Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(1,630)
- Faculty Publications (238)
- 2014
- Article
Executive Compensation and Human Capital Investments Through Industry Selection
By: Boris Groysberg and Eric Lin
We use proprietary data capturing compensation levels of executives placed by a global search firm to investigate how executives evaluate rewards and risks of human capital investment choices. Our findings suggest that more isolated industries with lower opportunity to... View Details
- February 2014
- Article
Gender Differences in Willingness to Guess
We present the results of an experiment that explores whether women are less willing than men to guess on multiple-choice tests. Our test consists of practice questions from SAT II subject tests; we vary whether a penalty is imposed for a wrong answer and the salience... View Details
- 2014
- Article
Prosocial Spending and Happiness: Using Money to Benefit Others Pays Off
By: Elizabeth W. Dunn, Lara B. Aknin and Michael I. Norton
While a great deal of research has shown that people with more money are somewhat happier
than people with less money, our research demonstrates that how people spend their money also matters for their happiness. In particular, both correlational and... View Details
- Article
No Evidence for an Effect of Testosterone Administration on Delay Discounting in Male University Students
By: Georgia Rada Ortner, Matthias Wibral, Anke Becker, Thomas Dohmen, Dietrich Klingmüller, Armin Falk and Bernd Weber
Intertemporal choices between a smaller sooner and a larger delayed reward are one of the most important types of decisions humans face in their everyday life. The degree to which individuals discount delayed rewards correlates with impulsiveness. Steep delay... View Details
- 2013
- Case
Career Pathways, Performance Pay, and Peer-review Promotion in Baltimore City Public Schools
By: Susan Moore Johnson, John J-H Kim, Geoff Marietta, S. Elisabeth Faller and James Noonan
In the fall of 2012, Dr. Andres Alonso had much to celebrate about in his five-year tenure as CEO of Baltimore City Public Schools, including the approval and implementation of an innovative teachers' contract with a jointly-governed four-tier career pathway that tied... View Details
- June 2013
- Case
Olympic Rent-A-Car U.S.: Customer Loyalty Battles
By: John Deighton and James T. Kindley
The marketing and operations managers for Olympic Rent-A-Car meet to decide how to respond to changes in the loyalty rewards program at the market-leading competitor. The competitor's program gives awards based on dollars spent instead of days rented and eliminates... View Details
- June 20, 2013
- Article
The Tyranny of Minority Shareholders
By: Josh Baron and Henry Foley
The article discusses challenges arising from minority ownership in the context of the proposed Empire State Building IPO. It emphasizes the complexities that minority shareholders can introduce in business decisions when families take their assets public. The article... View Details
- 2013
- Article
Does Social Connection Turn Good Deeds into Good Feelings? On the Value of Putting the 'Social' in Prosocial Spending
By: Lara B. Aknin, Elizabeth W. Dunn, Gillian M. Sandstrom and Michael I. Norton
When are the emotional benefits of generous behavior most likely to emerge? In three studies, we demonstrate that the hedonic benefits of generous spending are most likely when spending promotes positive social connection. Study 1 shows that people feel happier after... View Details
- April 2013
- Article
Making a Difference Matters: Impact Unlocks the Emotional Benefits of Prosocial Spending
By: Lara B. Aknin, Elizabeth W. Dunn, Ashley V. Whillans, Adam M. Grant and Michael I. Norton
When does giving lead to happiness? Here, we present two studies demonstrating that the
emotional benefits of spending money on others (prosocial spending) are unleashed when
givers are aware of their positive impact. In Study 1, an experiment using real... View Details
- March 2013
- Article
Advertising's New Medium: Human Experience
Standard ad messaging and conventional creative executions and placements are rapidly becoming outmoded. To win consumers' attention and trust, marketers must think less about what advertising says to its targets and more about what it does for them. Rather than... View Details
- March 2013
- Other Article
Redesigning Primary Care: A Strategic Vision to Improve Value by Organizing Around Patients' Needs
By: Michael E. Porter, Erika A. Pabo and Thomas H. Lee
Primary care in the United States currently struggles to attract new physicians and to garner investments in infrastructure required to meet patients' needs. We believe that the absence of a robust overall strategy for the entire spectrum of primary care is a... View Details
Keywords: Health
- 2013
- Article
Prosocial Spending and Well-Being: Cross-Cultural Evidence for a Psychological Universal
By: Lara B. Aknin, Christopher P. Barrington-Leigh, Elizabeth W. Dunn, John F. Helliwell, Justine Burns, Robert Biswas-Diener, Imelda Kemeza, Paul Nyende, Claire Ashton-James and Michael I. Norton
This research provides the first support for a possible psychological universal: Human beings around the world derive emotional benefits from using their financial resources to help others (prosocial spending). In Study 1, survey data from 136 countries were examined... View Details
- November 2012
- Article
An Age Penalty in Racial Preferences
By: Deborah A. Small, Devin G. Pope and Michael I. Norton
We document an age penalty in racial discrimination: charitable behavior toward African American children decreases-and negative stereotypical inferences increase-with the age of those children. Using data from an online charity that solicits donations for school... View Details
- December 2012 (Revised August 2020)
- Case
Rodan + Fields Dermatologists
By: Das Narayandas, Michael Roberts and Liz Kind
The case focuses on issues involved in managing the direct multilevel marketing sales consultants who sell R+F skin care products. The company is trying to better manage the inconsistent and highly variable recruitment behavior of the sales force i.e., the degree to... View Details
- 2012
- White Paper
Robust Enforcement Should Complement Voluntary Regulation
By: Jodi L. Short and Michael W. Toffel
Spurred by the anti-regulation movement that started in the 1970s, voluntary self-regulation programs have emerged in many regulatory agencies, seeking to increase cooperation between government and industry to achieve greater and more cost-effective compliance.... View Details
- April 2012 (Revised February 2017)
- Case
Dovernet
By: Robert Simons and Natalie Kindred
This case illustrates the implications of using stringent performance measurement systems to create performance pressure, motivate employee achievement, and sharpen a firm's competitiveness. It opens by describing the downsides of the ruthlessly competitive culture at... View Details
- 1 Mar 2012
- Talk
German Health Care: Moving to a Value-Based System
Michael E. Porter of Harvard Business School assesses the German health care system and offers suggestions for reforming to a value-based system, where rewards flow to those practices performing best. Introduced by Karl Lauterbach, professor of health economics and... View Details
- March 2012
- Article
The Incentive Bubble
By: Mihir Desai
The past three decades have seen American capitalism quietly transformed by a single, powerful idea—that financial markets are a suitable tool for measuring performance and structuring compensation. Stock instruments for managers, high-powered incentive contracts for... View Details
- February 2012 (Revised August 2013)
- Case
What's the Deal with LivingSocial?
By: Michael I. Norton, Luc Wathieu, Betsy Page Sigman and Marco Bertini
Tim O'Shaughnessy, the 29-year-old CEO of LivingSocial, is growing a revolutionary worldwide business of "daily deals"—in which retailers offer a heavily-discounted product or service available for purchase for brief (often 24-hour) windows. The case explores the... View Details
- 2012
- Article
Do Voters Demand Responsive Governments? Evidence from Indian Disaster Relief
By: Shawn Cole, Andrew Healy and Eric Werker
Using rainfall, public relief, and election data from India, we examine how governments respond to adverse shocks and how voters react to these responses. The data show that voters punish the incumbent party for weather events beyond its control. However, fewer voters... View Details