Publications

Spring 2013
Article

Does Mandatory IFRS Adoption Improve the Information Environment?

By: Joanne Horton, George Serafeim and Ioanna Serafeim

We examine the effect of mandatory International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) adoption on firms' information environment. We find that after mandatory IFRS adoption, consensus forecast errors decrease for firms that mandatorily adopt IFRS relative to forecast... View Details

Keywords: International Accounting; Financial Reporting; Standards; Information; Quality; Earnings Management

Article

Agency Costs, Mispricing, and Ownership Structure

By: Sergey Chernenko, C. Fritz Foley and Robin Greenwood

Standard theories of corporate ownership assume that because markets are efficient, insiders ultimately bear all agency costs that they create and therefore have a strong incentive to minimize conflicts of interest with outside investors. We argue that if equity is... View Details

Keywords: Business and Shareholder Relations; Ownership; Conflict of Interests; Investment; Valuation

18 Sep 2012
First Look

First Look: September 18

J.C. Cuddy, Caroline A. Wilmuth, and Dana R. Carney Abstract The current experiment tested whether changing one's nonverbal behavior prior to a high-stakes social evaluation could improve performance in the evaluated task. Participants... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

October 2006 (Revised August 2023)
Background Note

Note on Student Outcomes in U.S. Public Education

By: Stacey M. Childress, Stig Leschly and John J-H Kim

Surveys educational outcomes among public school students in the United States. Educational outcomes are categorized as achievement outcomes (measured primarily by students' performance on standardized test results) and attainment outcomes (measured primarily by... View Details

Keywords: Demographics; Education; Outcome or Result; Public Administration Industry; Education Industry; United States

Educators

2018
Working Paper

Is Overconfidence a Motivated Bias? Experimental Evidence

By: Jennifer M. Logg, Uriel Haran and Don A. Moore

Are overconfident beliefs driven by the motivation to view oneself positively? We test the relationship between motivation and overconfidence using two distinct, but often conflated, measures: better-than-average (BTA) beliefs and overplacement. Our results suggest... View Details

Keywords: Self-perception; Overconfidence; Motivation; Better-Than-Average Effect; Specifically; Personal Characteristics; Perception; Motivation and Incentives; Cognition and Thinking

July 2009 (Revised May 2012)
Case

Wareham SC Systems, Inc.

By: David F. Hawkins

CFO tests company's revenue recognition practices against the recently issued SAB 101 requirements and proposes plan for adoption of SAB 101. View Details

Keywords: Revenue Recognition; Standards

Educators

Randomized experiments have become the standard method for companies to evaluate the performance of new products or services. In addition to augmenting managers' decision-making, experimentation mitigates risk by limiting the proportion of customers exposed to... View Details

2021
Working Paper

Quantifying the Value of Iterative Experimentation

By: Iavor I Bojinov and Jialiang Mao

Over the past decade, most technology companies and a growing number of conventional firms have adopted online experimentation (or A/B testing) into their product development process. Initially, A/B testing was deployed as a static procedure in which an experiment was... View Details

Keywords: Product Development; Value Creation; Research

2008
Chapter

The Evidence Does Not Speak for Itself: Expert Witnesses and the Organization of DNA-Typing Companies

By: Arthur A. Daemmrich

During the past 15 years, new biotechnology companies have promoted DNA typing as a sophisticated criminal and paternity identification technique. Private testing laboratories produce results that link individuals with crime scenes and fathers to their children.... View Details

Keywords: Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Courts and Trials; Organizational Structure; Practice; Genetics; Science-Based Business; Trust; Commercialization; Vertical Integration

2023
Working Paper

Design-Based Confidence Sequences: A General Approach to Risk Mitigation in Online Experimentation

By: Dae Woong Ham, Michael Lindon, Martin Tingley and Iavor Bojinov

Randomized experiments have become the standard method for companies to evaluate the performance of new products or services. In addition to augmenting managers’ decision-making, experimentation mitigates risk by limiting the proportion of customers exposed to... View Details

Keywords: Performance Evaluation; Research and Development; Analytics and Data Science; Consumer Behavior

31 Aug 2009
Research & Ideas

Why Competition May Not Improve Credit Rating Agencies

professor of finance at Washington University in St. Louis, tested the potential problem of raters that compete for business favoring the issuers and providing less reliable ratings. Their HBS working paper "Reputation and... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Financial Services

14 Apr 2009
First Look

First Look: April 14, 2009

the standards that people use in making judgments. The authors employed a novel method to test for, and rule out, such scale recalibration in self-reports of well-being. Design: The authors asked patients... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

2021
Working Paper

Cognitive Biases: Mistakes or Missing Stakes?

By: Benjamin Enke, Uri Gneezy, Brian Hall, David Martin, Vadim Nelidov, Theo Offerman and Jeroen van de Ven

Despite decades of research on heuristics and biases, empirical evidence on the effect of large incentives—as present in relevant economic decisions—on cognitive biases is scant. This paper tests the effect of incentives on four widely documented biases: base rate... View Details

Keywords: Cognitive Biases; Incentives; Motivation and Incentives; Decision Making; Performance

2017
Working Paper

Nowcasting the Local Economy: Using Yelp Data to Measure Economic Activity

By: Edward L. Glaeser, Hyunjin Kim and Michael Luca

Can new data sources from online platforms help to measure local economic activity? Government datasets from agencies such as the U.S. Census Bureau provide the standard measures of economic activity at the local level. However, these statistics typically appear only... View Details

Keywords: Economy; Analytics and Data Science; Local Range; Social and Collaborative Networks

2013
Working Paper

Asset Price Dynamics with Limited Attention

By: Mark Seasholes, Terrence Hendershott, Sunny X. Li and Albert J. Menkveld

This paper studies the role that limited attention and inefficient risk sharing play in stock price deviations from the efficient prices at horizons from one day to one month. We expand the Due (2010) slow-moving capital model to analyze multiple groups of investors... View Details

Keywords: Transitory Volatility; Limited Attention; Individuals; Market Makers; Asset Pricing; Financial Markets; Volatility

22 Sep 2011
Working Paper Summaries

Measuring Teamwork in Health Care Settings: A Review of Survey Instruments

Keywords: by Melissa A. Valentine, Ingrid M. Nembhard & Amy C. Edmondson; Health

December 2016
Article

The Effects of Endowment Size and Strategy Method on Third Party Punishment

By: Jillian J. Jordan, Katherine McAuliffe and David G. Rand

Numerous experiments have shown that people often engage in third-party punishment (3PP) of selfish behavior. This evidence has been used to argue that people respond to selfishness with anger, and get utility from punishing those who mistreat others. Elements of the... View Details

Keywords: Third-party Punishment; Norm-enforcement; Strategy Method; Economic Games; Cooperation; Emotions; Fairness