Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(1,155)
- Faculty Publications (339)
- 2020
- Working Paper
Topic Preference Detection: A Novel Approach to Understand Perspective Taking in Conversation
By: Michael Yeomans and Alison Wood Brooks
Although most humans engage in conversations constantly throughout their lives, conversational mistakes are commonplace— interacting with others is difficult, and conversation re-quires quick, relentless perspective-taking and decision making. For example: during every... View Details
- February 2020
- Article
Being 'Good' or 'Good Enough': Prosocial Risk and the Structure of Moral Self-regard
By: Julian Zlatev, Daniella M. Kupor, Kristin Laurin and Dale T. Miller
The motivation to feel moral powerfully guides people’s prosocial behavior. We propose that people’s efforts to preserve their moral self-regard conform to a moral threshold model. This model predicts that people are primarily concerned with whether their... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Directors' Perceptions of Board Effectiveness and Internal Operations
By: J. Yo-Jud Cheng, Boris Groysberg, Paul M. Healy and Rajesh Vijayaraghavan
- December 2019
- Case
CME Group in 2019
By: José B. Alvarez, Forest Reinhardt and Natalie Kindred
Chicago-based CME Group is the world’s largest futures and options marketplace, with annual trading volume of over 4.8 billion contracts in 2018. This case is set in late 2019, as heightened perceptions of risk stemming from the U.S.-China trade war are driving record... View Details
- 2019
- Article
The Frequency of Corporate Misconduct: Public Enforcement versus Private Reality
By: Eugene F. Soltes
Perceptions about the frequency of misconduct—among the public, academics and even
regulators—have largely been formed by examining enforcement statistics, which rely on the detection and sanctioning of the misconduct. This study aims to illuminate the real occurrence... View Details
- November 2019
- Article
Procedural Justice and the Risks of Consumer Voting
By: Tami Kim, Leslie John, Todd Rogers and Michael I. Norton
Firms are increasingly giving consumers the vote. Eight studies demonstrate that when firms empower consumers to vote, consumers infer a series of implicit promises—even in the absence of explicit promises. We identify three implicit promises to which consumers react... View Details
- October 2019 (Revised March 2021)
- Background Note
Modern Automation (B): Robotics
By: William R. Kerr and James Palano
Driven largely by advances in perception and situational awareness, robots in the 2010s were gaining functionality that allowed them to be applied to fundamentally new types of work. The expanding range of new tasks that could be completed by machines had significant... View Details
- Article
Creating Firm Disclosures
By: Amir Amel-Zadeh, Alexandra Scherf and Eugene F. Soltes
Managers expend significant time and effort preparing disclosures about firm performance and strategy. Although prior literature has explored how variation in the style and presentation of disclosures impacts investors' perceptions of firms, little is known about how... View Details
- September 2019
- Article
The Self-Presentational Consequences of Upholding One's Stance in Spite of the Evidence
By: Leslie John, Martha Jeong, Francesca Gino and Laura Huang
Five studies explore the self-presentational consequences of refusing to “back down” – that is, upholding a stance despite evidence of its inaccuracy. Using data from an entrepreneurial pitch competition, Study 1 shows that entrepreneurs tend not to back down even... View Details
- August 2019 (Revised April 2021)
- Case
Zillow Offers: Winning Online Real Estate 2.0
By: Luis Viceira, Marco Di Maggio and Allison Ciechanover
Founded in 2005, Zillow had become the leading online real estate and home-related marketplace. The brand was recognized as a trusted resource for players in the real estate market, providing information and transparency on home prices. Revenue, which was historically... View Details
- Article
The Feeling of Not Knowing It All
By: Haiyang Yang, Ziv Carmon, Dan Ariely and Michael I. Norton
How do consumers assess their mastery of knowledge they have learned? We explore this question by investigating a common knowledge consumption situation: encountering opportunities for further learning. We argue and show that such opportunities can trigger a... View Details
- July 2019
- Article
The Gravitational Pull of Expressing Passion: When and How Expressing Passion Elicits Status Conferral and Support from Others
By: Jon M. Jachimowicz, Christopher To, Shira Agasi, Stéphane Côté and Adam D. Galinsky
Prior research attributes the positive effects of passion on professional success to intrapersonal characteristics. We propose that interpersonal processes are also critical because observers confer status on and support those who express passion. These interpersonal... View Details
- 2010
- Article
I May Not Agree With You, but I Trust You: Caring About Social Issues Signals Integrity
By: Julian Zlatev
What characteristics of an individual signal trustworthiness to other people? I propose that individuals who care about contentious social issues signal to observers that they have integrity and thus can be trusted. Critically, this signal conveys trustworthiness... View Details
- June 2019
- Article
Learning to Become a Taste Expert
By: Kathryn A. Latour and John A. Deighton
Evidence suggests that consumers seek to become more expert about hedonic products to enhance their enjoyment of future consumption occasions. Current approaches to becoming expert center on cultivating an analytic mindset. In the present research the authors explore... View Details
- April 16, 2019
- Article
Research Confirms: When Receiving Bad News, We Shoot the Messenger
By: Leslie John, Hayley Blunden and Heidi Liu
Most jobs require us at some point to deliver bad news—whether it be a minor revelation such as a recruiter telling a prospective employee that there’s no wiggle room in salary, or something major, like when a manager must fire an employee. We dread such discussions... View Details
- April 2019
- Article
Mitigating Malicious Envy: Why Successful Individuals Should Reveal Their Failures
People often feel malicious envy, a destructive interpersonal emotion, when they compare themselves to successful peers. Across three online experiments and a field experiment of entrepreneurs, we identify an interpersonal strategy that can mitigate feelings of... View Details
- April 2019
- Article
Rituals and Nuptials: The Emotional and Relational Consequences of Relationship Rituals
By: Ximena Garcia-Rada, Ovul Sezer and Michael I. Norton
Four studies reveal the benefits of relationship rituals: couples with relationship rituals report more positive emotions and greater relationship satisfaction and commitment than those without them. We show that rituals are crucial for understanding consumption... View Details
Keywords: Rituals; Relationship Satisfaction; Relationships; Satisfaction; Spending; Behavior; Perception; Emotions
- April 2019
- Article
Shooting the Messenger
By: Leslie John, Hayley Blunden and Heidi Liu
Eleven experiments provide evidence that people have a tendency to “shoot the messenger,” deeming innocent bearers of bad news unlikeable. In a preregistered lab experiment, participants rated messengers who delivered bad news from a random drawing as relatively... View Details
- Article
Thin Slices of Workgroups
By: Patricia Satterstrom, Jeffrey T. Polzer, Lisa Kwan, Oliver P. Hauser, Wannawiruch Wiruchnipawan and Marina Burke
In this paper, we explore whether perceivers can accurately assess the effectiveness of groups, how perceivers use group properties to inform their judgment, and the contextual and individual differences that allow some perceivers to be more accurate. Across seven... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
A Preference for Revision Absent Improvement
By: Ximena Garcia-Rada, Leslie K. John, Ed O’Brien and Michael I. Norton
People regularly encounter revised stimuli (e.g., revised versions of products, new editions of
books, tweaked recipes, and technological updates). In principle, a world of constant revision
should benefit people by affording them the most up-to-date offerings. In... View Details