Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(1,205)
- Faculty Publications (423)
- Article
Emotional Acknowledgment: How Verbalizing Others' Emotions Fosters Interpersonal Trust
By: Alisa Yu, Justin M. Berg and Julian Zlatev
People often respond to others’ emotions using verbal acknowledgment (e.g., “You seem upset”). Yet, little is known about the relational benefits and risks of acknowledging others’ emotions in the workplace. We draw upon Costly Signaling Theory to posit how emotional... View Details
- May–June 2021
- Article
How to Close the Gender Gap
By: Colleen Ammerman and Boris Groysberg
Most companies say they’re committed to advancing women into leadership roles. What they may fail to recognize, though, is that systemic barriers are holding women back. As a result, women remain disadvantaged at every stage of their employment and underrepresented in... View Details
- Article
Joy and Rigor in Behavioral Science
By: Hanne K. Collins, Ashley V. Whillans and Leslie K. John
In the past decade, behavioral science has seen the introduction of beneficial reforms to reduce false positive results. Serving as the motivational backdrop for the present research, we wondered whether these reforms might have unintended negative consequences on... View Details
- April 2021
- Case
Glass-Shattering Leaders: Ana Paula Pessoa
By: Boris Groysberg and Colleen Ammerman
Ana Paula Pessoa built a career at the largest media conglomerate in Latin America, combining a passion for digital transformation with a commitment to doing work that had a positive impact on society. Having grown up during a dictatorial military regime in Brazil, the... View Details
- April 2021
- Case
Glass-Shattering Leaders: Barbara Hackman Franklin
By: Boris Groysberg and Colleen Ammerman
Barbara Hackman Franklin was one of the first women to earn an MBA from Harvard Business School. She went on to break barriers in the private and public sectors, rising to leadership positions in business and government. In the 1970s, she led a successful White House... View Details
- March 2021
- Supplement
Applied: Using Behavioral Science to Debias Hiring (B)
By: Ashley Whillans and Jeff Polzer
At the end of 2018, Applied faced questions of stakeholder management and scale. Glazebrook wanted clients to get rid of CVs altogether. To do this, they would have to help hiring managers and recruiters easily build task-based assessments of the skills that their... View Details
- 2021
- Working Paper
Measuring Employment Impact: Applications and Cases
By: Katie Panella and George Serafeim
Applying the Impact-Weighted Accounts Initiative’s employment impact methodology on eight leading companies, we document wide variability in employment impacts as a percentage of salaries paid, ranging between 59 and 80 percent. We identify opportunities for... View Details
- January 2021 (Revised March 2022)
- Teaching Note
Ureed.com: The Marketplace for Language
This case explores the growth of Ureed, an online marketplace for translation services that is powered by a workforce consisting of remote freelancers who are based in the United Arab Emirates. Nour Al Hassan, the founder and CEO faced the challenge of how best to... View Details
- January 2021 (Revised October 2021)
- Case
eToro: Building the World's Largest Social Trading Network
By: Elie Ofek and Danielle Golan
Social trading platform eToro was preparing for the launch of its expanded offering in the U.S. The company faced critical decisions regarding product-market fit, go-to-market strategy, positioning and monetization. Moreover, it faced the challenge of how best to make... View Details
- 2021
- Book
Harvard Business Review Family Business Handbook: How to Build and Sustain a Successful, Enduring Enterprise
By: Josh Baron and Rob Lachenauer
Navigate the complex decisions and critical relationships necessary to create and sustain a healthy family business--and business family. Though "family business" may sound like it refers only to mom-and-pop shops, businesses owned by families are among the most... View Details
- 2021
- Article
Helping and Happiness: A Review and Guide for Public Policy
By: Lara B. Aknin and Ashley V. Whillans
Perhaps one of the most reaffirming findings to emerge over the past several decades is that humans not only engage in generous behavior, they also appear to experience pleasure from doing so. Yet not all acts of helping lead to greater happiness. Here, we review the... View Details
- January 2021
- Article
How Personality and Policy Predict Pandemic Behavior: Understanding Sheltering-in-Place in 55 Countries at the Onset of COVID-19
By: Friedrich M. Götz, Andrés Gvirtz, Adam D. Galinsky and Jon M. Jachimowicz
The spread of COVID-19 within any given country or community at the onset of the pandemic depended in part on the sheltering-in-place rate of its citizens. The pandemic led us to revisit one of psychology’s most fundamental and most basic questions in a high-stakes... View Details
- December 2020
- Case
Urban Company
Urban Company is an India-based market platform that helps customers book home services and at home beauty services. The company differentiated itself by investing heavily in building customer trust. Rather than merely positioning itself as a lead generating... View Details
- Article
Value of New Performance Information in Healthcare: Evidence from Japan
By: Susanna Gallani, Takehisa Kajiwara and Ranjani Krishnan
Mandatory measurement and disclosure of outcome measures are commonly used policy tools in
healthcare. The effectiveness of such disclosures relies on the extent to which the new information produced by the mandatory system is internalized by the healthcare... View Details
- November 30, 2020
- Editorial
Don't Focus on the Most Expressive Face in the Audience
By: Amit Goldenberg and Erika Weisz
Research has shown that when speaking in front of a group, people’s attention tends to gets stuck on the most emotional faces, causing them to overestimate the group’s average emotional state. In this piece, the authors share two additional findings: First, the larger... View Details
- November–December 2020
- Article
Lifting the Veil: The Benefits of Cost Transparency
By: Bhavya Mohan, Ryan W. Buell and Leslie K. John
Firms do not typically disclose information on their costs to produce a good to consumers. However, we provide evidence of when and why doing so can increase consumers’ purchase interest. Specifically, building on the psychology of disclosure and trust, we posit that... View Details
- 2020
- Book
Better, Not Perfect: A Realist's Guide to Maximum Sustainable Goodness
By: Max Bazerman
Every day, you make hundreds of decisions. They’re largely personal, but these choices have an ethical twinge as well; they value certain principles and ends over others. Bazerman argues that we can better balance both dimensions—and we needn’t seek perfection to make... View Details
- September 2020
- Article
How Multimedia Shape Crowdfunding Outcomes: The Overshadowing Effect of Images and Videos on Text in Campaign Information
By: J Yang, Y Li, Goran Calic and Anton Shevchenko
This study aims to explore the moderating effect of the number of images and videos on the relationship between text length in crowdfunding campaign descriptions and crowdfunding outcomes. We use data from 13,622 technology campaigns on the Kickstarter website to test... View Details
- Article
Common Variants of the Oxytocin Receptor Gene Do Not Predict the Positive Mood Benefits of Prosocial Spending
By: Ashley V. Whillans, Lara B. Aknin, Colin Ross, Lihan Chen and Frances S. Chen
Who benefits most from helping others? Previous research suggests that common polymorphisms of the oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR) predict whether people behave generously and experience increases in positive mood in response to socially-focused experiences in daily... View Details
- August 2020
- Article
Financial Market Risk Perceptions and the Macroeconomy
By: Carolin E. Pflueger, Emil Siriwardane and Adi Sunderam
We propose a novel measure of risk perceptions: the price of volatile stocks (PVS), defined as the book-to-market ratio of low-volatility stocks minus the book-to-market ratio of high-volatility stocks. PVS is high when perceived risk directly measured from surveys and... View Details