Publications

25 May 2011
HBS Case

QuikTrip’s Investment in Retail Employees Pays Off

to begin to address the income inequality gap and offer some measure of stability to employees who don't always enjoy that quality in their work lives." View Details

Keywords: by Julia Hanna; Retail

February 2009
Article

Just Because I'm Nice, Don't Assume I'm Dumb

By: Amy Cuddy

We often judge colleagues on the basis of their perceived warmth and competence, finding clues to these qualities in stereotypes rooted in race, gender, or nationality. Many of our decisions about fellow workers are thus premised on faulty data—harming judged and... View Details

Keywords: Prejudice and Bias; Perception; Nationality; Race; Judgments; Competency and Skills; Gender

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19 Jan 2015
Research & Ideas

Is Wikipedia More Biased Than Encyclopædia Britannica?

For more than a century, the long, stately rows of Encyclopædia Britannica have been a fixture on the shelves of many an educated person's home—the smooshed-together diphthong in the first word a symbol... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Publishing

02 Apr 2001
Research & Ideas

Not All M&As Are Alike—and That Matters

We know surprisingly little about mergers and acquisitions, despite the buckets of ink spilled on the topic. In fact, our collective wisdom could be summed up in a few short sentences: Acquirers usually pay too much. Friendly deals done... View Details

Keywords: by Joseph L. Bower

10 Dec 2014
Research & Ideas

Minimum Wage Debate Is Really About Social Values

tackles several large questions underlying the issue. April White: When we talk about a minimum wage increase in the United States, what are we really talking about? Matthew Weinzierl: The US federal minimum wage is not very high—it's much lower in real terms than it... View Details

Keywords: by April White; Retail; Manufacturing

15 Oct 2020
Research & Ideas

IT Job Wages Are No Longer 'Exceptional'

should at least partially explain rising wage inequality in the United States—a widely documented fact—we find evidence to the contrary,” the authors write. The paper, Digital Labor Market Inequality and the... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne; Information Technology

13 Feb 2012
Research & Ideas

The Case Against Racial Colorblindness

government subcontractors—the argument goes—then Whites' right for equal protection may be violated." In a related article, Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing, Norton and Sommers surveyed 100 white and 100 black respondents about their View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

24 May 2021
Op-Ed

Can Fabric Waste Become Fashion’s Resource?

COVID-19 has broken fashion’s supply chain. As a result, an already wasteful industry has become more wasteful. Even before the pandemic, the global apparel industry was producing about 92 million tons of textile waste a year. That’s about one garbage truck’s worth of... View Details

Keywords: by Geoffrey Jones and Shelly Xu; Fashion

April 2021 (Revised December 2022)
Case

Capitalism, Slavery, and Reparations

By: Sophus A. Reinert and Cary Williams

The birth of “Modern Economic Growth” constituted a watershed in human history, allowing societies to escape the Malthusian impasse and permanently raise living standards. While the new growth regime had lifted billions of people out of extreme poverty over the last... View Details

Keywords: Reparations; Living Standards; Poverty; Social Issues; Economic Growth; Equality and Inequality; Globalized Economies and Regions; Human Needs

February 2024
Article

Representation and Extrapolation: Evidence from Clinical Trials

By: Marcella Alsan, Maya Durvasula, Harsh Gupta, Joshua Schwartzstein and Heidi L. Williams

This article examines the consequences and causes of low enrollment of Black patients in clinical trials. We develop a simple model of similarity-based extrapolation that predicts that evidence is more relevant for decision-making by physicians and patients when it... View Details

Keywords: Representation; Racial Disparity; Health Testing and Trials; Race; Equality and Inequality; Innovation and Invention; Pharmaceutical Industry

20 Sep 2022
Research & Ideas

How Partisan Politics Play Out in American Boardrooms

result. The findings by Harvard Business School Associate Professor Elisabeth Kempf come at a time of heightened political discord and polarization among Americans. The research sheds new light on how the same dynamics are unfolding in... View Details

Keywords: by Pamela Reynolds

05 Apr 2004
Research & Ideas

Six Ways to Build Trust in Negotiations

speak for themselves. When you've made a significant concession, be sure to communicate exactly how much you've given away and what the sacrifice means to you. By doing so, you'll not only affect the other party's perceptions View Details

Keywords: by Deepak Malhotra

January 2024
Article

A Cost Model for a Low Threshold Clinic Treating Opioid Use Disorder

By: Sarah E. Wakeman, Elizabeth Powell, Syed Shehab, Grace Herman, Laura Kehoe and Robert S. Kaplan

The US fee-for-service payment system under-reimburses clinics offering access to comprehensive treatments for opioid use disorder (OUD). The funding shortfall limits a clinic’s ability to expand and improve access, especially for socially marginalized patients with... View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Cost; Equality and Inequality; Health Industry

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May 2022 (Revised June 2024)
Case

LOOP: Driving Change in Auto Insurance Pricing

By: Elie Ofek and Alicia Dadlani

John Henry and Carey Anne Nadeau, co-founders and co-CEOs of LOOP, an insurtech startup based in Austin, Texas, were on a mission to modernize the archaic $250 billion automobile insurance market. They sought to create equitably priced insurance by eliminating pricing... View Details

Keywords: AI and Machine Learning; Technological Innovation; Equality and Inequality; Prejudice and Bias; Growth and Development Strategy; Customer Relationship Management; Price; Insurance Industry; Financial Services Industry

February 2021
Background Note

Jobs to Be Done: A Toolbox

By: Derek C. M. van Bever, Bob Moesta, Iuliana Mogosanu, Shaye Roseman and Katie Zandbergen

The Jobs to Be Done methodology is both a theory and a practical approach for understanding customer behavior and why people make the choices they make. Many practitioners, whether they work for startups or incumbent businesses, find Jobs to Be Done useful because it... View Details

Keywords: Customer Value and Value Chain; Decision Choices and Conditions; Knowledge Acquisition; Attitudes; Perception; Theory; Behavior; Customer Relationship Management

13 Jan 2020
Research & Ideas

Do Private Equity Buyouts Get a Bad Rap?

benefit society: asset stripping, short-term profit at the expense of workers, and long-term stability. “There are certainly a lot of concerns around whether these kind of... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Financial Services; Banking

25 May 2021
Research & Ideas

White Airbnb Hosts Earn More. Can AI Shrink the Racial Gap?

fluctuations. Zhang and her coauthors were curious whether the algorithm might help reduce racial inequalities by optimizing nightly rates for both white and Black hosts, so everyone could benefit financially. Narrowing Airbnb’s racial... View Details

Keywords: by Lane Lambert; Technology; Accommodations

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