Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(118,347)
- Faculty Publications (2,221)
- 2024
- Working Paper
Employer-Based Short-Term Savings Accounts
By: Sarah Holmes Berk, John Beshears, Jay Garg, James J. Choi and David Laibson
We study the introduction of a choice architecture design intended to increase short-term savings among employees at five U.K. firms. Employees were offered the opportunity to opt into a payroll deduction program that auto-deposits funds from each paycheck into a... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Lost in Transmission
By: Thomas Graeber, Shakked Noy and Christopher Roth
For many decisions, people rely on information received from others by word of mouth. How does the process of verbal transmission distort economic information? In our experiments, participants listen to audio recordings containing economic forecasts and are paid to... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Complexity and Hyperbolic Discounting
By: Benjamin Enke, Thomas Graeber and Ryan Oprea
A large literature shows that people discount financial rewards hyperbolically instead of exponentially. While discounting of money has been questioned as a measure of time preferences, it continues to be highly relevant in empirical practice and predicts a wide range... View Details
- November 2023
- Article
Knowledge About the Source of Emotion Predicts Emotion-Regulation Attempts, Strategies, and Perceived Emotion-Regulation Success
By: Yael Millgram, Matthew K. Nock, David D. Bailey and Amit Goldenberg
People’s ability to regulate emotions is crucial to healthy emotional functioning. One overlooked aspect in emotion-regulation research is that knowledge about the source of emotions can vary across situations and individuals, which could impact people’s ability to... View Details
- 2023
- Chapter
Malleability Interventions in Intergroup Relations
By: Smadar Cohen-Chen, Amit Goldenberg, James J. Gross and Eran Halperin
One important characteristic of intergroup relations and conflicts is the fact that toxic or violent intergroup relations are often associated with fixed and stable perceptions of various entities, including the ingroup (stable and positive), the outgroup (stable and... View Details
- December 2023
- Article
Save More Today or Tomorrow: The Role of Urgency in Precommitment Design
By: Joseph Reiff, Hengchen Dai, John Beshears, Katherine L. Milkman and Shlomo Benartzi
To encourage farsighted behaviors, past research suggests that marketers may be wise to invite consumers to pre-commit to adopt them “later.” However, the authors propose that people will draw different inferences from different types of pre-commitment offers, and that... View Details
- November 2023
- Teaching Note
Inclusion and Diversity at Mars Petcare
By: Katherine Coffman, Jillian J. Jordan and Emma Ronzetti
Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 923-005. View Details
- October 2023
- Case
Making Progress at Progress Software (A)
By: Katherine Coffman, Hannah Riley Bowles and Alexis Lefort
In this case, the Human Capital team at Progress Software has identified that some employees have a hard time understanding how to advance within Progress. This realization leads the team to develop several major people-process innovations: the introduction of... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
The Buy-In Effect: When Increasing Initial Effort Motivates Behavioral Follow-Through
By: Holly Dykstra, Shibeal O'Flaherty and A.V. Whillans
Behavioral interventions often focus on reducing friction to encourage behavior change. In
contrast, we provide evidence that adding friction can promote long-term behavior change when
behaviors involve repeated costly efforts over longer time horizons. In... View Details
- October 2023
- Supplement
Making Progress at Progress Software (B)
By: Katherine Coffman, Hannah Riley Bowles and Alexis Lefort
In this case, the Human Capital team at Progress Software has identified that some employees have a hard time understanding how to advance within Progress. This realization leads the team to develop several major people-process innovations: the introduction of... View Details
- October 2023 (Revised April 2024)
- Case
ghSMART & Co: Building and Scaling a Time Smart Firm
By: Ashley Whillans and Sara Coronel Rodriguez
"For ghSMART, freedom is the first principle from which all good things flow”—Geoff Smart, Chairman and Founder, ghSMART. ghSMART was a leadership advisory firm that was grounded in the principle of freedom. Talented Consultants and Partners could work remotely from... View Details
- October–December 2023
- Article
A Practical Guide to Conversation Research: How to Study What People Say to Each Other
By: Michael Yeomans, Katelynn Boland, Hanne K. Collins, Nicole Abi-Esber and Alison Wood Brooks
Conversation—a verbal interaction between two or more people—is a complex, pervasive, and consequential human behavior. Conversations have been studied across many academic disciplines. However, advances in recording and analysis techniques over the last decade have... View Details
- October 2023
- Article
Speedy Activists: Firm Response Time to Sociopolitical Events Influences Consumer Behavior
By: Jimin Nam, Maya Balakrishnan, Julian De Freitas and Alison Wood Brooks
Organizations face growing pressure from their consumers and stakeholders to take public stances on sociopolitical issues. However, many are hesitant to do so lest they make missteps, promises they cannot keep, appear inauthentic, or alienate consumers, employees, or... View Details
- September 2023
- Exercise
Irrationality in Action: Decision-Making Exercise
By: Alison Wood Brooks, Michael I. Norton and Oliver Hauser
This teaching exercise highlights the obstacle of biases in decision-making, allowing students to generate examples of potentially poor decision-making rooted in abundant and unwanted bias. This exercise has two parts: a pre-class, online survey in which students... View Details
- September 2023
- Case
Healthy.io: The Negotiation for the Medical Selfie
By: Amit Goldenberg and Kumba Sennaar
Healthy.io, an Israeli digital health company, prepares to enter the U.S. market with its chronic kidney disease test. A product safety approval is delayed, putting the company’s cash runway at risk. How should the CEO negotiate his offer to insurance companies ahead... View Details
- September 2023
- Article
A Pull versus Push Framework for Reputation
Reputation is a powerful driver of human behavior. Reputation systems incentivize 'actors' to take reputation-enhancing actions, and 'evaluators' to reward actors with positive reputations by preferentially cooperating with them. This article proposes a reputation... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Channeled Attention and Stable Errors
By: Tristan Gagnon-Bartsch, Matthew Rabin and Joshua Schwartzstein
We develop a framework for assessing when somebody will eventually notice that she has
a misspecified model of the world, premised on the idea that she neglects information that
she deems—through the lens of her misconceptions—to be irrelevant. In doing so, we... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
How People Use Statistics
By: Pedro Bordalo, John J. Conlon, Nicola Gennaioli, Spencer Yongwook Kwon and Andrei Shleifer
We document two new facts about the distributions of answers in famous statistical problems: they are i) multi-modal and ii) unstable with respect to irrelevant changes in the problem. We offer a model in which, when solving a problem, people represent each hypothesis... View Details
- July 2023
- Article
Negative Expressions Are Shared More on Twitter for Public Figures Than for Ordinary Users
By: Jonas P. Schöne, David Garcia, Brian Parkinson and Amit Goldenberg
Social media users tend to produce content that contains more positive than negative emotional language. However, negative emotional language is more likely to be shared. To understand why, research has thus far focused on psychological processes associated with... View Details
- July 11, 2023
- Article
How Reputation Does (and Does Not) Drive People to Punish Without Looking
By: Jillian J. Jordan and Nour S. Kteily
Punishing wrongdoers can confer reputational benefits, and people sometimes punish without careful consideration. But are these observations related? Does reputation drive people to people to “punish without looking”? And if so, is this because unquestioning... View Details