Publications

December 2021
Case

The Instant Payment Mandate: The Central Bank of Brazil and Pix

By: Lauren Cohen and Spencer C. N. Hagist

João M. P. De Mello and his team at the Central Bank of Brazil are preparing a move that would seek to tilt the scales in favor of financial inclusion for the entire country. The innovation at hand is the unprecedented nation-wide instant payment scheme: Pix. The fruit... View Details

Keywords: Fintech; Finance; Entrepreneurship; Innovation Strategy; Banking Industry; Brazil

August 2006 (Revised February 2009)
Case

Medco Energi Internasional

In late 2004, Hilmi Panigoro, CEO of the publicly traded Indonesian oil company Medco Energi Internasional, is striving to regain majority control of the company his brother Arifin founded in 1980. The Asian financial crisis of 1999 led to a major restructuring that... View Details

Keywords: Leveraged Buyouts; Family Business; Restructuring; Financing and Loans; Ownership Stake; Business and Shareholder Relations; Indonesia; Singapore

16 Apr 2013
Working Paper Summaries

The Auditing Oligopoly and Lobbying on Accounting Standards

Keywords: by Abigail M. Allen, Karthik Ramanna & Sugata Roychowdhury; Accounting; Banking

23 Apr 2012
Research & Ideas

How to Brand a Next-Generation Product

preferred name. But when the list included several new features, 65.7 percent chose the name StreetPilot. While these experiments focused on high-tech equipment, the professors note that the findings hold true across many industries.... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

30 Jun 2015
First Look

First Look: June 30, 2015

2000s, a period during which Treasury bonds enabled investors to hedge macroeconomic risks. This paper develops a New Keynesian macroeconomic model with habit formation preferences that prices both bonds and stocks. The model attributes... View Details

Keywords: Carmen Nobel

July 2024
Article

Acceptance of Automated Vehicles Is Lower for Self than Others

By: Stuti Agarwal, Julian De Freitas, Anya Ragnhildstveit and Carey K. Morewedge

Road traffic accidents are the leading cause of death worldwide for people aged 2–59. Nearly all deaths are due to human error. Automated vehicles could reduce mortality risks, traffic congestion, and air pollution of human-driven vehicles. However, their adoption... View Details

Keywords: Transportation; Risk and Uncertainty; Technology Adoption; Prejudice and Bias

22 Mar 2016
First Look

March 22, 2016

in 2012. However, doing business in emerging markets remains subject to a high degree of "policy risk," namely the risk that a government will discriminatorily change the laws, regulations, or contracts governing an... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

June 2021
Case

Acelero Learning

By: Mario Small, Kathleen L. McGinn, Amy Klopfenstein and Katherine Chen

In November 2020, Henry Wilde, co-founder and CEO of Acelero, Inc., must decide whether to change his company’s program model for delivering early childhood education to low-income children. One of the only for-profit Head Start providers in the United States, Acelero... View Details

Keywords: Early Childhood Education; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Growth and Development Strategy; Adoption; Customer Focus and Relationships; Operations; Education Industry; North and Central America; United States

July 2008
Article

Fairness in Extended Dictator-Game Experiments

By: Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Reiner Eichenberger

We test the robustness of behavior in dictator games by offering allocators the choice to play an unattractive lottery. With this lottery option, mean transfers from allocators to recipients substantially decline, partly because many allocators now keep the entire... View Details

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Fairness; Game Theory; Risk and Uncertainty; Behavior

29 Sep 2009
First Look

First Look: September 29

older investors prefer dividend-paying stocks. Together, these tendencies generate geographically varying demand for dividends. Firms headquartered in areas in which seniors constitute a large fraction of the population are more likely to... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

2008
Working Paper

Variance-Seeking for Positive (and Variance-Aversion for Negative) Experiences: Risk-Seeking in the Domain of Gains?

By: Jolie Mae Martin, Gregory M. Barron and Michael I. Norton

In contrast to research which has conflated losses with negative experiences and gains with positive experiences, we argue that because reference points are set by memories of extremely good and bad experiences, most outcomes are seen as losses in positive domains and... View Details

Keywords: Change; Experience and Expertise; Marketing; Research; Risk and Uncertainty; Loss; Perspective

14 May 2014
Working Paper Summaries

Morality Rebooted: Exploring Simple Fixes to Our Moral Bugs

Keywords: by Ting Zhang, Francesca Gino & Max H. Bazerman

June 2024
Article

Valuing the Societal Impact of Medicines and Other Health Technologies: A User Guide to Current Best Practices

By: Jason Shafrin, Jaehong Kim, Joshua T. Cohen, Louis P. Garrison, Dana A. Goldman, Jalpa A. Doshi, Joshua Krieger, Darius N. Lakdawalla, Peter J. Neumann, Charles E. Phelps, Melanie D. Whittington and Richard Willke

This study argues that value assessment conducted from a societal perspective should rely on the Generalized Cost-Effectiveness Analysis (GCEA) framework proposed herein. Recently developed value assessment inventories—such as the Second Panel on Cost-Effectiveness’s... View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Valuation; Cost vs Benefits; Society

Read Now

July 2003
Article

Probabilistic Representation of Complexity

By: Nabil I Al-Najjar, Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Emre Ozdenoren

We study individuals' behavior in an environment that is deterministic, but too complex to permit tractable deterministic representation. Under mild conditions, behavior is represented by a unique probabilistic model in which the agent's inability to think through all... View Details

Keywords: Complexity; Behavior; Problems and Challenges; Risk and Uncertainty; Planning

May 2000
Article

Maxmin Expected Utility over Savage Acts with a Set of Priors

By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell, Peter Klibanoff and Emre Ozdenoren

This paper provides an axiomatic foundation for a maxmin expected utility over a set of priors (MMEU) decision rule in an environment where the elements of choice are Savage acts. This characterization complements the original axiomatizations of MMEU developed in a... View Details

Keywords: Uncertainty Aversion; Ambiguity; Expected Utility; Set Of Priors; Knightian Uncertainty; Decision Making; Game Theory; Risk and Uncertainty; Mathematical Methods

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March 2008
Article

Functional Imaging of Decision Conflict

By: J. B. Pochon, Jason Riis, A. Sanfey, L. Nystrom and J. D. Cohen

Decision conflict occurs when people feel uncertain as to which option to choose from a set of similarly attractive (or unattractive) options, with many studies demonstrating that this conflict can lead to suboptimal decision making. In this article, we investigate the... View Details

Keywords: Decisions; Judgments; Risk and Uncertainty; Science; Conflict and Resolution; Perception

October 2020 (Revised March 2024)
Case

Experimentation at Yelp

By: Iavor Bojinov and Karim R. Lakhani

Over the last decade, experimentation has become integral to the research and development processes of technology companies—including Yelp—for understanding customer preferences and mitigating innovation risks. The case describes Yelp's journey with experimentation,... View Details

Keywords: Customer Relationship Management; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Risk Management; Advertising; Research and Development; Technology Industry

February 2013 (Revised February 2014)
Case

Phu My Hung

By: John Macomber and Dawn H. Lau

Privately held city development promoters decide whether to partner on next phase or go it alone in a 20-year, 4000-acre project. Set outside of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, this decades-long project led by two Taiwanese families reshaped and built the economic... View Details

Keywords: Urban Development; Infrastructure; Real Estate Industry; Viet Nam