Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(1,675)
- Faculty Publications (242)
- Article
Do the Right Firms Survive Bankruptcy?
By: Samuel Antill
In U.S. Chapter 11 bankruptcy cases, firms are either reorganized, acquired, or liquidated. I show that decisions to liquidate often reduce creditor recovery, costing creditors billions of dollars every year. I exploit the within-district random assignment of... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
Is Hybrid Work the Best of Both Worlds? Evidence from a Field Experiment
Hybrid work is emerging as a novel form of organizing work globally. This paper reports causal evidence on how the extent of hybrid work—the number of days worked from home relative to days worked from the office—affects work outcomes. Collaborating with an... View Details
- 2022
- Article
Social Interactivity in Live Video Experiences Reduces Loneliness
By: Benjamin T. Kaveladze, Robert R. Morris, Rosa Victoria Dimitrova-Gammeltoft, Amit Goldenberg, James J. Gross, Judd Antin, Melissa Sandgren and Melissa C. Thomas-Hunt
Background: Loneliness, especially when chronic, can substantially reduce one's quality of life. However, positive social experiences might help to break cycles of loneliness by promoting more prosocial cognitions and behaviors. Internet-mediated live video... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
Do Startups Benefit from Their Investors' Reputation? Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment
By: Shai Benjamin Bernstein, Kunal Mehta, Richard Townsend and Ting Xu
We analyze a field experiment conducted on AngelList Talent, a large online search platform for startup jobs. In the experiment, AngelList randomly informed job seekers of whether a startup was funded by a top-tier investor and/or was funded recently. We find that the... View Details
- Article
Eliminating Unintended Bias in Personalized Policies Using Bias-Eliminating Adapted Trees (BEAT)
By: Eva Ascarza and Ayelet Israeli
An inherent risk of algorithmic personalization is disproportionate targeting of individuals from certain groups (or demographic characteristics such as gender or race), even when the decision maker does not intend to discriminate based on those “protected”... View Details
- March 2022
- Article
Sensitivity Analysis of Agent-based Models: A New Protocol
By: Emanuele Borgonovo, Marco Pangallo, Jan Rivkin, Leonardo Rizzo and Nicolaj Siggelkow
Agent-based models (ABMs) are increasingly used in the management sciences. Though useful, ABMs are often critiqued: it is hard to discern why they produce the results they do and whether other assumptions would yield similar results. To help researchers address such... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
Statistical Inference for Heterogeneous Treatment Effects Discovered by Generic Machine Learning in Randomized Experiments
By: Kosuke Imai and Michael Lingzhi Li
Researchers are increasingly turning to machine learning (ML) algorithms to investigate causal heterogeneity in randomized experiments. Despite their promise, ML algorithms may fail to accurately ascertain heterogeneous treatment effects under practical settings with... View Details
- February 15, 2022
- Article
How Managers Can Build a Culture of Experimentation
By: Frank V. Cespedes and Neil Hoyne
Testing in business presents qualitatively different challenges than those in clinical trials and most scientific research. There are very few opportunities for randomized control experiments in a changing, competitive market. Yet, change and competition make testing a... View Details
- January 2022 (Revised March 2022)
- Case
Chinese Restriction, Violence, and Exclusion in the United States
By: Tom Nicholas, Boyang Han and Tomas Rosales
Many early Chinese immigrants to the United States during the 1850s worked as traditional gold miners, but as gold mining declined in significance, an increasing number were employed as laborers for large scale construction projects such as railroads, roadways, and in... View Details
Keywords: Immigration Acts; Immigration; Labor; Jobs and Positions; Race; Social Issues; Laws and Statutes
- 2022
- Article
Alleviating Time Poverty Among the Working Poor: A Pre-Registered Longitudinal Field Experiment
By: A.V. Whillans and Colin West
Poverty entails more than a scarcity of material resources—it also involves a shortage of time. To examine the causal benefits of reducing time poverty, we conducted a longitudinal feld experiment over six consecutive weeks in an urban slum in Kenya with a sample of... View Details
Keywords: Time; Subjective Well Being; Administrative Costs; Friction; Poverty; Well-being; Money; Perception; Kenya
- January–February 2022
- Article
Operational Disruptions, Firm Risk, and Control Systems
By: William Schmidt and Ananth Raman
Operational disruptions can impact a firm's risk, which manifests in a host of operational issues, including a higher holding cost for inventory, a higher financing cost for capacity expansion, and a higher perception of the firm's risk among its supply chain partners.... View Details
- Article
A Prescriptive Analytics Framework for Optimal Policy Deployment Using Heterogeneous Treatment Effects
By: Edward McFowland III, Sandeep Gangarapu, Ravi Bapna and Tianshu Sun
We define a prescriptive analytics framework that addresses the needs of a constrained decision-maker facing, ex ante, unknown costs and benefits of multiple policy levers. The framework is general in nature and can be deployed in any utility maximizing context, public... View Details
- November 2021
- Article
Panel Experiments and Dynamic Causal Effects: A Finite Population Perspective
By: Iavor Bojinov, Ashesh Rambachan and Neil Shephard
In panel experiments, we randomly assign units to different interventions, measuring their outcomes, and repeating the procedure in several periods. Using the potential outcomes framework, we define finite population dynamic causal effects that capture the relative... View Details
- Article
Using Fresh Starts to Nudge Increased Retirement Savings
By: John Beshears, Hengchen Dai, Katherine L. Milkman and Shlomo Benartzi
We conducted a field experiment to study the effect of framing future moments in time as new beginnings (or “fresh starts”). University employees (N=6,082) received mailings with an opportunity to choose between increasing their contributions to a savings plan... View Details
- October 2021
- Article
Changing Gambling Behavior through Experiential Learning
By: Shawn A. Cole, Martin Abel and Bilal Zia
This paper tests experiential learning as a debiasing tool to reduce gambling in South Africa, through a randomized field experiment. The study implements a simple, interactive game that simulates the odds of winning the national lottery through dice rolling.... View Details
- Article
Measuring the Scientific Effectiveness of Contact Tracing: Evidence from a Natural Experiment
By: Thiemo Fetzer and Thomas Graeber
Contact tracing has for decades been a cornerstone of the public health approach to epidemics, including Ebola, severe acute respiratory syndrome, and now COVID-19. It has not yet been possible, however, to causally assess the method’s effectiveness using a randomized... View Details
- August 2021
- Case
Livongo: Scaling a Purpose-Driven Organization in Healthcare
By: Ranjay Gulati, Aseem Shukla and Reva Nohria
When seasoned entrepreneur Glen Tullman founded the chronic health care startup Livongo in 2014, it was personal. His son lived with diabetes, and Tullman knew firsthand how taxing it could be to manage such an unrelenting disease. Livongo set out to empower people... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Should Human Capital Development Programs Be Voluntary or Mandatory? Evidence from a Field Experiment
By: Jason Sandvik, Richard Saouma, Nathan Seegert and Christopher Stanton
In a field experiment, we find large differences in productivity treatment effects between voluntary and mandatory workplace mentorship programs. A significant portion of this difference is due to the best employees opting into the program when it is voluntary and... View Details
- July 2021
- Article
Do Interactions with Candidates Increase Voter Support and Participation? Experimental Evidence from Italy
By: Enrico Cantoni and Vincent Pons
We test whether politicians can use direct contact to reconnect with citizens, increase turnout, and win votes. During the 2014 Italian municipal elections, we randomly assigned 26,000 voters to receive visits from city council candidates, from canvassers supporting... View Details
- July 2021
- Article
Invisible Inequality Leads to Punishing the Poor and Rewarding the Rich
By: Oliver P. Hauser, Gordon T. Kraft-Todd, David Rand, Martin A. Nowak and Michael I. Norton
Four experiments examine how the lack of awareness of inequality affects behaviour towards the rich and poor. In Experiment 1, participants who became aware that wealthy individuals donated a smaller percentage of their income switched from rewarding the wealthy to... View Details
Keywords: Income Transparency; Income; Wealth; Equality and Inequality; Knowledge; Behavior; Outcome or Result; Society; Policy