Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(1,596)
- Faculty Publications (369)
- 2021
- Working Paper
Consuming Contests: Outcome Uncertainty and Spectator Demand for Contest-based Entertainment
By: Patrick J. Ferguson and Karim R. Lakhani
Contests that are designed to be consumed for entertainment by non-contestants are a fixture of economic, cultural and political life. In this paper, we examine whether individuals prefer to consume contests that have more uncertain outcomes. We look to... View Details
- 2021
- Working Paper
The Health Costs of Cost-Sharing
By: Amitabh Chandra, Evan Flack and Ziad Obermeyer
We use the design of Medicare’s prescription drug benefit program to demonstrate three facts about the health consequences of cost-sharing. First, we show that an as-if-random increase of 33.6% in out-of-pocket price (11.0 percentage points (p.p.) change in... View Details
- January 2021
- Article
Commuting and Innovation: Are Closer Inventors More Productive?
By: Hongyu Xiao, Andy Wu and Jaeho Kim
We estimate the causal effect of workplace–home commuting distance on inventor productivity. We construct a novel panel of U.S. inventors with precisely measured workplace–home distances and inventor-level productivity. Our identification strategy exploits firm office... View Details
- Article
Resilience vs. Vulnerability: Psychological Safety and Reporting of Near Misses with Varying Proximity to Harm in Radiation Oncology
By: Palak Kundu, Olivia Jung, Amy C. Edmondson, Nzhde Agazaryan, John Hegde, Michael Steinberg and Ann Raldow
Background
Psychological safety, a shared belief that interpersonal risk taking is safe, is an important determinant of incident reporting. However, how psychological safety affects near-miss reporting is unclear, as near misses contain contrasting cues that... View Details
Psychological safety, a shared belief that interpersonal risk taking is safe, is an important determinant of incident reporting. However, how psychological safety affects near-miss reporting is unclear, as near misses contain contrasting cues that... View Details
- Article
Value of New Performance Information in Healthcare: Evidence from Japan
By: Susanna Gallani, Takehisa Kajiwara and Ranjani Krishnan
Mandatory measurement and disclosure of outcome measures are commonly used policy tools in
healthcare. The effectiveness of such disclosures relies on the extent to which the new information produced by the mandatory system is internalized by the healthcare... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Dog Eat Dog: Balancing Network Effects and Differentiation in a Digital Platform Merger
By: Chiara Farronato, Jessica Fong and Andrey Fradkin
Digital platforms are increasingly the subject of regulatory scrutiny. In comparison to multiple competitors, a single platform may increase consumer welfare if network effects are large or may decrease welfare due to higher prices or reduction in platform variety. We... View Details
- Article
Nudging: Progress to Date and Future Directions
By: John Beshears and Harry Kosowsky
Nudges influence behavior by changing the environment in which decisions are made, without restricting the menu of options and without altering financial incentives. This paper assesses past empirical research on nudging and provides recommendations for future work in... View Details
- November 2020
- Article
Tackling Youth Unemployment: Evidence from a Labor Market Experiment in Uganda
By: Livia Alfonsi, Oriana Bandiera, Vittorio Bassi, Robin Burgess, Imran Rasul, Munshi Sulaiman and Anna Vitali
We design a labor market experiment to compare demand- and supply-side policies to tackle youth unemployment, a key issue in low-income countries. The experiment tracks 1700 workers and 1500 firms over four years to compare the effect of offering workers either... View Details
- November 2020
- Article
Taxation in Matching Markets
By: Arnaud Dupuy, Alfred Galichon, Sonia Jaffe and Scott Duke Kominers
We analyze the effects of taxation in two-sided matching markets, i.e., markets in which all agents have heterogeneous preferences over potential partners. In matching markets, taxes can generate inefficiency on the allocative margin by changing who is matched to whom,... View Details
- 2021
- Working Paper
The Effects of Temporal Distance on Intra-Firm Communication: Evidence from Daylight Savings Time
By: Jasmina Chauvin, Prithwiraj Choudhury and Tommy Pan Fang
Cross-border communication costs have plummeted and enabled the global distribution of work, but frictions attributable to distance persist. We estimate the causal effects of temporal distance, i.e., time zone separation between employees, on intra-firm communication,... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Consumption: The Impact of Access and Value
By: Retsef Levi, Elisabeth Paulson and Georgia Perakis
The goal of this paper is to leverage household-level data to improve food-related policies aimed at increasing the consumption of fruits and vegetables (FVs) among low-income households. Currently, several interventions target areas where residents have limited... View Details
Keywords: Food Deserts; Food Access; Food Policy; Causal Inference; Food; Nutrition; Poverty; Government Administration
- 2022
- Working Paper
Heterogeneity of Gain-Loss Attitudes and Expectations-Based Reference Points
By: Pol Campos-Mercade, Lorenz Goette, Thomas Graeber, Alex Kellogg and Charles Sprenger
Existing tests of reference-dependent preferences assume universal loss aversion. This paper examines heterogeneity in gain-loss attitudes, and explores its implications for identifying models of the reference point. In two experimental settings we measure gain-loss... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Targeting for Long-Term Outcomes
By: Jeremy Yang, Dean Eckles, Paramveer Dhillon and Sinan Aral
Decision makers often want to target interventions so as to maximize an outcome that is observed only in the long term. This typically requires delaying decisions until the outcome is observed or relying on simple short-term proxies for the long-term outcome. Here we... View Details
- September 2020
- Article
Customer Supercharging in Experience-Centric Channels
By: David R. Bell, Santiago Gallino and Antonio Moreno
We conjecture that for online retailers, experience-centric offline store formats do not simply expand market coverage, but rather, serve to significantly amplify future positive customer behaviors, both online and offline. We term this phenomenon “supercharging” and... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Design and Analysis of Switchback Experiments
By: Iavor I Bojinov, David Simchi-Levi and Jinglong Zhao
In switchback experiments, a firm sequentially exposes an experimental unit to a random treatment, measures its response, and repeats the procedure for several periods to determine which treatment leads to the best outcome. Although practitioners have widely adopted... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
When Should Public Programs Be Privately Administered? Theory and Evidence from the Paycheck Protection Program
By: Alexander Bartik, Zoë B. Cullen, Edward L. Glaeser, Michael Luca, Christopher Stanton and Adi Sunderam
What happens when public resources are allocated by private companies whose objectives may be
imperfectly aligned with policy goals? We study this question in the context of the Paycheck
Protection Program (PPP), which relied on private banks to disburse aid to small... View Details
- August 2020
- Article
Do Physician Incentives Increase Patient Medication Adherence?
By: Edward Kong, John Beshears, David Laibson, Brigitte Madrian, Kevin Volpp, George Loewenstein, Jonathan Kolstad and James J. Choi
We conducted a randomized experiment (911 primary care practices and 8,935 nonadherent patients) to test the effect of paying physicians for increasing patient medication adherence in three drug classes: diabetes medication, antihypertensives, and statins. We measured... View Details
- August 2020
- Article
Workplace Knowledge Flows
By: Jason Sandvik, Richard Saouma, Nathan Seegert and Christopher Stanton
We conducted a field experiment in a sales firm to test whether improving knowledge flows between coworkers affects productivity. Our design allows us to compare different management practices and to isolate whether frictions to knowledge transmission primarily reside... View Details
- Article
The Importance of Being Causal
By: Iavor I Bojinov, Albert Chen and Min Liu
Causal inference is the study of how actions, interventions, or treatments affect outcomes of interest. The methods that have received the lion’s share of attention in the data science literature for establishing causation are variations of randomized experiments.... View Details
- July–September 2020
- Article
Innovation Contest: Effect of Perceived Support for Learning on Participation
By: Olivia Jung, Andrea Blasco and Karim R. Lakhani
Background: Frontline staff are well positioned to conceive improvement opportunities based on first-hand knowledge of what works and does not work. The innovation contest may be a relevant and useful vehicle to elicit staff ideas. However, the success of the... View Details