Publications

27 Sep 2012
News

Guanxi or关系: one word, many interpretations

March 1991 (Revised January 1993)
Background Note

Why Do Good Managers Choose Poor Strategies?

The uncertainty and complexity of most business environments make successful management a difficult art. Frequently, bright, experienced, well-educated people manage their companies into strategic distress. Many of these bad results are not simply a matter of bad luck.... View Details

Keywords: Risk and Uncertainty; Prejudice and Bias; Business Strategy; Cognition and Thinking

Educators

September 2017
Article

The Advocacy Trap: When Legitimacy Building Inhibits Organizational Learning

By: Tiona Zuzul and Amy C. Edmondson

This paper describes a relationship between legitimacy building and learning for a new firm in a nascent industry. Through a longitudinal study of a new firm in the nascent smart city industry, we found that the firm failed to make progress on important internal... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Learning; Advocacy; Organizations; Learning; Organizational Culture; Entrepreneurship

Tiona Zuzul is an Assistant Professor in the Strategy Unit. She teaches the MBA elective Making Difficult Decisions and contributes to various executive education programs. Professor Zuzul studies how leaders’ cognition and communication shape the decisions... View Details

February 2016 (Revised September 2017)
Case

Neurotrack and the Alzheimer's Puzzle

By: Richard G. Hamermesh, Liz Kind and Carin-Isabel Knoop

Elli Kaplan founded Neurotrack in 2012 with a breakthrough noninvasive cognitive diagnostics test that will detect Alzheimer's disease in its earliest pre-symptomatic stages. While the company has gained great traction in the three years since it was started, with no... View Details

Keywords: Alzheimer's Disease; Diagnostics; Healthcare; Entrepreneurship; Health Disorders; Science-Based Business; Business Model; Medical Devices and Supplies Industry; United States

Educators

12 Jul 2007
Working Paper Summaries

Toward a Theory of Behavioral Operations

Keywords: by Francesca Gino & Gary Pisano

2020
Working Paper

What Can Economics Say About Alzheimer's Disease?

By: Amitabh Chandra, Courtney Coile and Corina Mommaerts

Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) affects one in ten people aged 65 or older and is the most expensive disease in the United States. We describe the central economic questions raised by AD. While there is overlap with the economics of aging, the defining features of the... View Details

Keywords: Health Disorders; Health Care and Treatment; Economics

Research Summary

Overview

Given the difficulty of directly debiasing cognitive and social biases, Ariella's research focuses on how environments can be structured to reduce biased behaviors and outcomes. Ariella is currently pursuing two main strands of research: the first is a focus on... View Details

September–October 2020
Article

A New Model for Ethical Leadership

By: Max Bazerman

Rather than try to follow a set of simple rules (“Don’t lie.” “Don’t cheat.”), leaders and managers seeking to be more ethical should focus on creating the most value for society. This utilitarian view, Bazerman argues, blends philosophical thought with business school... View Details

Keywords: Social Value; Leadership; Moral Sensibility; Ethics; Decision Making; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Society

Samantha is a behavioral scientist, earning her Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior (Micro) at Harvard Business School. Her research examines employees' strategic decisions under competition. Her work also examines how to harness diverse talent effectively, driving... View Details

2008
Article

Learning (Not) to Talk About Race: When Older Children Underperform in Social Categorization

By: Evan P. Apfelbaum, Kristin Pauker, Nalini Ambady, Samuel R. Sommers and Michael I. Norton

The present research identifies an anomaly in sociocognitive development, whereby younger children (8 and 9 years) outperform their older counterparts (10 and 11 years) in a basic categorization task in which the acknowledgment of racial difference facilitates... View Details

Keywords: Transition; Age; Race; Society; Cognition and Thinking

Research Summary

Sleep

Most people spend about a quarter to a third of their lives sleeping. For an activity that is such a large part of our lives, we know very little about it. Dr. Bos is working together with the Center for Sleep and Cognition at the Harvard Medical School to investigate... View Details

April 2011
Article

Ethical Breakdowns: Good People often Let Bad Things Happen. Why?

By: Max H. Bazerman and Ann E. Tenbrunsel

Companies are spending a great deal of time and money to install codes of ethics, ethics training, compliance programs, and in-house watchdogs. If these efforts worked, the money would be well spent. But unethical behavior appears to be on the rise. The authors observe... View Details

Keywords: Ethics; Moral Sensibility; Corporate Accountability; Corporate Governance; Leadership; Behavior; Conflict of Interests

05 Feb 2014
News

Awful Weather Makes for Better Workers (and More Mouse Trap Sales)

2023
Working Paper

The Complexity of Economic Decisions

By: Xavier Gabaix and Thomas Graeber

We propose a theory of the complexity of economic decisions. Leveraging a macroeconomic framework of production functions, we conceptualize the mind as a cognitive economy, where a task’s complexity is determined by its composition of cognitive operations. Complexity... View Details

Keywords: Decisions; Complexity; Perception; Consumer Behavior; Production

Article

The Similarity Heuristic

By: Daniel Read and Yael Grushka-Cockayne

Decision makers often make snap judgments using fast‐and‐frugal decision rules called cognitive heuristics. Research into cognitive heuristics has been divided into two camps. One camp has emphasized the limitations and biases produced by the heuristics; another has... View Details

Keywords: Heuristics And Biases; Fast-and-frugal Heuristics; Similarity; Representative Design