Publications

Educators

2021
Working Paper

Multiple Team Membership, Turnover, and On-Time Delivery: Evidence from Construction Services

By: Hise O. Gibson, Bradely R. Staats and Ananth Raman

Firms who want to compete in dynamic markets are finding that they must build more agile operations to ensure success. One way for a firm to increase organizational agility is to allocate employees to multiple project teams, simultaneously—a practice known as multiple... View Details

Keywords: Multiple Team Membership; Turnover; Fluid Teams; Project Management; Groups and Teams; Projects; Management; Performance

January 2018
Article

Who Gets Hired? The Importance of Competition Among Applicants

By: Edward P. Lazear, Kathryn L. Shaw and Christopher Stanton

Despite seeming to be an important requirement for hiring, the concept of a slot is absent from virtually all of economics. Macroeconomic studies of vacancies and search come closest, but the implications of slot-based hiring for individual worker outcomes has not been... View Details

Keywords: Hiring; Selection and Staffing; Employment; Competency and Skills

2012
Chapter

When Identities, Interests, and Information Collide: How Subgroups Create Hidden Profiles in Teams

By: Jeffrey T. Polzer, Lisa Kwan and Lisa B. Kwan

Purpose—We review how team members' identities and interests affect team functioning, paying special attention to subgroup dynamics triggered by fault lines and coalitions. This review sets the stage for describing novel pathways through which identities and... View Details

Keywords: Information; Conflict of Interests; Interests; Groups and Teams; Identity; Performance

September 2012
Article

Food Choices of Minority and Low-Income Employees: A Cafeteria Intervention

By: Douglas E. Levy, Jason Riis, Lillian M. Sonnenberg, Susan J. Barraclough and Anne N. Thorndike

Background: Effective strategies are needed to address obesity, particularly among minority and low-income individuals.

Purpose: To test whether a two-phase point-of-purchase intervention improved food choices across racial, socioeconomic (job... View Details

Keywords: Working Conditions; Safety; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Competitive Advantage; Cost

09 Nov 2017
HBS Seminar

Alfonso Gambardella, Bocconi University

09 Jun 2022
Blog Post

The MBA Class of 2022 Looks Back

career exploration. You may come into HBS wanting to pursue something specific, but this is the time to test uncharted waters and learn from all your peers who have worked in diverse fields! What is your favorite memory of your time at... View Details

12 Dec 2014
Working Paper Summaries

Bottlenecks, Modules and Dynamic Architectural Capabilities

Keywords: by Carliss Y. Baldwin

August 5, 2025
Article

Data-driven Equation Discovery Reveals Nonlinear Reinforcement Learning in Humans

By: Kyle J. LaFollette, Janni Yuval, Roey Schurr, David Melnikoff and Amit Goldenberg

Computational models of reinforcement learning (RL) have significantly contributed to our understanding of human behavior and decision-making. Traditional RL models, however, often adopt a linear approach to updating reward expectations, potentially oversimplifying the... View Details

Keywords: AI and Machine Learning; Behavior; Learning; Motivation and Incentives; Mathematical Methods

2025
Working Paper

Bank Capital and the Growth of Private Credit

By: Sergey Chernenko, Robert Ialenti and David Scharfstein

We show that business development companies (BDCs), a significant source of private credit, are very well capitalized according to bank capital frameworks. These types of private credit funds have median risk-based capital ratios of about 36%, which is 26 percentage... View Details

Keywords: Financing and Loans; Capital; Credit; Financial Institutions

SSRN

2023
Working Paper

Keep Your Enemies Closer: Strategic Platform Adjustments during U.S. and French Elections

By: Rafael Di Tella, Randy Kotti, Caroline Le Pennec and Vincent Pons

A key tenet of representative democracy is that politicians' discourse and policies should follow voters' preferences. In the median voter theorem, this outcome emerges as candidates strategically adjust their platform to get closer to their opponent. Despite its... View Details

Keywords: Political Ideology; Political Elections; United States; France

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

Keywords: Prosocial Behavior; Moral Sensibility; Decision Making; Risk and Uncertainty; Behavior; Perception

04 Oct 2019
HBS Seminar

Annabelle Fowler (Harvard University), Harvard University

Design-Based Confidence Sequences: A General Approach to Risk Mitigation in Online Experimentation.

Randomized experiments have become the standard method for companies to evaluate the performance of new products or services. In addition to augmenting managers' decision-making, experimentation mitigates risk by limiting the proportion of customers exposed to... View Details

Web

Social Enterprise - Faculty & Research

to avoid disruption costs, but we theorize that such responses evoke concession costs that prompt organizations to shift resources and attention from other social domains whose performance suffers. We test this theory by examining... View Details

06 Dec 2022
Research & Ideas

Latest Isn’t Always Greatest: Why Product Updates Capture Consumers

associate professor at the University of Chicago. Consumers put on blindfolds The researchers performed dozens of experiments, using products ranging from gummy candy to dictionaries, and testing out labels such as “newer version,”... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Consumer Products; Retail

13 Aug 2012
Research & Ideas

When Good Incentives Lead to Bad Decisions

experimental field study, the researchers set out to test the efficacy of three distinct incentive schemes for employees in charge of assessing risk and issuing loans: the origination bonus (in which officers are rewarded a commission for... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Banking

Web

Stata Temporary Files and Stata Tmp - Research Computing Services

number of files simultaneously Some of the file sizes may be large ( > several GB) You will submit a large number of jobs (> 10) to run at the same time You may still testing your code, your workflow, or changing parameters, which may... View Details

23 Nov 2010
Working Paper Summaries

Growth Through Heterogeneous Innovations

Keywords: by Ufuk Akcigit & William R. Kerr; Technology

2021
Working Paper

'Just Letting You Know…': Underestimating Others' Desire for Constructive Feedback

By: Nicole Abi-Esber, Jennifer 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

Keywords: Feedback; Helping; Prosocial Behavior; Relationships; Social Psychology; Theory; Perception