Publications

Purchase

March 2015 (Revised January 2020)
Supplement

Behavioural Insights Team (B)

By: Michael Luca and Patrick Rooney

The Behavioural Insights Team case introduces students to the concept of choice architecture and the value of experimental methods (sometimes called A/B testing) within organizational contexts. The exercise provides an opportunity for students to apply these principles... View Details

Keywords: Behavioral Economics; Experiments; Choice Architecture; Public Entrepreneurship; United Kingdom

Purchase

March 2010
Article

First, Get Your Feet Wet: The Effects of Learning from Direct and Indirect Experience on Team Creativity

By: F. Gino, L. Argote, E. Miron-Spektor and G. Todorova

Keywords: Learning; Groups and Teams

August 2022
Article

The Gender Gap in Self-Promotion

By: Christine L. Exley and Judd B. Kessler

In applications, interviews, performance reviews, and many other environments, individuals are explicitly asked or implicitly invited to assess their own performance. In a series of experiments, we find that women rate their performance less favorably than equally... View Details

Keywords: Self-promotion; Gender Gap; Experiments; Performance Evaluation; Gender

20 Aug 2013
News

More Kerouac Than Corporate: Harvard MBA Road Trip Coaches Businesses Across America

Keywords: MBAs; FIELD; field experience; Clothing and Clothing Accessories Stores; Retail Trade; Health and Personal Care Stores; Retail Trade

2021
Working Paper

Entrepreneurial Learning and Strategic Foresight

By: Aticus Peterson and Andy Wu

We study how learning by experience across projects affects an entrepreneur's strategic foresight. In a quantitative study of 314 entrepreneurs across 722 crowdfunded projects supplemented with a program of qualitative interviews, we counterintuitively find that... View Details

Keywords: Experience; Interdependency; Strategic Foresight; Crowdfunding; Timeline; Delay; Forecasting; Entrepreneurship; Learning; Complexity; Forecasting and Prediction; Product Development; Planning

May 2022
Article

Complex Disclosure

By: Ginger Zhe Jin, Michael Luca and Daniel Martin

We present evidence that unnecessarily complex disclosure can result from strategic incentives to shroud information. In our lab experiment, senders are required to report their private information truthfully, but can choose how complex to make their reports. We find... View Details

Keywords: Disclosure; Experiments; Naiveté; Overconfidence; Corporate Disclosure; Policy; Information; Complexity; Strategy; Consumer Behavior

July 31, 2019
Blog Post

Customer Centricity: Easy to Talk About, Hard to Implement: 3 Keys to Closing the Gap Between the Theory and the Reality of Putting the Customer First

By: Jeffrey F. Rayport

Keywords: Customer Experience; Customer Engagement; Retail Industry

12 Jun 2016
News

"An Opportunity to Make People Happy"

Keywords: entrepreneurship; art; experience economy; Arts, Entertainment

19 Nov 2015
Working Paper Summaries

The US Experiment with Fair Trade Laws: State Police Powers, Federal Antitrust, and the Politics of 'Fairness', 1890–1938

Keywords: by Laura Phillips Sawyer; Retail

November 2009
Article

Finding Missing Markets (and a Disturbing Epilogue): Evidence from an Export Crop Adoption and Marketing Intervention in Kenya

By: Nava Ashraf, Xavier Gine and Dean Karlan

Farmers may grow crops for local consumption despite more profitable export options. DrumNet, a Kenyan NGO that helps small farmers adopt and market export crops, conducted a randomized trial to evaluate its impact. DrumNet services increased production of export crops... View Details

Keywords: Export Crop; Field Experiment; Food Safety Standards; Plant-Based Agribusiness; Trade; Profit; Marketing; Standards; Failure; Non-Governmental Organizations; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Kenya; European Union

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

Keywords: Accelerators; Entrepreneur; Social Networks; Field Experiment; Entrepreneurship; Organizational Design; Networks; Social and Collaborative Networks; Social Media; Information Technology Industry; India

Research Summary

Designing Productive Zones of Privacy

By: Ethan S. Bernstein

A common theme that integrates my research and course development is how increasingly transparent workplaces can improve productivity and performance by putting up certain boundaries to observation. While the research above empirically and theoretically explores the... View Details

Keywords: Transparency; Privacy; Field Experiments; Design; Organizational Design; Performance

June 2022 (Revised January 2025)
Technical Note

Causal Inference

By: Iavor I Bojinov, Michael Parzen and Paul Hamilton

This note provides an overview of causal inference for an introductory data science course. First, the note discusses observational studies and confounding variables. Next the note describes how randomized experiments can be used to account for the effect of... View Details

Keywords: Causal Inference; Causality; Experiment; Experimental Design; Data Science; Analytics and Data Science

Educators

Purchase

2015
Working Paper

The U.S. Experiment with Fair Trade Laws: State Police Powers, Federal Antitrust, and the Politics of 'Fairness,' 1890-1938

By: Laura Phillips Sawyer

Prior to the Great Depression and President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal programs, considerable pressure for antitrust revision came from trade associations of independent proprietors. A perhaps unlikely leader, Edna Gleason, organized California's retail pharmacists... View Details

Keywords: Competition; Fairness; Laws and Statutes; Supply and Industry; Business and Government Relations

May 2017
Article

Behavioral Processes in Long-Lag Interventions

By: Dale T. Miller, Jennifer E. Dannals and Julian Zlatev

We argue that psychologists who conduct experiments with long lags between the manipulation and the outcome measure should pay more attention to behavioral processes that intervene between the manipulation and the outcome measure. Neglect of such processes, we contend,... View Details

Keywords: Field Experiments; Interventions; Behavioral Mediation; Theories Of Change; Longitudinal Studies; Behavior; Research; Change; Theory

16 May 2024
News

On the Job

came very close to costing me an entire career. DM: In this special edition of Skydeck, associate editor Julia Hanna asked this year’s recipients of the School’s highest honor to describe a work experience that has really stayed with them... View Details

Keywords: first job; leadership; life experience; career lessons; Finance; Oil and Gas Extraction; Mining; Retail Trade

07 Dec 2020
News

Lifting The Stigma

Sangu Delle (MBA/JD 2016) Sangu Delle (MBA/JD 2016) Early on, it was clear that Sangu Delle (MBA/JD 2016) was driven to excel. As a six-year-old living in Ghana Delle wrote to Harvard University President Neil Rudenstine to ask when he could enroll. Rudenstine wrote... View Details

Keywords: mental health; life experience; entrepreneurship

Article

Cheating, Inequality Aversion, and Appealing to Social Norms

By: Clara Amato, Francesca Gino, Natalia Montinari and Pierluigi Sacco

We conduct a field experiment involving 143, 9-years old children in their classrooms. Children are requested to flip a coin in private and receive a big or a small prize depending on the outcome they report. Comparing the actual and theoretical distribution of... View Details

Keywords: Cheating; Inequality Aversion; Social Norms; Children; Experiment; Behavior; Equality and Inequality; Moral Sensibility