Publications

Research Summary

Overview

By: Kris Johnson Ferreira

Professor Ferreira's research primarily focuses on how retailers can use algorithms to make better revenue management decisions, including pricing, product display, and assortment planning. In the retail industry, anticipating consumer demand is arguably one of the... View Details

Keywords: E-commerce; Analytics; Revenue Management; Pricing; Assortment Planning; Field Experiments; Operations; Supply Chain; Supply Chain Management; Retail Industry

May–June 2019
Article

U-Shaped Conformity in Online Social Networks

By: Monic Sun, Michael Zhang and Feng Zhu

We explore how people balance their needs to belong and to be different from their friends by studying their choices of a virtual-house wall color on a leading Chinese social-networking site. The setting enables us to randomize both the popular color and the adoption... View Details

Keywords: Conformity; Normative Social Influence; Social Networks; Field Experiment; Social and Collaborative Networks; Behavior; Attitudes; Social Media

2025
Working Paper

Greenlighting Innovative Projects: How Evaluation Format Shapes the Perceived Feasibility of Early-Stage Ideas

By: Jacqueline N. Lane, Simon Friis, Tianxi Cai, Michael Menietti, Griffin Weber and Eva C. Guinan

The evaluation of innovative early-stage projects is essential for allocating limited resources. We investigate how the evaluation format affects the identification of feasibility issues through a field experiment at a leading research university. Experts were... View Details

Keywords: Innovation Evaluation; Evaluation Criteria; Feasibility Assessment; Attention Allocation; Cognitive Mechanisms; Field Experiment; Research; Performance Evaluation; Innovation and Invention; Prejudice and Bias

February 2018
Article

Retention Futility: Targeting High-Risk Customers Might Be Ineffective.

By: Eva Ascarza

Companies in a variety of sectors are increasingly managing customer churn proactively, generally by detecting customers at the highest risk of churning and targeting retention efforts towards them. While there is a vast literature on developing churn prediction models... View Details

Keywords: Retention/churn; Proactive Churn Management; Field Experiments; Heterogeneous Treatment Effect; Machine Learning; Customer Relationship Management; Risk Management

26 Mar 2013
Working Paper Summaries

How Elastic Are Preferences for Redistribution? Evidence from Randomized Survey Experiments

Keywords: by Ilyana Kuziemko, Michael I. Norton, Emmanuel Saez & Stefanie Stantchev

March 2021
Article

Opting-in to Prosocial Incentives

By: Daniel Schwartz, Elizabeth A. Keenan, Alex Imas and Ayelet Gneezy

The design of effective incentive schemes that are both successful in motivating employees and keeping down costs is of critical importance. Research has demonstrated that prosocial incentives, where individuals’ effort benefits a charitable organization, can sometimes... View Details

Keywords: Incentives; Prosocial Behavior; Behavioral Economics; Field Experiments; Recycling; Prosocial Motivation; Decision Making; Motivation and Incentives; Behavior

29 Apr 2015
Lessons from the Classroom

Use Personal Experience to Pick Winning Stocks

that no one else does” That's exactly what Cohen has been doing for the last three years in the MBA field course Stock Pitching, which he co-teaches with Christopher J. Malloy, the Sylvan C. Coleman Professor of Financial Management.... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Financial Services

01 Jun 2016
Working Paper Summaries

Motivating Effort in Contributing to Public Goods Inside Organizations: Field Experimental Evidence

Keywords: by Andrea Blasco, Olivia S. Jung, Karim R. Lakhani, and Michael E. Menietti

Research Summary

Overview

Erin's research focuses on how organizations can and should respond to employee failures. She is interested in understanding the effects that organizational responses have on subsequent employee behavior, and how organizational policies can be designed to more... View Details

Keywords: Repair; Recovery; Reintegration; Prosocial Behavior; Field Experiment; Psychology; Networks; Punishment; Giving and Philanthropy; Social Psychology; Motivation and Incentives; Social and Collaborative Networks; Ethics

11 Feb 2016
Working Paper Summaries

Will a Five-Minute Discussion Change Your Mind? A Countrywide Experiment on Voter Choice in France

Keywords: by Vincent Pons; Public Relations; Public Administration

November–December 2023
Article

Iterative Coordination and Innovation: Prioritizing Value over Novelty

By: Sourobh Ghosh and Andy Wu

An innovating organization faces the challenge of how to prioritize distinct goals of novelty and value, both of which underlie innovation. Popular practitioner frameworks like Agile management suggest that organizations can adopt an iterative approach of frequent... View Details

Keywords: Innovation; Novelty; Goals; Specialization; Coordination; Field Experiment; Software Development; Agile; Scrum; Iteration; Iterative; Organizations; Innovation and Invention; Value; Goals and Objectives; Integration; Applications and Software

Forthcoming
Article

Sending a Message: An Empirical Assessment of Responses to Punitive and Non-punitive Compliance Messaging Strategies

By: Jodi L. Short, Michael W. Toffel, Elizabeth A. Keenan and Melissa Ouellet

Regulators operate in an increasingly hostile political environment. The U.S. Supreme Court is ramping up efforts to curtail the authority of administrative agencies. The second election of Donald Trump to the presidency has unleashed a torrent of anti-regulatory... View Details

Keywords: Field Experiment; Compliance; Compliance Programs; Compliance Policies; Regulatory Enforcement; Environmental Regulation; Environmental Policy; Government Experimentation; Governance Compliance; Government Administration; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Business and Government Relations; Construction Industry; Public Administration Industry; California; United States

SSRN

2020
Article

A Practical Approach to Sales Compensation: What Do We Know Now? What Should We Know in the Future?

By: Doug J. Chung, Byungyeon Kim and Niladri B. Syam

Personal selling represents one of the most important elements in the marketing mix, and appropriate management of the sales force is vital to achieving the organization’s objectives. Among the various instruments of sales management, compensation plays a pivotal role... View Details

Keywords: Sales Compensation; Sales Management; Sales Strategy; Principal-agent Theory; Structural Econometrics; Field Experiments; Machine Learning; Artificial Intelligence; Salesforce Management; Compensation and Benefits; Motivation and Incentives; AI and Machine Learning

July–August 2024
Article

Doing More with Less: Overcoming Ineffective Long-Term Targeting Using Short-Term Signals

By: Ta-Wei Huang and Eva Ascarza

Firms are increasingly interested in developing targeted interventions for customers with the best response, which requires identifying differences in customer sensitivity, typically through the conditional average treatment effect (CATE) estimation. In theory, to... View Details

Keywords: Long-run Targeting; Heterogeneous Treatment Effect; Statistical Surrogacy; Customer Churn; Field Experiments; Consumer Behavior; Customer Focus and Relationships; AI and Machine Learning; Marketing Strategy

Research Summary

Team, Individual, and Organizational Learning From Experience in Two High-Hazard Industries

High-hazard industries such as nuclear power and chemical process plants must learn and improve without sole reliance on trial-and-error. Considerable attention and resources are placed on learning from operating experience, including exchange of best practices, peer... View Details

2012
Chapter

The Confederacy of Heterogeneous Software Organizations and Heterogeneous Developers: Field Experimental Evidence on Sorting and Worker Effort

By: Kevin J. Boudreau and Karim R. Lakhani

Software development occurs in a patchwork or "confederacy" of different types of institutions (universities, small start-ups, multinational enterprises, government agencies, etc.) utilizing varied work approaches. Here we speculate on one possible explanation for this... View Details

Keywords: Innovation and Invention; Applications and Software; Product Development; Organizations; Employees; Behavior; Competition; Cooperation; Creativity; Information Technology Industry

March 2025
Article

Does Communicating Measurable Diversity Goals Attract or Repel Historically Marginalized Job Applicants? Evidence from the Lab and Field

By: Erika L. Kirgios, Ike Silver and Edward H. Chang

Many organizations struggle to attract a demographically diverse workforce. How does adding a measurable goal to a public diversity commitment—for example, “We care about diversity” versus “We care about diversity and plan to hire at least one woman or racial minority... View Details

Keywords: Selection and Staffing; Recruitment; Diversity; Goals and Objectives; Communication Intention and Meaning; Behavior