of Feature Creep
By: Debora V. Thompson and Michael I. Norton
Previous research shows that consumers frequently choose products with too many features that they later find difficult to use. Our research shows that this seemingly suboptimal behavior may in fact confer benefits when factoring in the social context of consumption.... View Details
- Article
Values, Purpose, Meaning, and Expectations: Why Culture and Context Matter
The "rational person" standard, based on assumptions of economic self-interest, has long prevailed in legal reasoning. But understanding of decision making, behavioral choices, and possibilities for action must be enlarged to include a variety of factors that give... View Details
- September 2011
- Article
What Drives Sell-Side Analyst Compensation at High-Status Investment Banks?
By: Boris Groysberg, Paul M. Healy and David A. Maber
We use proprietary data from a major investment bank to investigate factors associated with analysts' annual compensation. We find compensation to be positively related to "All-Star" recognition, investment-banking contributions, the size of analysts' portfolios, and... View Details
- 2010
- Working Paper
Conveniently Upset: Avoiding Altruism by Distorting Beliefs about Others
By: Rafael Di Tella and Ricardo Perez-Truglia
In this paper we present the results from a "corruption game" (a dictator game modified so that the second player can accept a side payment that reduces the overall size of the pie). Dictators (silently) treated to have the possibility of taking a larger proportion of... View Details
- 2010
- Working Paper
Cognitive Barriers to Environmental Action: Problems and Solutions
By: Lisa L. Shu and Max Bazerman
We explore interventions at the individual level and focus on recognized cognitive barriers from behavioral decision-making literature. In particular, we highlight three cognitive barriers that impede sound individual decision making that have particular relevance to... View Details
- 2010
- Working Paper
Overconfidence by Bayesian Rational Agents
This paper derives two mechanisms through which Bayesian-rational individuals with differing priors will tend to be relatively overconfident about their estimates and predictions, in the sense of overestimating the precision of these estimates. The intuition behind one... View Details
- 2010
- Book
Seven Strategy Questions: A Simple Approach for Better Execution
By: Robert L. Simons
To stay ahead of the pack, you must translate your organization's competitive strategy into day-to-day actions that will enable your company to win in the marketplace. This means channeling resources into the right efforts, striking a balance between innovation and... View Details
- 2010
- Chapter
Feeling Good about Giving: The Benefits (and Costs) of Self-interested Charitable Behavior
By: L. Anik, L. B. Aknin, M. I. Norton and E. W. Dunn
While lay intuitions and pop psychology suggest that helping others leads to higher levels of happiness, the existing evidence only weakly supports this causal claim: research in psychology, economics, and neuroscience exploring the benefits of charitable giving has... View Details
- 2010
- Working Paper
Growth through Heterogeneous Innovations
By: Ufuk Akcigit and William R. Kerr
We study how exploration versus exploitation innovations impact economic growth through a tractable endogenous growth framework that contains multiple innovation sizes, multi-product firms, and entry/exit. Firms invest in exploration R&D to acquire new product lines... View Details
- October 2010
- Article
Preferring Balanced vs. Advantageous Peace Agreements: A Study of Israeli Attitudes Towards a Two-State Solution
By: Deepak Malhotra and Jeremy Ginges
The paper extends research on fixed-pie perceptions by suggesting that disputants may prefer proposals that are perceived to be equally attractive to both parties (i.e., balanced) rather than one-sided, because balanced agreements are seen as more likely to be... View Details
- September 2010
- Supplement
Compass Maritime Services, LLC: Valuing Ships (CW)
By: Benjamin C. Esty and Albert W. Sheen
Tom Roberts, a founding partner of Compass Maritime Services, a New Jersey-based shipping research and consulting firm, has been asked by a new potential customer in May 2008 for advice on purchasing a capesize bulk carrier. After identifying a suitable ship with his... View Details
- September 2010 (Revised December 2010)
- Case
Compass Maritime Services, LLC: Valuing Ships
By: Benjamin C. Esty and Albert W. Sheen
Tom Roberts, a founding partner of Compass Maritime Services, a New Jersey-based shipping research and consulting firm, has been asked by a new potential customer in May 2008 for advice on purchasing a capesize bulk carrier. After identifying a suitable ship with his... View Details