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Norms
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- October 2014
- Article
The Promise of Positive Optimal Taxation: Normative Diversity and a Role for Equal Sacrifice
A prominent assumption in modern optimal tax research is that the objective of taxation is Utilitarian. I present new survey evidence that most people disagree with this assumption, preferring tax policies based at least in part on a classic alternative objective: the... View Details
- September 2, 2014
- Article
Development of In-Group Favoritism in Children's Third-Party Punishment of Selfishness
By: Jillian J. Jordan, Katherine McAuliffe and Felix Warneken
When enforcing norms for cooperative behavior, human adults sometimes exhibit in-group bias. For example, third-party observers punish selfish behaviors committed by out-group members more harshly than similar behaviors committed by in-group members. Although evidence... View Details
- Fall 2014
- Article
Seesaws and Social Security Benefits Indexing
The price indexation of Social Security benefit payments has emerged in recent years as a flashpoint of debate in the United States. I characterize the direct effects that changes in that price index would have on retirees who differ in their initial wealth at... View Details
- 2014
- Working Paper
Non-Adherence in Health Care: A Positive and Normative Analysis
By: Mark Egan and Tomas J. Philipson
Non-adherence in health care results when a patient does not initiate or continue care that a provider has recommended. Previous research identifies non-adherence as a major source of waste in US health care, totaling approximately 2.3% of GDP, and have proposed a... View Details
- Article
Turnkey or Tailored? Relational Pluralism, Institutional Complexity, and the Organizational Adoption of More or Less Customized Practices
By: Ryan Raffaelli and Mary Ann Glynn
We examine how the organizational adoption of new practices is influenced by relational pluralism, i.e., an organization's multiple ties to actors inside and outside its industry. We theorize that institutional mechanisms of practice diffusion underlying relational... View Details
- 2014
- Article
Attentional Rhythm: A Temporal Analogue of Object-Based Attention
By: Julian De Freitas, Brandon Liverence and Brian J. Scholl
The underlying units of attention are often discrete visual objects. Perhaps the clearest form of evidence for this is the same-object advantage: Following a spatial cue, responses are faster to probes occurring on the same object than they are to probes occurring on... View Details
- January–February 2014
- Article
IDEO's Culture of Helping
By: Teresa Amabile, Colin M. Fisher and Julianna Pillemer
Leaders can do few things more important than encouraging helping behavior within their organizations. In the highest-performing companies, it is a norm that colleagues support one another's efforts to do the best work they can. That has always been true for efficiency... View Details
- 2014
- Working Paper
Modularity and Intellectual Property Protection
By: Carliss Y. Baldwin and Joachim Henkel
Modularity is a means of partitioning technical knowledge about a product or process. When state-sanctioned intellectual property (IP) rights are ineffective or costly to enforce, modularity can be used to hide information and thus protect IP. We investigate the impact... View Details
- 2013
- Working Paper
International Health Economics
By: Mark Egan and Tomas J. Philipson
Perhaps because health care is a local service sector, health economists have paid little attention to international linkages between domestic health care economies. However, the growth in domestic health care sectors is often attributed to medical innovations whose... View Details
- June 2013
- Case
Ron Ventura at Mitchell Memorial Hospital
By: Frank V. Cespedes and Heide Abelli
Mitchell Memorial Hospital is a 750-bed regional academic medical center in Ohio. Andy Prescott, Chief of the Cardiovascular Center, is reviewing the performance evaluations of his star vascular surgeon Ron Ventura. The evaluations, the result of a 360-degree... View Details
- April 2013
- Article
An fMRI Investigation of Racial Paralysis
By: Michael I. Norton, Malia F. Mason, Joseph A. Vandello, Andrew Biga and Rebecca Dyer
We explore the existence and underlying neural mechanism of a new norm endorsed by both black and white Americans for managing interracial interactions: "racial paralysis," the tendency to opt out of decisions involving members of different races. We show that people... View Details
- October 2012
- Article
The Gifts We Keep on Giving: Documenting and Destigmatizing the Regifting Taboo
By: Gabrielle S. Adams, Francis J. Flynn and Michael I. Norton
Five studies investigate whether the practice of "regifting"-a social taboo-is as offensive to givers as regifters assume. Participants who imagined regifting thought that the original givers would be more offended than givers reported feeling, to such an extent that... View Details
- December 2012
- Article
Reflected Knowledge and Trust in Global Collaboration
By: Mark Mortensen and Tsedal Neeley
Scholars argue that direct knowledge about distant colleagues is crucial for fostering trust in global collaboration. However, their arguments focus mainly on how trust accrues from knowledge about distant collaborators' personal characteristics, relationships, and... View Details
- Article
Can Wages Buy Honesty?: The Relationship Between Relative Wages and Employee Theft
By: C. X. Chen and Tatiana Sandino
In this study we examine whether, for a sample of retail chains, high levels of employee compensation can deter employee theft, an increasingly common type of fraudulent behavior. Specifically, we examine the extent to which relative wages (i.e., employee wages... View Details
- 2012
- Working Paper
What Do Managers Do? Exploring Persistent Performance Differences among Seemingly Similar Enterprises
By: Robert Gibbons and Rebecca Henderson
Social networks and social groups have both been seen as important to discouraging malfeasance and supporting the global pro-social norms that underlie social order, but have typically been treated either as pure substitutes or as having completely independent effects.... View Details
- 2012
- Article
The Two Facets of Collaboration: Cooperation and Coordination in Strategic Alliances
By: Ranjay Gulati, Franz Wohlgezogen and Pavel Zhelyazkov
This paper unpacks two underspecified facets of collaboration: cooperation and coordination. Prior research has emphasized cooperation, and specifically the partners' commitment and alignment of interests, as the key determinant of collaborative success. Scholars have... View Details
- May 2012
- Article
Measuring the Prevalence of Questionable Research Practices with Incentives for Truth-telling
By: Leslie K. John, George Loewenstein and Drazen Prelec
Cases of clear scientific misconduct have received significant media attention recently, but less flagrant transgressions of research norms may be more prevalent and in the long run more damaging to the academic enterprise. We surveyed over 2,000 psychologists about... View Details
- April 2012
- Article
Bouncing Out of the Banking System: An Empirical Analysis of Involuntary Bank Account Closures
By: Dennis Campbell, F. Asis Martinez-Jerez and Peter Tufano
Using a new database, we document the factors that relate to the extent of involuntary consumer bank account closure resulting from excessive overdraft activity. Consumers who have accounts involuntarily closed for overdraft activity may have limited or no access to... View Details
- 2012
- Working Paper
How Short-Termism Invites Corruption—And What to Do About It
Researchers and business leaders have long decried short-termism: the excessive focus of executives of publicly traded companies-along with fund managers and other investors-on short-term results. The central concern is that short-termism discourages long-term... View Details
- 2012
- Working Paper
~Why Do We Redistribute so Much but Tag so Little? Normative Diversity, Equal Sacrifice and Optimal Taxation
Tagging is a free lunch in conventional optimal tax theory because it eases the classic tradeoff between efficiency and equality. But tagging is used in only limited ways in tax policy. I propose one explanation: conventional optimal tax theory has yet to capture the... View Details