Publications

2014
Working Paper

The Contract Year Phenomenon in the Corner Office: An Analysis of Firm Behavior During CEO Contract Renewals

By: Ping Liu and Yuhai Xuan

This paper investigates how executive employment contracts influence corporate financial policies during the final year of the contract term, using a new, hand-collected data set of CEO employment agreements. On the one hand, the impending expiration of fixed-term... View Details

Keywords: Management Style; Contracts; Behavior; Employment

July 2019 (Revised November 2022)
Case

Backstage at Boston Ballet

By: David G. Fubini, Ryan Raffaelli, Begum Agca Okutgen and Julia Kelley

This case asks students to consider how to prioritize goals when placed in a new leadership role. In August 2014, Meredith “Max” Hodges became the youngest Executive Director (ED) in the Boston Ballet’s 51-year history. In her first year, she was able to claim several... View Details

24 Aug 2016
Research & Ideas

Behavioral Economists Can Make You a Healthier Consumer and Smarter Marketer

behavioral science, specifically, behavioral economics, tries to understand consumers as they actually behave and promote changes in their decision making around those biases.... View Details

Keywords: by Amelia Kunhardt

01 Feb 2010
Research & Ideas

The ‘Luxury Prime’: How Luxury Changes People

Y.J. Chua and Xi Zou, an assistant professor at London Business School, suggest that luxury goods have an important effect on human behavior that is only now becoming clear—and that may have implications for addressing the continuation of... View Details

Keywords: by Sarah Jane Gilbert

18 Feb 2011
Working Paper Summaries

A Behavioral Model of Demandable Deposits and Its Implications for Financial Regulation

Keywords: by Julio J. Rotemberg; Financial Services

June 2014
Article

Frictions in Shadow Banking: Evidence from the Lending Behavior of Money Market Funds

By: Sergey Chernenko and Adi Sunderam

We document the consequences of money market fund risk taking during the European sovereign debt crisis. Using a novel data set of security-level holdings of prime money market funds, we show that funds with large exposures to risky Eurozone banks suffered significant... View Details

Keywords: Money Market Mutual Funds; European Sovereign Debt Crisis; Runs; Contagion; Risk Taking; Investment Funds; Financial Crisis; Europe

26 Mar 2024
Research & Ideas

How Humans Outshine AI in Adapting to Change

flexibly navigate changing environments yet because it does not have a notion of its “self” and what it can do with it. This shortcoming raises questions about whether it’s safe to rely on AI in certain circumstances, such as an... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne; Technology; Information Technology

September 2016 (Revised May 2018)
Case

Zurich Insurance: Fostering People Management Practices

By: Boris Groysberg and Katherine Connolly

Zurich Insurance was undergoing organizational change after implementing five new people practices focused on manager development, diversity and inclusion, job model and data analytics, recruitment, and talent pipeline. The case provides background for the company, as... View Details

Keywords: Managing Change; Organizational Behavior; Diversity Management; Organizational Architecture; Recruiting; Succession Planning; Management; Organizational Culture; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Leading Change; Human Capital; Human Resources; Insurance; Leadership; Diversity; Organizational Structure; Recruitment; Management Succession; Insurance Industry

2023
Working Paper

Change We Can’t Believe In: Distrust of Political Converts

By: Julian J. Zlatev, Amos Schurr and Nir Halevy

We propose and test three hypotheses regarding how people respond to political converts— individuals who switch their voting from one political party to another. Across two experiments, using behavioral and attitudinal measures of trust in two different countries, we... View Details

Keywords: Political Elections; Behavior; Attitudes; Trust

June 2018
Teaching Note

Zurich Insurance

By: Boris Groysberg, David Lane and Joni Coughlin

This teaching note addresses six cases in the Zurich Insurance series, the overview case (HBS No. 417-035) and five cases focused on particular change efforts (HBS Nos. 417-036 through 417-040).
Zurich Insurance was undergoing organizational change after... View Details

March – April 2008
Article

Customer Preference Discontinuities: A Trigger for Radical Technological Change

By: Mary Tripsas

What factors cause a mature industry to re-enter a period of technological turbulence? This paper addresses this question by developing a model of technological evolution that incorporates both technological trajectories and a new concept: preference trajectories, ... View Details

Keywords: History; Technology; Transition; Consumer Behavior; Industry Structures; Product Development

1999
Chapter

Learning, Trust and Organizational Change: Contrasting Models of Intervention Research in Organizational Behavior

By: A. Edmondson and B. Moingeon

Keywords: Organizational Change and Adaptation; Trust

February 2024
Case

Levels.fyi: How Negotiations Coaching and Pay Transparency Change Job Market Outcomes

By: Zoë B. Cullen

Salary information is everywhere. What impact does it have on compensation? How should employees and employers use salary information in negotiations? This case brings to light how pay information affects behavior and job market outcomes in surprising ways. View Details

Keywords: Knowledge Use and Leverage; Compensation and Benefits; Negotiation

Research Summary

Overview

Observing how globalization and technological innovation are transforming economies, Professor Steinwender is motivated by understanding what drives these factors. She uses the careful empirical identification of causal effects—and often the lens of history—to examine... View Details

Keywords: Economic History; Productivity; Innovation; Information Technology; Telegraph; Technological Change; Firm Behavior

2011
Book

Flying Without a Net: Turn Fear of Change into Fuel for Success

By: Thomas J. DeLong

Confronted by omnipresent threats of job loss and change, even the brightest among us are anxious. In response, we're hunkering down, blocking ourselves from new challenges. This response hurts us and our organizations, but we fear making ourselves even more vulnerable... View Details

Keywords: Leadership Style; Personal Development and Career; Problems and Challenges; Attitudes; Behavior

2021
Working Paper

Changing Ingroup Boundaries: The Effect of Immigration on Race Relations in the U.S.

By: Vasiliki Fouka and Marco Tabellini

How do social group boundaries evolve? Does the appearance of a new outgroup change the ingroup's perceptions of other outgroups? We introduce a conceptual framework of context-dependent categorization, in which exposure to one minority leads to recategorization of... View Details

Keywords: In-group-out-group Relations; Immigration; Race; Attitudes; Boundaries; Prejudice and Bias

SSRN

July 2020
Case

Kathy Fish at Procter & Gamble: Navigating Industry Disruption by Disrupting from Within

By: Emily Truelove, Linda A. Hill and Emily Tedards

When Kathy Fish, Procter & Gamble’s Chief Research, Development & Innovation Officer, and a 40-year company veteran, stepped into her role in 2014, she was concerned that the world’s leading consumer packaged goods company had lost its capability to produce a steady... View Details

Keywords: Female Protagonist; Organizational Change; Organizational Behavior; Culture Change; Digital; Innovation; Lean Startup; Experimentation; Metrics; Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG); Leadership; Leading Change; Change Management; Organizational Culture; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Disruption; Innovation and Invention; Digital Transformation

Article

Consumers' Misunderstanding of Health Insurance

By: George Loewenstein, Joelle Y. Friedman, Barbara McGill, Sarah Ahmad, Suzanne Linck, Stacey Sinkula, John Beshears, James J. Choi, Jonathan Kolstad, David Laibson, Brigitte C. Madrian, John A. List and Kevin G. Volpp

We report results from two surveys of representative samples of Americans with private health insurance. The first examines how well Americans understand, and believe they understand, traditional health insurance coverage. The second examines whether those insured... View Details

Keywords: Behavioral Economics; Simplification; Insurance; Consumer Behavior; Health Care and Treatment; Cognition and Thinking; Insurance Industry; Health Industry; United States