Publications

Article

Democratizing Work: Redistributing Power in Organizations for a Democratic and Sustainable Future

By: Julie Battilana, Julie Yen, Isabelle Ferreras and Lakshmi Ramarajan

Environmental destruction and social inequalities are increasingly urgent challenges. How can corporations, which have played a key role in creating and reproducing these problems, be part of the solution? In this paper, we advance that a shift to more democratic forms... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Citizenship; Corporate Social Responsibility; CSP; CSR; Domination; Industrial Relations; Power; Resistance; Work; Corporate Governance; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Governance; Power and Influence; Environmental Management; Social Issues

November 2018 (Revised July 2023)
Case

The Weir Group: Reforming Executive Pay (A)

By: Lynn S. Paine and Federica Gabrieli

In February 2018, the Remuneration Committee together with the full Board of Directors of the Scotland-based engineering company The Weir Group had to decide whether to seek a shareholder vote at the upcoming Annual General Meeting in April on a proposal to reform the... View Details

Educators

13 Jul 2012
News

Something for the weekend

April 2021
Article

Today's Surgeon Compensation Models Fall Short: Aligning Incentives to Create More Equitable and Value-based Compensation Models

By: Susanna Gallani, Mary Witkowski, Lauren Haskins, Haley Jeffcoat, Vinita Mujumdar and Frank Opelka

Modern medicine is undergoing a transformation that involves innovative surgical approaches, increased medical treatment options, clinical care pathways that require collaboration beyond hospital walls, and health data captured by electronic health records and other... View Details

Keywords: Physician Compensation; Surgeons; Health Care and Treatment; Business Model; Compensation and Benefits

01 Nov 2022
Research & Ideas

A Penny for Your Thoughts? For Big-Picture Ideas, the Right Pay Structure Matters

to obtain.” In a study of a Chinese manufacturer that encouraged factory workers to submit innovative ideas to bolster the company’s operations, Gallani and her colleagues find that providing certain perks and incentives View Details

Keywords: by Scott Van Voorhis

January 2020
Article

Compensation Consultants and the Level, Composition, and Complexity of CEO Pay

By: Kevin J. Murphy and Tatiana Sandino

We provide fresh evidence regarding the relation between compensation consultants and CEO pay. First, firms that employ consultants have higher-paid CEOs—this result is robust to firm fixed effects and matching on economic and governance variables. Second, while this... View Details

Keywords: Consultants; Benchmarking; Incentive Pay; Executive Compensation; Complexity; Motivation and Incentives; Governance

SSRN

Find at Harvard

2019
Working Paper

Compensation Consultants and the Level, Composition, and Complexity of CEO Pay

By: Kevin J. Murphy and Tatiana Sandino

We provide fresh evidence regarding the relation between compensation consultants and CEO pay. First, firms that employ consultants have higher-paid CEOs—this result is robust to firm fixed effects and matching on economic and governance variables. Second, while this... View Details

Keywords: Consultants; Benchmarking; Incentive Pay; Executive Compensation; Complexity; Motivation and Incentives; Governance

SSRN

21 Jul 2017
Working Paper Summaries

Organizational Structures and the Improvement of Working Conditions in Global Supply Chains: Legalization, Participation, and Economic Incentives

Keywords: by Yanhua Z. Bird, Jodi L. Short, and Michael W. Toffel

2018
Working Paper

Creativity Under Fire: The Effects of Competition on Creative Production

By: Daniel P. Gross

Though fundamental to innovation and essential to many industries and occupations, individual creativity has received limited attention as an economic behavior and has historically proven difficult to study. This paper studies the incentive effects of competition on... View Details

Keywords: Incentives; Tournaments; Radical Vs. Incremental Innovation; Motivation and Incentives; Competition; Creativity; Innovation and Invention

SSRN

29 Jun 2010
News

Cash for Clunkers: A Retrospective

2025
Working Paper

Better Keep the Twenty Dollars: Incentivizing Innovation in Open Source

By: Annamaria Conti, Vansh Gupta, Jorge Guzman and Maria P. Roche

Open source is key to innovation yet is assumed to be done largely through intrinsic motivation. How can we incentivize it? In this paper, we examine the impact of a program providing monetary incentives to motivate innovators to contribute to open source. The Sponsors... View Details

Keywords: Open Source; Innovation; Incentives; Financial Rewards; Crowding Out; Open Source Distribution; Innovation and Invention; Motivation and Incentives; Technology Industry

January 1987
Article

Posterior Implementability in a Two-person Decision Problem

By: Jerry R. Green and Jean-Jacques Laffont

When a decision rule is implemented using a Bayesian incentive compatible mechanism in which the messages are publicly observable, the players' information is augmented by their observation of each others' strategies. In this paper we study the set of Bayesian... View Details

Keywords: Incentives; Commitment; Mechanism Design; Decision Making; Information

Find at Harvard

March 2011 (Revised December 2019)
Case

Wealth Management Crisis at UBS (A)

By: Paul M. Healy

The case describes the challenges that UBS faced as a result of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation for tax fraud, that claimed that UBS had helped some 52,000 U.S. residents hide billions of dollars in untaxed assets in secret Swiss accounts between... View Details

Educators

August 2021
Article

Hoping for the Worst? A Paradoxical Preference for Bad News

By: Kate Barasz and Serena Hagerty

Nine studies investigate when and why people may paradoxically prefer bad news—e.g., hoping for an objectively worse injury or a higher-risk diagnosis over explicitly better alternatives. Using a combination of field surveys and randomized experiments, the research... View Details

Keywords: Decision Avoidance; Difficult Decisions; Judgment And Decision Making; Medical Decision-making; Decision Making; Behavior

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Register to Read

April 2025
Article

Corporate Ownership and ESG Performance

By: Belen Villalonga, Peter Tufano and Boya Wang

Using a sample of 3083 firms from 62 countries over 18 years, we analyze how the structure and identity of firms' material owners influence their Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) performance. We find that firms with founding families or other individual... View Details

Keywords: ESG; CSR; Family Firms; Social Responsibility; Environment; Sustainability; Ownership; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Corporate Governance; Environmental Sustainability

9 AM – 10 AM EDT, 19 Oct 2017
Webinars: Trending@HBS

Innovative Finance for the Common Good

Whether it's a vaccine or green bond, drought insurance, pay-as-you-go financing for solar electricity in Kenya, or discounted metro cards in New York, innovative finance is as much about incentives and sound decision making as it is about money; when it works,... View Details

September 2019
Case

Clean Energy for the Future

By: Richard H.K. Vietor and Howaida Kamel

This is an industry note on renewable energy – wind, solar, governmental incentives and storage. It covers the recent history of both the wind and solar industries, an extensive look at governmental policies in the United States, including the Green New Deal, and... View Details

Keywords: Green New Deal; Renewable Energy; Energy Policy; Industry Growth; Supply and Industry; Price; Motivation and Incentives; Energy Industry; Green Technology Industry; United States

Educators