Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(1,704)
- Faculty Publications (233)
- 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
- January 2014 (Revised June 2014)
- Supplement
Dumb Ways To Die: Advertising Train Safety (B)
By: John Quelch
The case series focuses on Melbourne Trains' viral advertising campaign to improve safe behaviors around trains among young people. This iconic, low budget campaign swept the Cannes Lions advertising awards in 2013 and became a social media sensation. View Details
- 2014
- Book
Business History
By: Walter A. Friedman and Geoffrey Jones
This volume contains a selection of 42 foundational articles on the discipline of business history written between 1934 and the present day by scholars based in the United States, Europe, Asia, and Latin America. A wide-ranging editorial introduction describes the... View Details
- Article
Financial Incentives for Exercise Adherence in Adults: Systematic Review and Meta-analysis
By: Marc S. Mitchell, Jack M. Goodman, David A. Alter, Leslie K. John, Paul I. Oh, Maureen T. Pakosh and Guy E. Faulkner
Context
Less than 5% of U.S. adults accumulate the required dose of exercise to maintain health. Behavioral economics has stimulated renewed interest in economic-based, population-level health interventions to address this issue. Despite widespread implementation of... View Details
- November 2013
- Article
Simplification and Saving
By: John Beshears, James J. Choi, David Laibson and Brigitte C. Madrian
The daunting complexity of important financial decisions can lead to procrastination. We evaluate a low-cost intervention that substantially simplifies the retirement savings plan participation decision. Individuals received an opportunity to enroll in a retirement... View Details
- Article
Consumers' Misunderstanding of Health Insurance
By: George Loewenstein, Joelle Y. Friedman, Barbara McGill, Sarah Ahmad, Suzanne Linck, Stacey Sinkula, John Beshears, James J. Choi, Jonathan Kolstad, David Laibson, Brigitte C. Madrian, John A. List and Kevin G. Volpp
We report results from two surveys of representative samples of Americans with private health insurance. The first examines how well Americans understand, and believe they understand, traditional health insurance coverage. The second examines whether those insured... View Details
- June 2013
- Case
The World Economic Forum's Global Leadership Fellows Program
By: Rakesh Khurana and Eric Baldwin
This case examines a distinctive leadership development program within the World Economic Forum. The program, born out of the conviction that the complexity of global challenges at the beginning of the 21st century required a new generation of global leaders, recruited... View Details
- 2013
- Working Paper
Inequality and Decision Making: Imagining a New Line of Inquiry
By: David Moss, Anant Thaker and Howard Rudnick
The substantial increase in inequality in the United States over the past three decades has provoked considerable debate, with some analysts characterizing rising inequality as among the greatest threats facing the nation and others dismissing it as little more than a... View Details
- June 2013
- Article
What Is Privacy Worth?
By: Alessandro Acquisti, Leslie K. John and George Loewenstein
Understanding the value that individuals assign to the protection of their personal data is of great importance for business, law, and public policy. We use a field experiment informed by behavioral economics and decision research to investigate individual privacy... View Details
- 2013
- Working Paper
Managers and Market Capitalism
By: Rebecca Henderson and Karthik Ramanna
In a capitalist system based on free markets, do managers have responsibilities to the system itself? If they do, should these responsibilities shape their behavior when they are engaging in the political process in an attempt to structure the institutions of... View Details
- March 2013
- Article
From Social Control to Financial Economics: The Linked Ecologies of Economics and Business in Twentieth Century America
By: Marion Fourcade and Rakesh Khurana
This article draws on historical material to examine the co-evolution of economic science and business education over the course of the twentieth century, showing that fields evolve not only through internal struggles but also through struggles taking place in adjacent... View Details
Keywords: Professions; Disciplines; Neo-Liberalism; Education; Economics; Finance; Society; United States
- 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
- 2014
- Working Paper
Bridging Science and Technology Through Academic-Industry Partnerships
By: Sen Chai and Willy C. Shih
Scientific research and its translation into commercialized technology is a driver of wealth creation and economic growth. Partnerships to foster the translational processes from public research organizations, such as universities and hospitals, to private firms are a... View Details
- 2013
- Chapter
Behavioral Corporate Finance: A Current Survey
By: Malcolm Baker and Jeffrey Wurgler
We survey the theory and evidence of behavioral corporate finance, which generally takes one of two approaches. The market timing and catering approach views managerial financing and investment decisions as rational managerial responses to securities mispricing. The... View Details
- 2013
- Book
Judgment in Managerial Decision Making
By: Max Bazerman and Don A. Moore
Is your judgment influenced by personal biases? In situations requiring careful judgment, we're all influenced by our own biases to some extent. But, with Judgment in Managerial Decision Making, you can learn how to overcome those biases to make better... View Details
- 2013
- Article
Planning Prompts as a Means of Increasing Preventive Screening Rates
By: Katherine L Milkman, John Beshears, James J. Choi, David Laibson and Brigitte C. Madrian
- November 2012
- Case
Occupy Wall Street
By: Rakesh Khurana and Eric Baldwin
This case examines the Occupy Wall Street movement, which emerged in late 2011 in response to the fallout from the global financial crisis of 2008 and the economic downturn that followed. Occupy Wall Street was born out of a sense of frustration with both a global... View Details
- November 2012
- Article
Empirical Observations on Longer-term Use of Incentives for Weight Loss
By: Leslie K. John, George Loewenstein and Kevin Volpp
Behavioral economic-based interventions are emerging as powerful tools to help individuals accomplish their own goals, including weight loss. Deposit contract incentive systems give participants the opportunity to put their money down toward losing weight, which they... View Details
- November 2012
- Article
The Organization of Firms Across Countries
By: Nicholas Bloom, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen
We argue that social capital as proxied by trust increases aggregate productivity by affecting the organization of firms. To do this we collect new data on the decentralization of investment, hiring, production, and sales decisions from Corporate Headquarters to local... View Details
Keywords: Decentralization; Social Capital; Theory Of The Firm; Firm Objectives, Organization, And Behavior; Business Economics; Management Of Technological Innovation And R＆D; Technological Change: Choices And Consequences; Diffusion Processes; Organizational Structure; Performance Productivity; Trust; Technology Adoption; Multinational Firms and Management
- September 2012
- Article
The Bedside Manner of Homo Economicus: How and Why Priming an Economic Schema Reduces Compassion
By: Andrew Molinsky, Adam M. Grant and Joshua D. Margolis
We investigate how, why and when activating economic schemas reduces the compassion that individuals extend to others in need when delivering bad news. Across three experiments, we show that unobtrusively priming economic schemas decreases the compassion that... View Details