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- 2023
- Working Paper
Change We Can’t Believe In: Distrust of Political Converts
By: Julian J. Zlatev, Amos Schurr and Nir Halevy
We propose and test three hypotheses regarding how people respond to political converts— individuals who switch their voting from one political party to another. Across two experiments, using behavioral and attitudinal measures of trust in two different countries, we... View Details
- February 2023
- Case
Roblox: Virtual Commerce in the Metaverse
By: Ayelet Israeli and Nicole Tempest Keller
In 2022, Roblox had 58.8 million daily active users, including over half of all children and teens under the age of 16 in the United States. Roblox, a free-to-use “co-experience platform”, allowed users to come together in immersive 3D experiences to socialize, work,... View Details
Keywords: Entertainment; Games, Gaming, and Gambling; Market Design; Marketing; Brands and Branding; Marketing Channels; Marketing Strategy; Business Strategy; Economics; Economy; Economic Systems; Advertising; Advertising Campaigns; Digital Platforms; Markets; Price; Innovation and Management; Entertainment and Recreation Industry; Video Game Industry; Technology Industry; United States; California; North America; South America; Asia; Europe
- 2023
- Working Paper
Crowding in Private Quality: The Equilibrium Effects of Public Spending in Education
By: Tahir Andrabi, Natalie Bau, Jishnu Das, Asim Ijaz Khwaja and Naureen Karachiwalla
We estimate the equilibrium effects of a public-school grant program administered through school councils in Pakistani villages with multiple public and private schools and clearly defined catchment boundaries. The program was randomized at the village-level, allowing... View Details
- February 2023
- Article
Increasing the Demand for Workers with a Criminal Record
By: Zoë Cullen, Will Dobbie and Mitchell Hoffman
State and local policies increasingly restrict employers’ access to criminal records, but without
addressing the underlying reasons that employers may conduct criminal background checks.
Employers may thus still want to ask about a job applicant’s criminal record... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
'It Wouldn’t Have Mattered Anyway': When Overdetermined Outcomes Justify Our Sins
By: Stephanie C. Lin, Julian J. Zlatev and Dale T. Miller
We identify and document an “overdetermined outcome defense” which occurs when one learns
that circumstances besides one’s own actions were sufficient to produce a negative effect (e.g.,
deciding not to go to the gym, but later discovering that the gym had been... View Details
- January 2023
- Case
Cleave Therapeutics: Taking a Risk on Oncology Drug Discovery
By: Regina Herzlinger and Brian Walker
What should a successful executive (HBS Baker Scholar) assess as her next move as the CEO of a firm with a promising and yet uncertain new drug? Amy Burroughs’ mandate to successfully commercialize Cleave Therapeutics’ drug for a cancer with no current successful... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
The Subjective Expected Utility Approach and a Framework for Defining Project Risk in Terms of Novelty and Feasibility—A Response to Franzoni and Stephan (2023), ‘Uncertainty and Risk-Taking in Science’
In their Discussion Paper, Franzoni and Stephan (F&S, 2023) discuss the shortcomings of existing peer review models in shaping the funding of risky science. Their discussion offers a conceptual framework for incorporating risk into peer review models of research... View Details
- January–February 2023
- Article
Data-Driven COVID-19 Vaccine Development for Janssen
By: Dimitris Bertsimas, Michael Lingzhi Li, Xinggang Liu, Jennings Xu and Najat Khan
The COVID-19 pandemic has spurred extensive vaccine research worldwide. One crucial part of vaccine development is the phase III clinical trial that assesses the vaccine for safety and efficacy in the prevention of COVID-19. In this work, we enumerate the first... View Details
- January–February 2023
- Article
External Interfaces and Internal Processes: Market Positioning and Divergent Professionalization Paths in Young Ventures
By: Alicia DeSantola, Ranjay Gulati and Pavel Zhelyazkov
We explore how the initial market positioning of entrepreneurial ventures shapes how they professionalize over time, focusing specifically on the development of functional roles. In contrast to existing literature, which has presumed a uniform march toward... View Details
- December 2022 (Revised June 2023)
- Case
Hacking the U.S. Election: Russia's Misinformation Campaign
By: Shikhar Ghosh
The case discusses the relatively low technology approach used by Russia to influence the U.S. Presidential Election in 2016. Although political parties manipulating the media was not a new phenomenon, the Russians ran a broad, well-financed, and sophisticated social... View Details
- December 2022
- Article
'Just Letting You Know…': Underestimating Others' Desire for Constructive Feedback
By: Nicole Abi-Esber, Jennifer E. Abel, Juliana Schroeder and Francesca Gino
People often avoid giving feedback to others even when it would help fix a problem immediately. Indeed, in a pilot field study (N=155), only 2.6% of individuals provided feedback to survey administrators that the administrators had food or marker on their faces.... View Details
- 2022
- Article
Becoming a Learning Organization While Enhancing Performance: The Case of LEGO
By: Thomas Borup Kristensen, Henrik Saabye and Amy Edmondson
Purpose - The purpose of this study is to empirically test how problem-solving lean practices, along with
leaders as learning facilitators in an action learning approach, can be transferred from a production context to a
knowledge work context for the purpose... View Details
- December 2022
- Article
I Don't 'Recall': The Decision to Delay Innovation Launch to Avoid Costly Product Failure
By: Byungyeon Kim, Oded Koenigsberg and Elie Ofek
Innovations embody novel features or cutting-edge components aimed at delivering desired customer benefits.
Oftentimes, however, we observe the need to recall new products shortly after their introduction. Indeed, a firm
may rush an innovation to market in an attempt... View Details
- December 2022
- Article
Social Skills Improve Business Performance: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial with Entrepreneurs in Togo
By: Stefan Dimitriadis and Rembrand Koning
Recent field experiments demonstrate that advice, mentorship, and feedback from randomly assigned peers improve entrepreneurial performance. These results raise a natural question: what is preventing entrepreneurs and managers from forming these peer connections... View Details
- November 2022
- Case
GE: A New Way Forward?
By: David J. Collis and Haisley Wert
One of the most iconic American companies, General Electric (GE) was founded in 1892 in New York state. Named among the original dozen companies on the Dow Jones index in 1896, it was the list’s most tenacious holdout, maintaining its “blue chip” stock status for over... View Details
- November 2022
- Article
Hate Crime Towards Minoritized Groups Increases as They Increase in Sized-Based Rank
By: Mina Cikara, Vasiliki Fouka and Marco Tabellini
People are on the move in unprecedented numbers within and between countries. How does demographic change affect local intergroup dynamics? In complement to accounts that emphasize stereotypical features of groups as determinants of their treatment, we propose the... View Details
Keywords: Prejudice; Minority; Hate Crimes; Reference Dependence; Prejudice and Bias; Attitudes; Demographics
- October 2022
- Case
Spaceport America, Public Sector Risk-taking, and Political Accountability (A)
By: Matthew Weinzierl, Dava Newman, Rebecca Browder and Angela Acocella
Sitting quietly in the heart of the New Mexico desert in the summer of 2014, Spaceport America (SA) housed little of the activity its supporters anticipated when opening its hangar doors in 2011. Despite $1 million in annual rent from Virgin Galactic, British... View Details
- September 16, 2022
- Article
A Causal Test of the Strength of Weak Ties
By: Karthik Rajkumar, Guillaume Saint-Jacques, Iavor I. Bojinov, Erik Brynjolfsson and Sinan Aral
The authors analyzed data from multiple large-scale randomized experiments on LinkedIn’s People You May Know algorithm, which recommends new connections to LinkedIn members, to test the extent to which weak ties increased job mobility in the world’s largest... View Details
- September 2022
- Article
Experimentation and Start-up Performance: Evidence from A/B Testing
By: Rembrand Koning, Sharique Hasan and Aaron Chatterji
Recent scholarship has argued that experimentation should be the organizing principle for entrepreneurial strategy. Experimentation leads to organizational learning, which drives improvements in firm performance. We investigate this proposition by exploiting the... View Details
- September 2022
- Article
Health Externalities and Policy: The Role of Social Preferences
By: Laura Alfaro, Ester Faia, Nora Lamersdorf and Farzad Saidi
Social preferences facilitate the internalization of health externalities, for example by reducing mobility during a pandemic. We test this hypothesis using mobility data from 258 cities worldwide alongside experimentally validated measures of social preferences.... View Details