Publications

2013
Working Paper

The Dirty Laundry of Employee Award Programs: Evidence from the Field

By: Timothy Gubler, Ian I. Larkin and Lamar Pierce

Many scholars and practitioners have recently argued that corporate awards are a "free" way to motivate employees. We use field data from an attendance award program implemented at one of five industrial laundry plants to show that awards can carry significant... View Details

Keywords: Motivation and Incentives; Service Delivery; Performance Productivity; Failure; Service Industry

SSRN

March 1996
Case

Erox Corporation: Leverage Marketing

Erox Corp. is a biotechnology start-up that creates products containing synthetic human pheromones. It was founded in 1989, went public in 1993, and brought in a turnaround team in 1994. Sales ramped from $110,000 in 1993 to over $1 million in 1994, with prospects for... View Details

Keywords: Marketing Communications; Entrepreneurship; Biotechnology Industry

Educators

July 2014
Article

Winners in the Spotlight: Media Coverage of Fund Holdings as a Driver of Flows

By: David H. Solomon, Eugene F. Soltes and Denis Sosyura

We show that media coverage of mutual fund holdings affects how investors allocate money across funds. Controlling for fund performance, fund holdings with high past returns attract extra flows only if these stocks were recently featured in major newspapers. In... View Details

Keywords: Prejudice and Bias; Media; Investment Funds; Financial Services Industry

SSRN

2014
Article

Time, Money, and Morality

By: F. Gino and C. Mogilner

Money, a resource that absorbs much daily attention, seems to be present in much unethical behavior thereby suggesting that money itself may corrupt. This research examines a way to offset such potentially deleterious effects—by focusing on time, a resource that tends... View Details

Keywords: Money; Ethics

01 Dec 2023
News

The Imposter Among Us

Edited by Jen McFarland Flint; Illustrations by Peter Arkle It was their rst day at Harvard and like the rest of his cohort, Edgar Wallner (PMD 22, 1971) will never forget meeting Robert Gaines-Cooper. Frankly, it would have been difficult to miss the Englishman, who... View Details

Keywords: Business Schools & Computer & Management Training; Educational Services

January 2022
Article

Global Behaviors, Perceptions, and the Emergence of Social Norms at the Onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic

By: Lukas Hensel, Marc Witte, Stefano Caria, Thiemo Fetzer, Stefano Fiorin, Friedrich M. Goetz, Margarita Gomez, Johannes Haushofer, Andriy Ivchenko, Gordon T. Kraft-Todd, Elena Reutskaja, Christopher Roth, Erez Yoeli and Jon M. Jachimowicz

We conducted a large-scale survey covering 58 countries and over 100,000 respondents between late March and early April 2020 to study beliefs and attitudes towards citizens' and governments' responses at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Most respondents reported... View Details

Keywords: COVID-19; Government Regulation; Social Norms; Health Pandemics; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Behavior; Perception; Global Range; Surveys

19 Feb 2019
First Look

New Research and Ideas, February 19, 2019

forthcoming Journal of Political Economy CEO Behavior and Firm Performance By: Bandiera, Oriana, Stephen Hansen, Andrea Prat, and Raffaella Sadun Abstract— We measure the behavior of 1,114 CEOs in six... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

November 2000 (Revised May 2002)
Case

FleetBoston Financial: Online Banking

By: Frances X. Frei and Hanna Rodriguez-Farrar

As the ninth largest bank holding company in the United States in 2000, FleetBoston Financial Corp. provided a myriad of financial services, including retail banking, loan origination, and brokerage accounts. This case explores how FleetBoston responded to the Internet... View Details

Keywords: Business Model; Borrowing and Debt; Cost Management; Banks and Banking; Consumer Behavior; Service Operations; Competition; Online Technology; Banking Industry; United States

Educators

Luis M. Viceira is the George E. Bates Professor in the Finance Unit and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research, course development, and teaching focus on the areas of investment management... View Details

Keywords: banking; education industry; financial services; nonprofit industry; retail financial services

Web

Community Values | About

today includes a wide range of courses that deal with the issues of ethics and leadership. For example, Leadership and Corporate Accountability is an interdisciplinary course that draws on economics, law, psychology, and organizational View Details

November 2011
Article

How Great Companies Think Differently

By: Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Corporate leaders have long subscribed to the belief that the sole purpose of business is to make money. That narrow view, deeply embedded in the American capitalist system, molds the actions of most corporations, constraining them to focus on maximizing short-term... View Details

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Profit; Leadership; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Business and Shareholder Relations; Behavior; Social Issues; Competitive Advantage

Article

Guilt Enhances the Sense of Control and Drives Risky Judgments

By: Maryam Kouchaki, Christopher Oveis and F. Gino

The present studies investigate the hypothesis that guilt influences risk-taking by enhancing one's sense of control. Across multiple inductions of guilt, we demonstrate that experimentally induced guilt enhances optimism about risks for the self (Study 1), preferences... View Details

Keywords: Risk and Uncertainty; Behavior; Emotions

01 Nov 2017
What Do You Think?

What Are the Real Lessons of the Wells Fargo Case?

“be skeptical. In this case it was cross-selling retail products.” Outliers in competitive industries raise a red flag, he wrote. A number of causes for the alleged fraudulent behavior at Wells Fargo were put forth. They included poor... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett; Banking

Ashish Nanda

Ashish Nanda is Senior Lecturer and C. Roland Christensen Distinguished Management Educator at Harvard Business School. From 2018 to 2021, he was course head for the MBA Required Curriculum course in Strategy. Beginning in 2022, he is teaching an MBA Elective... View Details

04 Oct 2010
Research & Ideas

Introverts: The Best Leaders for Proactive Employees

five-point scale, the respondents rated themselves on adjectives such as "reserved," "introverted," "talkative," and "bold." The employees rated their teams' general work behaviors on items such as... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

November 2007
Article

Measuring Consumer and Competitive Impact with Elasticity Decompositions

Marketing investments are designed to change consumer behavior in ways that help goods compete in the marketplace. Previous research has focused on using elasticity decompositions to measure how these investments affect either consumer decision making or competing... View Details

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Investment Return; Marketing Strategy; Consumer Behavior; Measurement and Metrics; Mathematical Methods; Competitive Advantage