Publications

Educators

March 1991 (Revised January 1993)
Background Note

Why Do Good Managers Choose Poor Strategies?

The uncertainty and complexity of most business environments make successful management a difficult art. Frequently, bright, experienced, well-educated people manage their companies into strategic distress. Many of these bad results are not simply a matter of bad luck.... View Details

Keywords: Risk and Uncertainty; Prejudice and Bias; Business Strategy; Cognition and Thinking

Educators

September 2025
Article

Using Satellites and Phones to Evaluate and Promote Agricultural Technology Adoption: Evidence from Smallholder Farms in India

By: Shawn Cole, Tomoko Harigaya, Grady Killeen and Aparna Krishna

This paper evaluates a low-cost, customized soil nutrient management advisory service in India. As a methodological contribution, we examine whether and in which settings satellite measurements may be effective at estimating both agricultural yields and treatment... View Details

Keywords: Measurement and Metrics; Mathematical Methods; Analytics and Data Science; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; India

September 2021
Article

Gender Stereotypes in Deliberation and Team Decisions

By: Katherine B. Coffman, Clio Bryant Flikkema and Olga Shurchkov

We explore how groups deliberate and decide on ideas in an experiment with communication. We find that gender biases play a significant role in which group members are chosen to answer on behalf of the group. Conditional on the quality of their ideas, individuals are... View Details

Keywords: Gender Differences; Stereotypes; Teams; Economic Experiments; Gender; Prejudice and Bias; Groups and Teams; Perception

Find at Harvard

07 Jul 2017
News

When Potential Mentors Are Mostly White and Male

15 Dec 2010
Working Paper Summaries

Cognitive Barriers to Environmental Action: Problems and Solutions

Keywords: by Lisa L.Shu & Max H. Bazerman

October 2012
Article

The Effect of Reference Point Prices on Mergers and Acquisitions

By: Malcolm Baker, Xin Pan and Jeffrey Wurgler

Prior stock price peaks of targets affect several aspects of merger and acquisition activity. Offer prices are biased toward recent peak prices although they are economically unremarkable. An offer's probability of acceptance jumps discontinuously when it exceeds a... View Details

Keywords: Mergers and Acquisitions; Stocks; Price; Valuation; Negotiation

Find at Harvard

2010
Other Unpublished Work

Modeling Passenger Travel and Delays in the National Air Transportation System

Many of the existing methods for evaluating an airline's on-time performance are based on flight-centric measures of delay. However, recent research has demonstrated that passenger delays depend on many factors in addition to flight delays. For instance,... View Details

Keywords: Mathematical Methods; Performance Evaluation; Air Transportation Industry; United States

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

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Microeconomics; Mathematical Methods; Behavioral Finance

Find at Harvard

2024
Working Paper

Migration Fear and Minority Crowd-Funding Success: Evidence from Kickstarter

By: John (Jianqui) Bai, William R. Kerr, Chi Wan and Alptug Yorulmaz

We study racial biases on Kickstarter across multiple ethnic groups from 2009-2021. Scaling the concept of racially salient events, we quantify the close co-movement of minority funding gaps to inflamed political rhetoric surrounding migration. The racial funding gap... View Details

Keywords: Crowdfunding; Prejudice and Bias; Race; Immigration; Public Opinion

12 Oct 2021
News

AI Can Bring More Equity To The Workplace And Consumer Markets By Implementing These Conditions

2010
Working Paper

Cognitive Barriers to Environmental Action: Problems and Solutions

By: Lisa L. Shu and Max Bazerman

We explore interventions at the individual level and focus on recognized cognitive barriers from behavioral decision-making literature. In particular, we highlight three cognitive barriers that impede sound individual decision making that have particular relevance to... View Details

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Judgments; Consumer Behavior; Environmental Sustainability; Cognition and Thinking; Prejudice and Bias

1980
Working Paper

Taxation and the Ex-dividend Day Behavior of Common Stock Prices

By: Jerry R. Green

The behavior of stock prices around ex-dividend days has been suggested as evidence for tax-induced clientele effects and as a means to estimate the average effective tax rate faced by investors. In this paper these possibilities are examined theoretically and... View Details

Keywords: Taxation; Stocks; Price

01 Sep 2023
News

Alumni and Faculty Books

Edited by Margie Kelley The Happiness Handbook By Landon Carter (MBA 1967) Marshall and McClintic Publishing Have you ever wished you had the instruction manual for being a happy human on planet Earth? This book will answer some of life’s fundamental questions: Who am... View Details

31 Aug 2017
News

Google And Microsoft Can Use Ai To Extract Many More Ad Dollars From Our Clicks

February 1997
Background Note

Errors in Social Judgment: Implications for Negotiation and Conflict Resolution, Part 1

For the past quarter-century, the field of social cognition has documented a number of ways in which individuals and groups are prone to make characteristic errors when judging others. This note examines the ways in which these tendencies pose difficulties for... View Details

Keywords: Prejudice and Bias; Negotiation; Conflict and Resolution

Educators