Publications

SSRN

29 Apr 2015
Lessons from the Classroom

Use Personal Experience to Pick Winning Stocks

that no one else does” That's exactly what Cohen has been doing for the last three years in the MBA field course Stock Pitching, which he co-teaches with Christopher J. Malloy, the Sylvan C. Coleman Professor of Financial Management.... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Financial Services

01 Jun 2016
Working Paper Summaries

Motivating Effort in Contributing to Public Goods Inside Organizations: Field Experimental Evidence

Keywords: by Andrea Blasco, Olivia S. Jung, Karim R. Lakhani, and Michael E. Menietti

January 2024
Article

Helping Children Catch Up: Early Life Shocks and the PROGRESA Experiment

By: Achyuta Adhvaryu, Theresa Molina, Anant Nyshadham and Jorge Tamayo

Can investing in children who faced adverse events in early childhood help them catch up? We answer this question using two orthogonal sources of variation – resource availability at birth (local rainfall) and cash incentives for school enrollment – to identify the... View Details

Keywords: Children; Outcome or Result; Welfare; Early Childhood Education; Weather

11 Feb 2016
Working Paper Summaries

Will a Five-Minute Discussion Change Your Mind? A Countrywide Experiment on Voter Choice in France

Keywords: by Vincent Pons; Public Relations; Public Administration

Research Summary

Overview

Erin's research focuses on how organizations can and should respond to employee failures. She is interested in understanding the effects that organizational responses have on subsequent employee behavior, and how organizational policies can be designed to more... View Details

Keywords: Repair; Recovery; Reintegration; Prosocial Behavior; Field Experiment; Psychology; Networks; Punishment; Giving and Philanthropy; Social Psychology; Motivation and Incentives; Social and Collaborative Networks; Ethics

2024
Working Paper

Does Pension Automatic Enrollment Increase Debt? Evidence from a Large-Scale Natural Experiment

By: John Beshears, Matthew Blakstad, James J. Choi, Christopher Firth, John Gathergood, David Laibson, Richard Notley, Jesal D. Sheth, Will Sandbrook and Neil Stewart

Does automatic enrollment into retirement saving increase household debt? We study the randomized roll-out of automatic enrollment pensions to ~160,000 employers in the United Kingdom with 2-29 employees. We find that the additional savings generated through automatic... View Details

Keywords: Retirement; Saving; Personal Finance; Borrowing and Debt; Credit; Compensation and Benefits

November–December 2023
Article

Iterative Coordination and Innovation: Prioritizing Value over Novelty

By: Sourobh Ghosh and Andy Wu

An innovating organization faces the challenge of how to prioritize distinct goals of novelty and value, both of which underlie innovation. Popular practitioner frameworks like Agile management suggest that organizations can adopt an iterative approach of frequent... View Details

Keywords: Innovation; Novelty; Goals; Specialization; Coordination; Field Experiment; Software Development; Agile; Scrum; Iteration; Iterative; Organizations; Innovation and Invention; Value; Goals and Objectives; Integration; Applications and Software

Article

Eliminating Unintended Bias in Personalized Policies Using Bias-Eliminating Adapted Trees (BEAT)

By: Eva Ascarza and Ayelet Israeli

An inherent risk of algorithmic personalization is disproportionate targeting of individuals from certain groups (or demographic characteristics such as gender or race), even when the decision maker does not intend to discriminate based on those “protected”... View Details

Keywords: Algorithm Bias; Personalization; Targeting; Generalized Random Forests (GRF); Discrimination; Customization and Personalization; Decision Making; Fairness; Mathematical Methods

Forthcoming
Article

Sending a Message: An Empirical Assessment of Responses to Punitive and Non-punitive Compliance Messaging Strategies

By: Jodi L. Short, Michael W. Toffel, Elizabeth A. Keenan and Melissa Ouellet

Regulators operate in an increasingly hostile political environment. The U.S. Supreme Court is ramping up efforts to curtail the authority of administrative agencies. The second election of Donald Trump to the presidency has unleashed a torrent of anti-regulatory... View Details

Keywords: Field Experiment; Compliance; Compliance Programs; Compliance Policies; Regulatory Enforcement; Environmental Regulation; Environmental Policy; Government Experimentation; Governance Compliance; Government Administration; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Business and Government Relations; Construction Industry; Public Administration Industry; California; United States

SSRN

2020
Article

A Practical Approach to Sales Compensation: What Do We Know Now? What Should We Know in the Future?

By: Doug J. Chung, Byungyeon Kim and Niladri B. Syam

Personal selling represents one of the most important elements in the marketing mix, and appropriate management of the sales force is vital to achieving the organization’s objectives. Among the various instruments of sales management, compensation plays a pivotal role... View Details

Keywords: Sales Compensation; Sales Management; Sales Strategy; Principal-agent Theory; Structural Econometrics; Field Experiments; Machine Learning; Artificial Intelligence; Salesforce Management; Compensation and Benefits; Motivation and Incentives; AI and Machine Learning

July–August 2024
Article

Doing More with Less: Overcoming Ineffective Long-Term Targeting Using Short-Term Signals

By: Ta-Wei Huang and Eva Ascarza

Firms are increasingly interested in developing targeted interventions for customers with the best response, which requires identifying differences in customer sensitivity, typically through the conditional average treatment effect (CATE) estimation. In theory, to... View Details

Keywords: Long-run Targeting; Heterogeneous Treatment Effect; Statistical Surrogacy; Customer Churn; Field Experiments; Consumer Behavior; Customer Focus and Relationships; AI and Machine Learning; Marketing Strategy

25 Mar 2021
Research & Ideas

Steer Clear of the Blind Spots That Derail Experiments

look at how companies could more effectively leverage structured, randomized experiments to inform decision-making. His goal: Enable C-suite leaders to avoid the blind spots and blunders that can occur when... View Details

Keywords: by Danielle Kost

2012
Chapter

The Confederacy of Heterogeneous Software Organizations and Heterogeneous Developers: Field Experimental Evidence on Sorting and Worker Effort

By: Kevin J. Boudreau and Karim R. Lakhani

Software development occurs in a patchwork or "confederacy" of different types of institutions (universities, small start-ups, multinational enterprises, government agencies, etc.) utilizing varied work approaches. Here we speculate on one possible explanation for this... View Details

Keywords: Innovation and Invention; Applications and Software; Product Development; Organizations; Employees; Behavior; Competition; Cooperation; Creativity; Information Technology Industry

April 2020
Article

A Theory of Experimenters: Robustness, Randomization, and Balance

By: Abhijit Banerjee, Sylvain Chassang, Sergio Montero and Erik Snowberg

This paper studies the problem of experiment design by an ambiguity-averse decisionmaker who trades off subjective expected performance against robust performance guarantees. This framework accounts for real-world experimenters’ preference for randomization. It also... View Details

Keywords: Experiment Design; Experimenters; Theory; Performance

Spring 2016
Article

Performance Responses to Competition Across Skill-Levels in Rank Order Tournaments: Field Evidence and Implications for Tournament Design

By: Kevin J. Boudreau, Karim R. Lakhani and Michael E. Menietti

Tournaments are widely used in the economy to organize production and innovation. We study individual contestant-level data from 2,796 contestants in 774 software algorithm design contests with random assignment. Precisely conforming to theory predictions, the... View Details

Keywords: Competition; Innovation Strategy

April 2023
Article

Performance on Patient Experience Measures of Former Chief Medical Residents as Physician Exemplars Chosen by the Profession

By: Lucy Chen and J. Michael McWilliams

OBJECTIVE To compare care for patients of primary care physicians (PCPs) who were former chiefs with care for patients of nonchief PCPs.

DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS Using 2010 to 2018 Medicare Fee-For-Service Consumer Assessment of Healthcare... View Details

Keywords: Performance Evaluation; Forecasting and Prediction; Knowledge Use and Leverage; Competency and Skills; Surveys; Health Industry

Purchase

Research Summary

Team, Individual, and Organizational Learning From Experience in Two High-Hazard Industries

High-hazard industries such as nuclear power and chemical process plants must learn and improve without sole reliance on trial-and-error. Considerable attention and resources are placed on learning from operating experience, including exchange of best practices, peer... View Details

March 2025
Article

Does Communicating Measurable Diversity Goals Attract or Repel Historically Marginalized Job Applicants? Evidence from the Lab and Field

By: Erika L. Kirgios, Ike Silver and Edward H. Chang

Many organizations struggle to attract a demographically diverse workforce. How does adding a measurable goal to a public diversity commitment—for example, “We care about diversity” versus “We care about diversity and plan to hire at least one woman or racial minority... View Details

Keywords: Selection and Staffing; Recruitment; Diversity; Goals and Objectives; Communication Intention and Meaning; Behavior