Publications
Publications
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(3,577)
- Faculty Publications (820)
- March 2022
- Supplement
Winning Business at Russell Reynolds (B)
By: Ethan Bernstein and Cara Mazzucco
In an effort to make compensation drive collaboration, Russell Reynolds Associates’ (RRA) CEO Clarke Murphy sought to re-engineer the bonus system for his executive search consultants in 2016. As his HR analytics guru, Kelly Smith, points out, that risks upsetting–and... View Details
Keywords: Compensation; Collaboration; Executive Search Firms; Consulting Firms; Compensation and Benefits; Restructuring; Human Resources; Human Capital; Management Practices and Processes; Organizational Culture; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Social and Collaborative Networks; Recruitment; Selection and Staffing; Talent and Talent Management; Consulting Industry; Employment Industry; Asia; Europe; Latin America; Middle East; North and Central America; South America; Oceania
- 2022
- Working Paper
Can a Website Bring Unemployment Down? Experimental Evidence from France
By: Aïcha Ben Dhia, Bruno Crépon, Esther Mbih, Louise Paul-Delvaux, Bertille Picard and Vincent Pons
We evaluate the impact of an online platform giving job seekers tips to improve their search and recommendations of new occupations and locations to target, based on their personal data and labor market data. Our experiment used an encouragement design and was... View Details
- March 2022
- Article
How Much Does Your Boss Make? The Effects of Salary Comparisons
By: Zoë B. Cullen and Ricardo Perez-Truglia
The vast majority of the pay inequality in an organization comes from differences in pay between employees and their bosses. But are employees aware of these pay disparities? Are employees demotivated by this inequality? To address these questions, we conducted a... View Details
Keywords: Salary; Inequality; Managers; Career Concerns; Pay Transparency; Wages; Equality and Inequality; Perception; Behavior
- Article
Policies to Influence Perceptions about COVID-19 Risk: The Case of Maps
By: Claudia Engel, Jonathan Rodden and Marco Tabellini
Choropleth disease maps have become an important tool for informing the public about the risks posed by COVID-19. In a survey conducted in the U.S. state of Georgia in June 2020, we randomly assigned respondents to view either of two maps. The first one reported... View Details
- February 2022 (Revised January 2024)
- Supplement
Winning Business at Russell Reynolds (C)
By: Ethan Bernstein and Cara Mazzucco
In an effort to make compensation drive collaboration, Russell Reynolds Associates’ (RRA) CEO Clarke Murphy sought to re-engineer the bonus system for his executive search consultants in 2016. As his HR analytics guru, Kelly Smith, points out, that risks upsetting—and... View Details
- February 2022 (Revised May 2022)
- Case
Buddy Valastro: Cake Boss
By: Boris Groysberg, Evan M.S. Hecht and Katherine Connolly Baden
Buddy Valastro, celebrity baker and business owner, inherited his father’s bakery—Carlo’s Bake Shop of Hoboken, New Jersey—at the age of seventeen. He had willed the shop to survive and gone on to fame through his television show, “Cake Boss”—the name most people now... View Details
Keywords: Bakery; Entrepreneur; Scalability; Digital; Systems; Process Improvement; Team Effectiveness; Team Building; COVID-19 Pandemic; Food; Entrepreneurship; Family Business; Crisis Management; Change Management; Leadership; Creativity; Operations; Groups and Teams; Brands and Branding; Food and Beverage Industry; United States
- 2022
- Book
Deep Purpose: The Heart and Soul of High-Performance Companies
By: Ranjay Gulati
This book offers a compelling reassessment and defense of purpose as a management ethos, documenting the vast performance gains and social benefits that become possible when firms manage to get purpose right. Few business topics have aroused more skepticism in recent... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
Hate Crime Increases with Minoritized Group Rank
People are on the move in unprecedented numbers within and between countries. How does demographic change affect local intergroup dynamics? In complement to accounts that emphasize stereotypical features of groups as determinants of their treatment, we propose the... View Details
- 2022
- Article
Alleviating Time Poverty Among the Working Poor: A Pre-Registered Longitudinal Field Experiment
By: A.V. Whillans and Colin West
Poverty entails more than a scarcity of material resources—it also involves a shortage of time. To examine the causal benefits of reducing time poverty, we conducted a longitudinal feld experiment over six consecutive weeks in an urban slum in Kenya with a sample of... View Details
Keywords: Time; Subjective Well Being; Administrative Costs; Friction; Poverty; Well-being; Money; Perception; Kenya
- January 2022 (Revised April 2025)
- Case
Steem Versus Hive: Testing Blockchain Governance
By: Shikhar Ghosh and Shweta Bagai
This case examines a pivotal governance conflict that occurred in 2020 when Justin Sun, founder of the TRON blockchain, acquired Steemit Inc., the company behind a popular social media platform operating on the Steem blockchain. Steem, launched in 2016 by Daniel... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
Feeling Seen: Leader Eye Gaze Promotes Psychological Safety, Participation, and Voice
By: Nicole Abi-Esber, Alison Wood Brooks and Ethan Burris
Psychological safety is a hallmark of effective team functioning. Although prior work shows that characteristics of the leader influence employee judgments of psychological safety (and subsequent decisions to speak up), we know very little about “the specific behaviors... View Details
- January 10, 2022
- Article
The Link Between Income, Income Inequality, and Prosocial Behavior Around the World: A Multiverse Approach
By: Lucia Macchia and Ashley V. Whillans
The questions of whether high-income individuals are more prosocial than low-income individuals and whether income inequality moderates this effect have received extensive attention. We shed new light on this topic by analyzing a large-scale dataset with a... View Details
- January 2022
- Teaching Plan
Just Arrived: Integrating Refugees in Sweden
By: Brian Trelstad and Emilie Billaud
Teaching Plan for HBS Case No. 321-040. Just Arrived is an online platform that matches newly-arrived immigrants in Sweden with employment opportunities. As one of several for-profit and non-profit start-ups in Europe that is looking to address the refugee crisis, the... View Details
- January 2022
- Article
Global Behaviors, Perceptions, and the Emergence of Social Norms at the Onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic
By: Lukas Hensel, Marc Witte, Stefano Caria, Thiemo Fetzer, Stefano Fiorin, Friedrich M. Goetz, Margarita Gomez, Johannes Haushofer, Andriy Ivchenko, Gordon T. Kraft-Todd, Elena Reutskaja, Christopher Roth, Erez Yoeli and Jon M. Jachimowicz
We conducted a large-scale survey covering 58 countries and over 100,000 respondents between late March and early April 2020 to study beliefs and attitudes towards citizens' and governments' responses at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Most respondents reported... View Details
- 2022
- Conference Presentation
Organizational Competition: A Catalyst for Workplace Diversity and Desires for Uniqueness
By: Samantha N. Smith, Edward H. Chang, Erika L. Kirgios and Katherine L. Milkman
Competition is prevalent in organizations. For example, people often compete against their colleagues for status and recognition in the workplace or for opportunities for advancement. Workers also compete against others to get hired into organizations in the first... View Details
- January 2022
- Article
Rational Habit Formation: Experimental Evidence from Handwashing in India
By: Reshmaan Hussam, Atonu Rabbani, Giovanni Reggiani and Natalia Rigol
We test the predictions of the rational addiction model, reconceptualized as rational habit formation, in the context of handwashing in rural India. To track handwashing, we design soap dispensers with timed sensors. We test for rational habit formation by informing... View Details
- 2022
- Book
Ripe for Revolution: Building Socialism in the Third World
By: Jeremy Friedman
A historical account of ideology in the Global South as the postwar laboratory of socialism, its legacy following the Cold War, and the continuing influence of socialist ideas worldwide.
In the first decades after World War II, many newly independent... View Details
In the first decades after World War II, many newly independent... View Details
- 2022
- Conference Presentation
Workplace Competition and the Desire for Uniqueness
By: Samantha N. Smith, Edward H. Chang, Erika L. Kirgios and Katherine L. Milkman
Across four preregistered studies (n=3,202), we find that intra-group competition increases people’s willingness to join groups where they will be underrepresented along a given identity dimension (e.g., area of specialization, political affiliation). Via mediation and... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Threat and Assimilation: Evidence from Refugees in Germany
By: Philipp Jaschke, Sulin Sardoschau and Marco Tabellini
This paper studies the effects of local threat on the cultural assimilation and economic integration of refugees, exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in their allocation across German regions between 2013 and 2016. We use representative survey data and... View Details
Keywords: Assimilation; Threat Hypothesis; Migration; Cultural Change; Refugees; Culture; Identity; Germany
- Article
Megastudies Improve the Impact of Applied Behavioural Science
By: Katherine L. Milkman, Dena Gromet, Hung Ho, Joseph S. Kay, Timothy W. Lee, Pepi Pandiloski, Yeji Park, Aneesh Rai, Max Bazerman, John Beshears, Lauri Bonacorsi, Colin Camerer, Edward Chang, Gretchen Chapman, Robert Cialdini, Hengchen Dai, Lauren Eskreis-Winkler, Ayelet Fishbach, James J. Gross, Samantha Horn, Alexa Hubbard, Steven J. Jones, Dean Karlan, Tim Kautz, Erika Kirgios, Joowon Klusowski, Ariella Kristal, Rahul Ladhania, Jens Ludwig, George Loewenstein, Barbara Mellers, Sendhil Mullainathan, Silvia Saccardo, Jann Spiess, Gaurav Suri, Joachim H. Talloen, Jamie Taxer, Yaacov Trope, Lyle Ungar, Kevin G. Volpp, Ashley V. Whillans, Jonathan Zinman and Angela L. Duckworth
Policy-makers are increasingly turning to behavioural science for insights about how to improve citizens’ decisions and outcomes. Typically, different scientists test different intervention ideas in different samples using different outcomes over different time... View Details