Publications

November 2015 (Revised May 2016)
Case

Aspiring Minds

By: Karim R. Lakhani, Marco Iansiti and Christine Snively

By 2015, India-based employment assessment and certification provider Aspiring Minds had helped facilitate over 300,000 job matches through its assessment tools. Aspiring Minds' flagship product, the Aspiring Minds Computer Adaptive Test (AMCAT), used machine learning... View Details

Keywords: Information Technology; Strategy; Higher Education; Technological Innovation; Employment; Technology Industry; India; China

May 2018
Article

Incentives for Prosocial Behavior: The Role of Reputations

By: Christine L. Exley

Do monetary incentives encourage volunteering? Or, do they introduce concerns about appearing greedy and crowd out the motivation to volunteer? Since the importance of such image concerns is normally unobserved, the answer is theoretically unclear, and corresponding... View Details

Keywords: Incentives; Image Motivation; Volunteer; Prosocial Behavior; Altruism; Gender; Reputations; Motivation and Incentives; Behavior; Perception; Reputation

November 2018 (Revised August 2020)
Case

The Reinvention of Kodak

By: Ryan Raffaelli and Christine Snively

The Eastman Kodak Company (Kodak) was a name familiar to most Americans. The company had dominated the film and photography industry through most of the 20th Century and was known for making affordable cameras (and the “Kodak Moment”) and supplying the movie industry... View Details

Keywords: CEO; Leadership; Asset Management; Transformation; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Competitive Strategy

2022
Working Paper

The Gender Gap in Confidence: Expected But Not Accounted For

By: Christine L. Exley and Kirby Nielsen

We investigate how the gender gap in confidence affects the views that evaluators (e.g., employers) hold about men and women. If evaluators fail to account for the confidence gap, it may cause overly pessimistic views about women. Alternatively, if evaluators expect... View Details

Keywords: Confidence; Experiments; Gender; Perception; Values and Beliefs; Performance Evaluation; Analysis

Article

Excusing Selfishness in Charitable Giving: The Role of Risk

By: Christine L. Exley

Decisions involving charitable giving often occur under the shadow of risk. A common finding is that potential donors give less when there is greater risk that their donation will have less impact. While this behavior could be fully rationalized by standard economic... View Details

Keywords: Charitable Giving; Prosocial Behavior; Altruism; Risk Preferences; Risk and Uncertainty; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; Behavior

June 2021
Article

The Role of Beliefs in Driving Gender Discrimination

By: Katherine B. Coffman, Christine L. Exley and Muriel Niederle

While there is ample evidence of discrimination against women in the workplace, it can be difficult to understand what factors contribute to discriminatory behavior. We use an experiment to both document discrimination and unpack its sources. First, we show that, on... View Details

Keywords: Gender Discrimination; Behavioral Decision Making; Gender; Attitudes; Prejudice and Bias; Economics; Behavior; Decision Making

18 Sep 2018
First Look

New Research and Ideas, September 18, 2018

in designing and assessing policy. Download working paper: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=54968 Large-Scale Demand Estimation with Search Data By: Amano, Tomomichi, Andrew Rhodes, and Stephan Seiler Abstract—Many online markets are characterized View Details

Keywords: Dina Gerdeman

December 2016 (Revised December 2017)
Case

Faber-Castell

By: Ryan Raffaelli and Christine Snively

By 2016, Count Anton-Wolfgang von Faber-Castell had led the 255-year-old pencil manufacturer Faber-Castell through waves of technological change. The pocket calculator decimated Faber-Castell’s slide rule business in the 1970s, and computer aided design technology... View Details

Keywords: Leadership Style; Leading Change; Family Ownership; Manufacturing Industry; Germany

January 2015
Case

Chevron Under Fire

By: George Serafeim, Rebecca Henderson and Christine Snively

Oil giant, Chevron, faced numerous challenges on environmental, social and governance (ESG) grounds in the first decade of the 21st century, including some major lawsuits and actions by NGOs. The case describes those challenges and raises questions about what is the... View Details

Keywords: Carbon Tax; Oil And Gas; Environment; Drilling; Governance; Business or Company Management; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Corporate Strategy; Environmental Sustainability; Energy Sources; Mining Industry; Energy Industry

June 2016
Teaching Note

The Cheese and the Oligarchs: The Politics, the Media, and Israel's Dream of a Start-Up Nation

By: Rafael Di Tella and Christine Snively

Israel enjoyed the highest concentration of technology start-ups in the world per capita. Despite regional instability, the country maintained strong economic growth and was considered a high-tech powerhouse. But not all Israelis benefited. Between the 1980s and 2010s,... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Information Technology; Business Conglomerates; Business Startups; Israel

17 Oct 2017
First Look

First Look at New Research and Ideas, October 17, 2017

Hybrids and Hybrid Organizing: A Review and Roadmap for Future Research By: Battilana, Julie, Marya Besharov, and Bjoern Mitzinneck Abstract—The purpose of this chapter is to advance research on hybrids by bringing together work from... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

October 2017 (Revised November 2017)
Case

NYC311

By: Constantine E. Kontokosta, Mitchell Weiss, Christine Snively and Sarah Gulick

Joe Morrisroe, executive director for NYC311, had some gut instincts but no definitive answer to the question he was just asked by one of the mayor’s deputies: “Are some communities being underserved by 311? How do we know we are hearing from the right people?” Founded... View Details

March 2018
Technical Note

Internet Data Capping Note (B)

By: Shane Greenstein and Christine Snively

The B note brings the reader up through early 2017 and addresses an informal review carried out by the Wireless Telecommunications Bureau (WTB) on sponsored data and zero-rating data plans in the mobile broadband market. View Details

Keywords: Telecommunications; Information Technology; Internet and the Web

Article

Multivoxel Patterns in Face-sensitive Temporal Regions Reveal an Encoding Schema Based on Detecting Life in a Face

By: Christine E. Looser, J. Swaroop Guntupalli and Thalia Wheatley

More than a decade of research has demonstrated that faces evoke prioritized processing in a 'core face network' of three brain regions. However, whether these regions prioritize the detection of global facial form (shared by humans and mannequins) or the detection of... View Details

Keywords: Brain Imaging; Social Psychology; Mind Perception; Identity; Science; Cognition and Thinking

29 May 2018
First Look

New Research and Ideas, May 29, 2018

policies, non-CEO executives’ behavior, and tail risk vary with CEO materialism. We document that the proportion of banks run by materialistic CEOs increased significantly from 1994 to 2004, that the strength of risk management functions... View Details

Keywords: Dina Gerdeman

2015
Working Paper

Understanding Conformity: An Experimental Investigation

By: B. Douglas Bernheim and Christine L Exley

Some theories of conformity hold that social equilibrium either standardizes inferences or promotes a shared understanding of conventions and norms among individuals with fixed heterogeneous preferences (belief mechanisms). Others depict tastes as fluid and hence... View Details

Keywords: Conformity; Norms; Image Motivation; Prosocial Behavior; Motivation and Incentives; Behavior; Standards

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