Publications

13 Jan 2013
News

On the Job: Don't let uncertainty cloud your thinking

2023
Working Paper

Complexity and Hyperbolic Discounting

By: Benjamin Enke, Thomas Graeber and Ryan Oprea

A large literature shows that people discount financial rewards hyperbolically instead of exponentially. While discounting of money has been questioned as a measure of time preferences, it continues to be highly relevant in empirical practice and predicts a wide range... View Details

Keywords: Hyperbolic Discounting; Present Bias; Bounded Rationality; Cognitive Uncertainty; Behavioral Finance

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17 Feb 2021
Research & Ideas

Pandemic Self-Care for CEOs: Rituals, Running, and Cognitive Restructuring

doing and how they are coping made me realize I am not in bad shape.” Another made a habit of “talk[ing] to at least one friend a day to vent—[the] main objective was not to help each other, but to hear each other out.” Developing resilience and using View Details

Keywords: by Gamze D. Yucaoglu, Robin Abrahams, and Boris Groysberg

Research Summary

Self-environment relationship and its effect on decisions under risk and uncertainty

My research seek to better understand the main cognitive and social abilities that guide our judgments, and the ways they interact with aspects of the situation to shape humans' decisions. It is currently comprised of three related... View Details

May 2012
Supplement

Columbia's Final Mission (Abridged) (B)

By: Amy C. Edmondson and Kerry Herman

Keywords: Cognitive Biases; Teams; Organizational Learning; Ambiguous Threat; Risk and Uncertainty; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Leadership; Corporate Disclosure; Groups and Teams; Decision Making; Organizational Culture; Public Administration Industry; Aerospace Industry

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

August 2018
Article

Creative Sparks or Paralysis Traps? The Effects of Contradictions on Creative Processing and Creative Products

By: Goran Calic and Sébastien Hélie

Paradoxes are an unavoidable part of work life. The unusualness of attempting to simultaneously satisfy contradictory imperatives can result in creative outcomes that simultaneously satisfy both imperatives by inducing search for, and selection of, novel and useful... View Details

Keywords: Creativity; Cognition and Thinking; Business or Company Management; Performance

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2018
Chapter

An Integrated Model of Dynamic Problem Solving within Organizational Constraints

By: Johnathan R. Cromwell, Teresa M. Amabile and Jean-François Harvey

Book Abstract: Rapid technological change, global competition, and economic uncertainty have all contributed to organizations seeking to improve creativity and innovation. Researchers and businesses want to know what factors facilitate or inhibit creativity in a... View Details

Keywords: Organizations; Problems and Challenges; Creativity

2023
Working Paper

Complexity and Time

By: Benjamin Enke, Thomas Graeber and Ryan Oprea

We provide experimental evidence that core intertemporal choice anomalies -- including extreme short-run impatience, structural estimates of present bias, hyperbolicity and transitivity violations -- are driven by complexity rather than time or risk preferences. First,... View Details

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Motivation and Incentives

March 2016
Article

The Role of Investor Gut Feel in Managing Complexity and Extreme Risk

By: Laura Huang

Securing financial resources from investors is a key challenge for many early stage entrepreneurial ventures. Given the inherent uncertainty surrounding a decision to invest in these ventures, prior research has found that experienced investors rely heavily on their... View Details

Keywords: Angel Investors; Gut Feel; Intuition; Entrepreneurship; Finance; Risk and Uncertainty; Complexity; Decision Making

March 2006
Module Note

Managing Innovation in an Uncertain World: Module 3: Expanding Diversity

By: Alan D. MacCormack

Describes the third module of the 30-session Harvard Business School elective course Managing Innovation in an Uncertain World. The course helps students understand the challenges that uncertainty implies for innovation and how to overcome them. The course emphasizes... View Details

Keywords: Innovation and Management; Business Processes; Projects; Risk and Uncertainty; Product Development; Managerial Roles; Opportunities; Perspective; Expansion; Goals and Objectives

07 Apr 2020
News

How to Manage Coronavirus Layoffs with Compassion

March 2021
Article

Bayesian Signatures of Confidence and Central Tendency in Perceptual Judgment

By: Yang Xiang, Thomas Graeber, Benjamin Enke and Samuel Gershman

This paper theoretically and empirically investigates the role of Bayesian noisy cognition in perceptual judgment, focusing on the central tendency effect: the well-known empirical regularity that perceptual judgments are biased towards the center of the... View Details

Keywords: Visual Perception; Bayesian Modeling; Perception; Judgments

January 2021
Article

A Model of Relative Thinking

By: Benjamin Bushong, Matthew Rabin and Joshua Schwartzstein

Fixed differences loom smaller when compared to large differences. We propose a model of relative thinking where a person weighs a given change along a consumption dimension by less when it is compared to bigger changes along that dimension. In deterministic settings,... View Details

Keywords: Relative Thinking; Econometric Models; Behavior; Cognition and Thinking