Publications

Research Summary

The Transparency of Ethical Behavior

(with Max Bazerman, Karim Kassam, and Neeru Paharia)
This research analyzes how unethical behavior is viewed when performed... View Details

13 Feb 2025
HBS Seminar

Kamalini Ramdas, London School of Business

09 Aug 2011
First Look

First Look: August 9

States, and one deceased donor can save numerous lives by providing multiple organs. Nevertheless, most Americans are not registered organ donors despite the relative ease of becoming one. We study in the laboratory an experimental game... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

April 2018
Article

We Ask Men to Win & Women Not to Lose: Closing the Gender Gap in Startup Funding

By: Dana Kanze, Laura Huang, Mark Conley and E. Tory Higgins

Male entrepreneurs are known to raise higher levels of funding than their female counterparts, but the underlying mechanism for this funding disparity remains contested. Drawing upon Regulatory Focus Theory, we propose that the gap originates with a gender bias in the... View Details

Keywords: Business Startups; Finance; Gender; Prejudice and Bias

Purchase

2016
Article

Does volunteering improve well-being?

By: A.V. Whillans, Scott C. Seider, Lihan Chen, Ryan J. Dwyer, Sarah Novick, Kathryn J. Gramigna, Brittany A. Mitchell, Victoria Savalei, Sally S. Dickerson and Elizabeth W. Dunn

Does volunteering causally improve well-being? To empirically test this question, we examined one instantiation of volunteering that is common at post-secondary institutions across North America: community service learning (CSL). CSL is a form of experiential learning... View Details

Keywords: Prosocial Behavior; College Students; Bayesian Statistics; Education; Well-being

2024
Working Paper

Lessons from an App Update at Replika AI: Identity Discontinuity in Human-AI Relationships

By: Julian De Freitas, Noah Castelo, Ahmet Uğuralp and Zeliha Uğuralp

Can consumers form deep emotional bonds with AI and be vested in AI identities over time? We leverage a natural app-update event at Replika AI, a popular US-based AI companion, to shed light on these questions. We find that customers feel closer to their AI companion... View Details

Keywords: AI and Machine Learning; Welfare; Loss; Well-being; Identity; Perception; Relationships

SSRN

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

15 Jul 2014
First Look

First Look: July 15

Working Papers Decision Making Under Information Asymmetry: Experimental Evidence on Belief Refinements By: Schmidt, William, and Ryan W. Buell Abstract—We examine how people make decisions when the value... View Details

Keywords: Carmen Nobel

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

Keywords: Hyperbolic Discounting; Present Bias; Bounded Rationality; Cognitive Uncertainty; Behavioral Finance

2021
Working Paper

Information Avoidance and Image Concerns

By: Christine L. Exley and Judd B. Kessler

A rich literature finds that individuals avoid information, even information that is instrumental to their choices. A common hypothesis posits that individuals strategically avoid information to hold particular beliefs or to take certain actions--such as behaving... View Details

Keywords: Image Motivation; Self-image; Information; Behavior; Identity; Personal Characteristics

Research Summary

Overview

By: Iavor I. Bojinov

Over the last decade, technology companies like Amazon, Google, and Netflix have pioneered data-driven research and development processes centered on massive experimentation. However, as companies increase the breadth and scale of their experiments to millions of... View Details

2023
Working Paper

Words Can Hurt: How Political Communication Can Change the Pace of an Epidemic

By: Jessica Gagete-Miranda, Lucas Argentieri Mariani and Paula Rettl

While elite-cue effects on public opinion are well-documented, questions remain as to when and why voters use elite cues to inform their opinions and behaviors. Using experimental and observational data from Brazil during the COVID-19 pandemic, we study how leader... View Details

Research Summary

Overview

Over the last decade, technology companies like Amazon, Google, and Netflix have pioneered data-driven research and development processes centered on massive experimentation. However, as companies increase the breadth and scale of their experiments to millions of... View Details

Kris Johnson Ferreira

Kris Ferreira is the Edgerley Family Associate Professor of Business Administration in the Technology and Operations Management (TOM) Unit. She teaches the Supply Chain Management course in the MBA elective curriculum and analytics in numerous Executive Education... View Details

Keywords: retailing

April 2023
Article

Inattentive Inference

By: Thomas Graeber

This paper studies how people infer a state of the world from information structures that include additional, payoff-irrelevant states. For example, learning from a customer review about a product’s quality requires accounting for the reviewer’s otherwise irrelevant... View Details

Keywords: Cognition and Thinking; Information Types; Behavior; Knowledge Acquisition

May 2018
Article

The Downside of Downtime: The Prevalence and Work Pacing Consequences of Idle Time at Work

By: Andrew Brodsky and Teresa M. Amabile

Although both media commentary and academic research have focused much attention on the dilemma of employees being too busy, this paper presents evidence of the opposite phenomenon, in which employees do not have enough work to fill their time and are left with hours... View Details

Keywords: Employees; Working Conditions; Performance Consistency; Performance Productivity

26 Mar 2019
First Look

New Research and Ideas, March 26, 2019

Publisher's link: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=55886 Can Biometric Tracking Improve Healthcare Provision and Data Quality? Experimental Evidence from Tuberculosis Control in India By:... View Details

Keywords: Dina Gerdeman

Incentives versus Reciprocity: Insights from a Field Experiment

We conduct a field experiment in which we vary the sales force compensation scheme at an Asian enterprise that sells consumer durable goods. With variation generated by the experimental treatments, we model sales force performance to identify the effectiveness of... View Details

January 23, 2023
Article

Digital Public Health Interventions at Scale: The Impact of Social Media Advertising on Beliefs and Outcomes Related to COVID Vaccines

By: Susan Athey, Kristen Grabarz, Michael Luca and Nils Wernerfelt

Public health organizations increasingly use social media advertising campaigns in pursuit of public health goals. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of about $40 million of social media advertisements that were run and experimentally tested on Facebook and... View Details

Keywords: COVID-19 Pandemic; Public Health; Vaccines; Social Media; Advertising; Power and Influence; Health Care and Treatment