Publications

25 May 2016
News

FIELD 3: Taking Down Barriers

FIELD (Field Immersion Experiences for Leadership Development) course. “I was interested in entrepreneurship, but I didn’t think that I was cut out for it,” says the Princeton economics major. “FIELD 3 took... View Details

September 2015 (Revised March 2025)
Technical Note

FIELD Global Capstone: Developing Customer Empathy

By: Jill Avery

The Design Thinking process begins with empathizing with potential customers. Empathizing, being aware of, interpreting, and understanding the thoughts of others, as well as being able to vicariously experience them oneself, requires the careful and deliberate study of... View Details

Keywords: Market Research; Design Thinking; Customer Behavior; Ethnography; Interviews; Surveys; A/B Testing; Experimentation; Marketing; Customer Focus and Relationships; Consumer Behavior; Demand and Consumers

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Field Course: Go to Market Sales Playbook Field Study - Course Catalog

HBS Course Catalog Field Course: Go to Market Sales Playbook Field Study Course Number 6665 Senior Lecturer Lou Shipley Spring; Q4; 1.5 credits Project/Paper Overview: This course is designed for students... View Details

February 2013
Article

Commitment and Behavior Change: Evidence from the Field

By: Katie Baca-Motes, Amber Brown, Ayelet Gneezy, Elizabeth A. Keenan and Leif D. Nelson

Influencing behavior change is an ongoing challenge in psychology, economics, and consumer behavior research. Building on previous work on commitment, self-signaling, and the principle of consistency, a large, intensive field experiment (N = 2,416) examined the effect... View Details

Keywords: Behavior; Marketing

Switchback experiments, where a firm sequentially exposes an experimental unit to random treatments, are among the most prevalent designs used in the technology sector, with applications ranging from ride-hailing platforms to online marketplaces. Although... View Details

2017
Working Paper

Voter Mobilization and Trust in Electoral Institutions: Evidence from Kenya

By: Benjamin Marx, Vincent Pons and Tavneet Suri

Voter mobilization campaigns face trade-offs in young democracies. In a large-scale experiment implemented in 2013 with the Kenyan Electoral Commission (IEBC), text messages intended to mobilize voters boosted participation but also decreased trust in electoral... View Details

Keywords: Political Participation; Electoral Institutions; Field Experiment; Voting; Political Elections; Behavior; Trust; Kenya

2017
Working Paper

Seeking to Belong: How the Words of Internal and External Beneficiaries Influence Performance

By: Paul Green, Francesca Gino and Bradley R. Staats

In this paper, we examine how connecting to beneficiaries of one’s work increases performance and argue that beneficiaries internal to an organization (i.e., one’s own colleagues) can serve as an important source of motivation, even in jobs that—on the surface—may seem... View Details

Keywords: Prosocial Motivation; Belongingness; Motivation; Job Design; Field Experiment; Motivation and Incentives; Strategy; Job Design and Levels

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26 May 2015
Research & Ideas

Corporate Field Researchers Share Tricks of the Trade

The term "academic research" can conjure images of scientists conducting experiments in a basement laboratory, or of tweed-clad professors poring through old theories to develop new ones. But let's not forget about View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

May 2017
Article

Behavioral Processes in Long-Lag Interventions

By: Dale T. Miller, Jennifer E. Dannals and Julian Zlatev

We argue that psychologists who conduct experiments with long lags between the manipulation and the outcome measure should pay more attention to behavioral processes that intervene between the manipulation and the outcome measure. Neglect of such processes, we contend,... View Details

Keywords: Field Experiments; Interventions; Behavioral Mediation; Theories Of Change; Longitudinal Studies; Behavior; Research; Change; Theory

June 2021
Article

Engineering Serendipity: When Does Knowledge Sharing Lead to Knowledge Production?

By: Jacqueline N. Lane, Ina Ganguli, Patrick Gaule, Eva C. Guinan and Karim R. Lakhani

We investigate how knowledge similarity between two individuals is systematically related to the likelihood that a serendipitous encounter results in knowledge production. We conduct a natural field experiment at a medical research symposium, where we exogenously... View Details

Keywords: Cognitive Similarity; Innovation; Knowledge Production; Natural Field Experiment; Knowledge Acquisition; Knowledge Sharing; Relationships

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September 2016
Article

When 3+1>4: Gift Structure and Reciprocity in the Field

By: Duncan S. Gilchrist, Michael Luca and Deepak Malhotra

Do higher wages elicit reciprocity and lead to increased productivity? In a field experiment with 266 employees, we find that paying higher wages, per se, does not have a discernible effect on productivity (in a context with no future employment opportunities).... View Details

Keywords: Wages; Performance Productivity

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Research Summary

Overview

By: Ethan S. Bernstein

I have spent my career studying novel talent management practices and their effect on collaboration and performance. My core research focuses on two interrelated organizational trends that have become salient in the 21st century: workplace transparency (who gets to... View Details

2022
Working Paper

Are Experts Blinded by Feasibility?: Experimental Evidence from a NASA Robotics Challenge

By: Jacqueline N. Lane, Zoe Szajnfarber, Jason Crusan, Michael Menietti and Karim R. Lakhani

Resource allocation decisions play a dominant role in shaping a firm’s technological trajectory and competitive advantage. Recent work indicates that innovative firms and scientific institutions tend to exhibit an anti-novelty bias when evaluating new projects and... View Details

Keywords: Evaluations; Novelty; Feasibility; Field Experiment; Resource Allocation; Technological Innovation; Competitive Advantage; Decision Making

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