Publications

07 Feb 2005
What Do You Think?

If You Blink, Will You Miss?

individuals' biases often get in the way of good decision making. In part, it's a reflection of what we often term "analysis paralysis" in MBA-speak. A distant cousin to thin slicing in our... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

26 Mar 2025
Blog Post

How to Approach Your Equity Compensation

the company? The 409a is an independent valuation of common shares. But it’s also a critical metric in determining your equity grant price and future tax implications if and when you decide to sell your shares. 2. Plan for Pivotal Job Transitions One of the most... View Details

Article

The Price of Equality: Suboptimal Resource Allocations across Social Categories

By: Stephen M. Garcia, Max Bazerman, Shirli Kopelman, Avishalom Tor and Dale T. Miller

This paper explores the influence of social categories on the perceived trade-off between relatively bad but equal distribution of resources between two parties and profit maximizing, yet asymmetric, payoffs. Studies 1 and 2 show that people prefer to maximize profits... View Details

Keywords: Equality and Inequality; Resource Allocation; Societal Protocols; Profit; Decision Making; Prejudice and Bias; Market Transactions; Ethics; Power and Influence; Distribution; Organizations

Research Summary

Overview

By: Katherine B. Coffman

Professor Coffman studies the sources of gender gaps in economically-important contexts. Her work focuses on the role of beliefs: how do stereotypes bias the beliefs that individuals hold about themselves (and others), and how do these biased beliefs shape... View Details

Keywords: Gender; Stereotypes; Diversity Management; Experiments

2009
Working Paper

Assess, Don't Assume, Part I: Etiquette and National Culture in Negotiation

By: James K. Sebenius

When facing a cross-border negotiation, the standard preparatory assessments -- of the parties, their interests, their no-deal options, opportunities for and barriers to creating and claiming value, the most promising sequence and process design, etc. -- should be... View Details

Keywords: Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues; Negotiation Process; Societal Protocols; Competitive Advantage; Cooperation

April–May 2017
Article

Career Concerns of Banking Analysts

By: Joanne Horton, George Serafeim and Shan Wu

We study how career concerns influence banking analysts' forecasts and how their forecasting behavior benefits both them and bank managers. We show that banking analysts issue early in the year relatively more optimistic and later in the year more pessimistic forecasts... View Details

Keywords: Sell-side Analysts; Analyst Forecasts; Analysts; Investment Recommendations; Career Advancement; Career Management; Labor Mobility; Labor Market; Prejudice and Bias; Personal Development and Career; Forecasting and Prediction; Investment Banking

SSRN

15 Jun 2012
Working Paper Summaries

Reaching for Yield in the Bond Market

Keywords: by Bo Becker & Victoria Ivashina

Article

Your Visual System Provides All the Information You Need to Make Moral Judgments about Generic Visual Events

By: Julian De Freitas and George A. Alvarez

To what extent are people's moral judgments susceptible to subtle factors of which they are unaware? Here we show that we can change people’s moral judgments outside of their awareness by subtly biasing perceived causality. Specifically, we used subtle visual... View Details

Keywords: Moral Judgment; Perceived Causality; Visual Illusions; Moral Sensibility; Judgments

2011
Working Paper

When Smaller Menus Are Better: Variability in Menu-Setting Ability

Are large menus better than small menus? Recent literature argues that individuals' apparent preference for smaller menus can be explained by choosers' behavioral biases or informational limitations. These explanations imply that absent behavioral or informational... View Details

Keywords: Experience and Expertise; Decision Choices and Conditions; Investment; Investment Portfolio; Size; Quality

07 Nov 2023
Research & Ideas

When Glasses Land the Gig: Employers Still Choose Workers Who 'Look the Part'

world, where we don’t usually share our pictures when we apply for a job.” However, employers on such platforms may not be particularly well-served by these hunches, which are often rooted in biases and stereotypes. In fact, having the... View Details

Keywords: by Scott Van Voorhis

2010
Article

The Ethical Mirage: A Temporal Explanation as to Why We Are Not as Ethical as We Think We Are

By: A. E. Tenbrunsel, K. Diekmann, K A. Wade-Benzoni and Max Bazerman

This paper explores the biased perceptions that people hold of their own ethicality. We argue that the temporal trichotomy of prediction, action and recollection is central to these misperceptions: People predict that they will behave more ethically than they actually... View Details

Keywords: Forecasting and Prediction; Values and Beliefs; Framework; Research; Behavior; Cognition and Thinking; Perception; Prejudice and Bias

March 2021
Article

Bayesian Signatures of Confidence and Central Tendency in Perceptual Judgment

By: Yang Xiang, Thomas Graeber, Benjamin Enke and Samuel Gershman

This paper theoretically and empirically investigates the role of Bayesian noisy cognition in perceptual judgment, focusing on the central tendency effect: the well-known empirical regularity that perceptual judgments are biased towards the center of the... View Details

Keywords: Visual Perception; Bayesian Modeling; Perception; Judgments

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2023
Working Paper

The Limits of Algorithmic Measures of Race in Studies of Outcome Disparities

By: David S. Scharfstein and Sergey Chernenko

We show that the use of algorithms to predict race has significant limitations in measuring and understanding the sources of racial disparities in finance, economics, and other contexts. First, we derive theoretically the direction and magnitude of measurement bias in... View Details

Keywords: Racial Disparity; Paycheck Protection Program; Measurement Error; AI and Machine Learning; Race; Measurement and Metrics; Equality and Inequality; Prejudice and Bias; Forecasting and Prediction; Outcome or Result

SSRN