Publications
Publications
Show Results For
- All HBS Web
(4,455)
- Faculty Publications (620)
FIELD
→
- October 2021
- Article
Changing Gambling Behavior through Experiential Learning
By: Shawn A. Cole, Martin Abel and Bilal Zia
This paper tests experiential learning as a debiasing tool to reduce gambling in South Africa, through a randomized field experiment. The study implements a simple, interactive game that simulates the odds of winning the national lottery through dice rolling.... View Details
- 2021
- Article
How Top Managers Use the Entrepreneurial Gap to Drive Strategic Change
By: Robert L. Simons and Antonio Davila
Prior research provides strong evidence for the association between business strategy and the design and use of management control systems. We complement this research by examining the role of management control systems in situations of strategic change. We report the... View Details
- September 2021
- Article
Joint Problem-solving Orientation in Fluid Cross-boundary Teams
By: Michaela J. Kerrissey, Anna T. Mayo and Amy C. Edmondson
Using interviews, a national field survey, and an online laboratory study, we have examined teamwork in fluid cross-boundary teams. Across three studies, we qualitatively discovered and quantitatively explored "joint problem-solving orientation" as a new team factor.... View Details
- Article
Targeting Weather Insurance Markets
By: Anita Mukherjee, Shawn Cole and Jeremy Tobacman
The suitability of insurance products often depends greatly on individual circumstances. This paper examines the challenges of heterogeneity in a relatively new product, weather‐indexed insurance. This index insurance product has been launched in over a dozen... View Details
Keywords: Index Insurance; Labor Markets; Self-insurance; Self-protection; Weather; Insurance; Markets; Household; Risk Management
- 2023
- Working Paper
Should Human Capital Development Programs Be Voluntary or Mandatory? Evidence from a Field Experiment
By: Jason Sandvik, Richard Saouma, Nathan Seegert and Christopher Stanton
In a field experiment, we find large differences in productivity treatment effects between voluntary and mandatory workplace mentorship programs. A significant portion of this difference is due to the best employees opting into the program when it is voluntary and... View Details
- August 2021
- Article
The Undervalued Power of Self-relevant Research: The Case of Researching Retirement While Retiring
By: Teresa M. Amabile and Douglas T. (Tim) Hall
For decades, training in management research has emphasized objectivity, typically viewed as an arm’s length distance between the topic of the research and the interests of the researcher. This emphasis has led most scholars to avoid research topics of deep personal... View Details
- August 2021
- Article
Voter Mobilization and Trust in Electoral Institutions: Evidence from Kenya
By: Benjamin Marx, Vincent Pons and Tavneet Suri
Voter mobilization campaigns face trade-offs in young democracies. In a large-scale experiment implemented in 2013 with the Kenyan Electoral Commission (IEBC), text messages intended to mobilize voters boosted participation but also decreased trust in electoral... View Details
- July 2021 (Revised July 2024)
- Course Overview Note
Social Entrepreneurship and Systems Change
By: Brian Trelstad and Preeti Varma
Systems thinking is a discipline that emerged in the 20th century as a way to understand the complex interrelationships among various players and dynamics within an industry or field that resist simple, reductionist thinking. The big challenges we face play out in... View Details
- July 2021
- Article
Creating Exercise Habits Using Incentives: The Trade-off Between Flexibility and Routinization
By: John Beshears, Hae Nim Lee, Katherine L. Milkman, Robert Mislavsky and Jessica Wisdom
Habits involve regular, cue-triggered routines. In a field experiment, we tested whether incentivizing exercise routines—paying participants each time they visit the gym within a planned, daily two-hour window—leads to more persistent exercise than offering flexible... View Details
- July 2021
- Article
Discovering Auctions: Contributions of Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson
By: Alex Teytelboym, Shengwu Li, Scott Duke Kominers, Mohammad Akbarpour and Piotr Dworczak
The 2020 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel was awarded to Paul R. Milgrom and Robert B. Wilson for “improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats.” In this survey article, we review the contributions of the... View Details
- 2021
- Article
Nudging the Commute: Using Behaviorally-Informed Interventions to Promote Sustainable Transportation
By: Ashley Whillans, Joseph Sherlock, Jessica Roberts, Shibeal O'Flaherty, Lyndsay Gavin, Holly Dykstra and Michael Daly
Dramatic reductions in carbon emissions must take place immediately. A human-centric method of reducing environmental impacts is to “nudge” employees away from single-occupancy vehicles (SOVs) toward more sustainable commuting options. While an abundance of research... View Details
- Article
On Her Own Account: How Strengthening Women's Financial Control Impacts Labor Supply and Gender Norms
By: Natalia Rigol, Simone Schaner, Rohini Pande, Erica Field and Charity Troyer Moore
Can increasing control over earnings incentivize a woman to work, and thereby influence norms around gender roles? We randomly varied whether rural Indian women received bank accounts, training in account use, and direct deposit of public sector wages into their own... View Details
- July–August 2021
- Article
Surfacing the Submerged State: Operational Transparency Increases Trust in and Engagement with Government
By: Ryan W. Buell, Ethan Porter and Michael I. Norton
Problem definition: As trust in government reaches historic lows, frustration with government performance approaches record highs.
Academic/practical relevance: We propose that in co-productive settings like government services, peoples’ trust and... View Details
- Summer 2021
- Article
The World Management Survey at 18: lessons and the way forward
By: Daniela Scur, Raffaella Sadun, John Van Reenen, Renata Lemos and Nicholas Bloom
Understanding how differences in management ‘best practices’ affect organizational outcomes has been a focus of both theoretical and empirical work in the fields of management, sociology, economics, and public policy. The World Management Survey (WMS) project was born... View Details
- June 23, 2021
- Article
Research: When A/B Testing Doesn't Tell You the Whole Story
By: Eva Ascarza
When it comes to churn prevention, marketers traditionally start by identifying which customers are most likely to churn, and then running A/B tests to determine whether a proposed retention intervention will be effective at retaining those high-risk customers. While... View Details
Keywords: Customer Retention; Churn; Targeting; Market Research; Marketing; Investment Return; Customers; Retention; Research
- June 2021
- Case
Acelero Learning
By: Mario Small, Kathleen L. McGinn, Amy Klopfenstein and Katherine Chen
In November 2020, Henry Wilde, co-founder and CEO of Acelero, Inc., must decide whether to change his company’s program model for delivering early childhood education to low-income children. One of the only for-profit Head Start providers in the United States, Acelero... View Details
- June 2021
- Article
Engineering Serendipity: When Does Knowledge Sharing Lead to Knowledge Production?
By: Jacqueline N. Lane, Ina Ganguli, Patrick Gaule, Eva C. Guinan and Karim R. Lakhani
We investigate how knowledge similarity between two individuals is systematically related to the likelihood that a serendipitous encounter results in knowledge production. We conduct a natural field experiment at a medical research symposium, where we exogenously... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Virtual Water Coolers: A Field Experiment on the Role of Virtual Interactions on Organizational Newcomer Performance
By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Jacqueline N. Lane and Iavor Bojinov
Designing management practices to better onboard organizational newcomers working remotely is a key priority for firms. We report results from a randomized field experiment conducted at a large global firm that estimates the performance effects of different types of... View Details
- Article
A Megastudy of Text-Based Nudges Encouraging Patients to Get Vaccinated at an Upcoming Doctor's Appointment
By: Katherine L. Milkman, Mitesh S. Patel, Linnea Gandhi, Heather N. Graci, Dena M. Gromet, Hung Ho, Joseph S. Kay, Timothy W. Lee, Modupe Akinola, John Beshears, Jonathan E. Bogard, Alison Buttenheim, Christopher F. Chabris, Gretchen B. Chapman, James J. Choi, Hengchen Dai, Craig R. Fox, Amir Goren, Matthew D. Hilchey, Jillian Hmurovic, Leslie K. John, Dean Karlan, Melanie Kim, David Laibson, Cait Lamberton, Brigitte C. Madrian, Michelle N. Meyer, Maria Modanu, Jimin Nam, Todd Rogers, Renante Rondina, Silvia Saccardo, Maheen Shermohammed, Dilip Soman, Jehan Sparks, Caleb Warren, Megan Weber, Ron Berman, Chalanda N. Evans, Christopher K. Snider, Eli Tsukayama, Christophe Van den Bulte, Kevin G. Volpp and Angela L. Duckworth
Many Americans fail to get life-saving vaccines each year, and the availability of a vaccine for COVID-19 makes the challenge of encouraging vaccination more urgent than ever. We present a large field experiment (N = 47,306) testing 19 nudges delivered to patients via... View Details
Keywords: Vaccination; COVID-19; Nudge; Influenza; Field Experiment; Health; Communication Strategy; Behavior
- May 2021
- Case
André Hoffmann: Beyond Philanthropy
By: Lauren Cohen, Hao Gao, Jiawei Ye and Spencer C.N. Hagist
André Hoffmann is a leader of one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies. His exceptional tenure in philanthropy over the past several decades, including being president of the WWF and the vice-president of the MAVA Foundation, has allowed him access to a far... View Details