Publications

Educators

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April 2014
Teaching Note

Taikang Insurance: Standing Out In China's Crowded Insurance Market

By: William C. Kirby and Erica M. Zendell

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Article

Do Government Subsidies to Nonprofits Crowd Out Donations or Donors?

By: Arthur C. Brooks

April 2013
Article

Using the Crowd as an Innovation Partner

By: Kevin J. Boudreau and Karim R. Lakhani

More and more organizations are turning to crowds for help in solving their most vexing innovation and research questions, but managers remain understandably cautious. It seems risky and even unnatural to push problems out to vast groups of strangers distributed around... View Details

Keywords: Innovation and Management; Research and Development

Article

Scaling Up Analogical Innovation with Crowds and AI

By: Aniket Kittur, Lisa Yu, Tom Hope, Joel Chan, Hila Lifshitz - Assaf, Karni Gilon, Felicia Ng, Robert Kraut and Dafna Shachaf

Analogy—the ability to find and apply deep structural patterns across domains—has been fundamental to human innovation in science and technology. Today there is a growing opportunity to accelerate innovation by moving analogy out of a single person’s mind and... View Details

Keywords: Innovation; Artificial Intelligence; Crowdsourcing; Analogy; Innovation and Invention; Technology; Science

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

19 Jun 2014
Working Paper Summaries

Wisdom or Madness? Comparing Crowds with Expert Evaluation in Funding the Arts

Keywords: by Ethan R. Mollick & Ramana Nanda

31 Oct 2004
What Do You Think?

Should the Wisdom of Crowds Influence Our Thinking About Leadership?

crowd…." As Dean Robb put it, "... the use of the term 'crowd' is inappropriate, because crowds generally fail the test of independence from each other's decisions." Others saw the findings strongly affirming the role... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

2023
Article

Conduit Incentives: Eliciting Cooperation from Workers Outside of Managers' Control

By: Susanna Gallani

Can managers use monetary incentives to elicit cooperation from workers they cannot reward for their efforts? I study “conduit incentives,” an innovative incentive design, whereby managers influence bonus-ineligible workers’ effort by offering bonus-eligible employees... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Behavior Modification; Peer Monitoring; Persistence Of Performance Improvements; Crowding Out; Implicit Incentives; Compensation; Healthcare; Social Pressure; Image Motivation; Incentives; Motivation; Performance; Behavior; Motivation and Incentives; Compensation and Benefits; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Organizational Culture; Health Industry; California

20 Jul 2016
Research & Ideas

Airplane Design Brings Out the Class Warfare in Us All

buckle up, and general rule-breaking, like smoking in the bathroom. Popular explanations for bad behavior include crowded conditions, long delays, and shrinking seats. The researchers also evaluated other possible rage-inducing factors,... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman; Air Transportation; Sports; Travel

21 Sep 2020
Working Paper Summaries

The Targeting and Impact of Paycheck Protection Program Loans to Small Businesses

Keywords: by Alexander Bartik, Zoë B. Cullen, Edward L. Glaeser, Michael Luca, Christopher Stanton, and Adi Sunderam

December 2020
Article

The Employment Effects of Faster Payment: Evidence from the Federal Quickpay Reform

By: Jean-Noel Barrot and Ramana Nanda

We study the impact of Quickpay, a federal reform that indefinitely accelerated payments to small business contractors of the U.S. government. We find a strong direct effect of the reform on employment growth at the firm level. Importantly, however, we also... View Details

Keywords: Small Business; Employment; Business and Government Relations; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms

Article

The Multidimensional Effects of a Small Gift:: Evidence from a Natural Field Experiment

By: Ellen Garbarino, Robert Slonim and Carmen Wang

Using a large natural field experiment, we demonstrate that a small unconditional gift (pen) more than doubled both small (survey) and large (blood donation) responses. We find no evidence that the opportunity for a small response crowded out the larger response;... View Details

Keywords: Reciprocity; Gift Exchange; Blood Donation; Charitable Behavior; Field Experiment; Behavior; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving

2024
Working Paper

The Crowdless Future? Generative AI and Creative Problem Solving

By: Léonard Boussioux, Jacqueline N. Lane, Miaomiao Zhang, Vladimir Jacimovic and Karim R. Lakhani

The rapid advances in generative artificial intelligence (AI) open up attractive opportunities for creative problem-solving through human-guided AI partnerships. To explore this potential, we initiated a crowdsourcing challenge focused on sustainable, circular economy... View Details

Keywords: Large Language Models; Crowdsourcing; Generative Ai; Creative Problem-solving; Organizational Search; AI-in-the-loop; Prompt Engineering; AI and Machine Learning; Innovation and Invention

SSRN

16 Sep 2019
Research & Ideas

Crowdsourcing Is Helping Hollywood Reduce the Risk of Movie-Making

started 14 years ago with an email from Franklin Leonard, a development executive in Leonardo DiCaprio’s production company, asking a select group of friends to let him know if they’d read any good scripts in the past year. He aggregated their suggestions, and sent the... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Motion Pictures & Video

April 2020
Case

Ment.io: Knowledge Analytics for Team Decision Making

By: Yael Grushka-Cockayne, Jeffrey T. Polzer, Susie L. Ma and Shlomi Pasternak

Ment.io was a software platform that used proprietary data analytics technology to help organizations make informed and transparent decisions based on team input. Ment was born out of founder Joab Rosenberg’s frustration that, while organizations collected ever... View Details

Keywords: Decision Making; Information Technology; Knowledge; Knowledge Acquisition; Knowledge Management; Operations; Information Management; Product; Product Development; Entrepreneurship; Business Startups; Communications Industry; Information Industry; Information Technology Industry; Web Services Industry; Middle East; Israel

Educators

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2016
Chapter

Innovation Experiments: Researching Technical Advance, Knowledge Production and the Design of Supporting Institutions

By: Kevin J. Boudreau and Karim R. Lakhani

This paper discusses several challenges in designing field experiments to better understand how organizational and institutional design shapes innovation outcomes and the production of knowledge. We proceed to describe the field experimental research program carried... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Design; Research; Knowledge; Innovation and Invention

Article

Informal Family Insurance and the Design of the Welfare State

By: Rafael Di Tella and Robert MacCulloch

We study unemployment benefit provision when the family also provides social insurance. In the benchmark case, more generous State transfers crowd out family risk-sharing one-for-one. An extension gives the State an advantage in enforcing transfers through taxes... View Details

Keywords: Insurance; Design; Welfare