Publications

Article

Inaccurate Group Meta-Perceptions Drive Negative Out-Group Attributions in Competitive Contexts

By: J. Lees and M. Cikara

Across seven experiments and one survey (n = 4,282), people consistently overestimated out-group negativity towards the collective behaviour of their in-group. This negativity bias in group meta-perception was present across multiple competitive (but not cooperative)... View Details

Keywords: Intergroup Competition; Psychology; Political Polarization; Judgment And Decision-making

09 May 2014
Working Paper Summaries

‘My Bad!’ How Internal Attribution and Ambiguity of Responsibility Affect Learning from Failure

Keywords: by Christopher G. Myers, Bradley R. Staats & Francesca Gino

2023
Article

M4: A Unified XAI Benchmark for Faithfulness Evaluation of Feature Attribution Methods across Metrics, Modalities, and Models

By: Himabindu Lakkaraju, Xuhong Li, Mengnan Du, Jiamin Chen, Yekun Chai and Haoyi Xiong

While Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) techniques have been widely studied to explain predictions made by deep neural networks, the way to evaluate the faithfulness of explanation results remains challenging, due to the heterogeneity of explanations for... View Details

Keywords: AI and Machine Learning

2022
Article

The Ordinary Concept of a Meaningful Life: The Role of Subjective and Objective Factors in Third-Person Attributions of Meaning

By: Michael Prinzing, Julian De Freitas and Barbara L. Fredrickson

The desire for a meaningful life is ubiquitous, yet the ordinary concept of a meaningful life is poorly understood. Across six experiments (total N = 2,539), we investigated whether third-person attributions of meaning depend on the psychological states an agent... View Details

Keywords: Experimental Philosophy; Folk Theories; Meaning In Life; Moral Psychology; Positive Psychology; Moral Sensibility; Satisfaction

09 Aug 2006
Research & Ideas

Career Advancement Without Experience

stretches a worker in a new direction. Framing and bluffing. "This is one of the most creative attributes for obtaining stretchwork," O'Mahony notes. "People who are good at presenting their prior View Details

Keywords: by Julia Hanna; Motion Pictures & Video; Technology

September 2020
Article

Customer Supercharging in Experience-Centric Channels

By: David R. Bell, Santiago Gallino and Antonio Moreno

We conjecture that for online retailers, experience-centric offline store formats do not simply expand market coverage, but rather, serve to significantly amplify future positive customer behaviors, both online and offline. We term this phenomenon “supercharging” and... View Details

Keywords: Retail Operations; Marketing-operations Interface; Omnichannel Retailing; Experience Attributes; Quasi-experimental Methods; Operations; Internet and the Web; Marketing Channels; Consumer Behavior; Retail Industry

November 2013
Article

Learning from My Successes and from Others' Failures: Evidence from Minimally Invasive Cardiac Surgery

By: D. KC, B. Staats and F. Gino

Learning from past experience is central to an organization's adaptation and survival. A key dimension of prior experience is whether an outcome was successful or unsuccessful. While empirical studies have investigated the effects of success and failure in... View Details

Keywords: Healthcare; Health Care; Knowledge Work; Attribution Theory; Quality; Success; Medical Specialties; Health Care and Treatment; Failure; Learning; Health Industry

April 2019
Article

Shooting the Messenger

By: Leslie John, Hayley Blunden and Heidi Liu

Eleven experiments provide evidence that people have a tendency to “shoot the messenger,” deeming innocent bearers of bad news unlikeable. In a preregistered lab experiment, participants rated messengers who delivered bad news from a random drawing as relatively... View Details

Keywords: Judgment; Communication; Sense-making; Attribution; Disclosure; Interpersonal Communication; Perception; Judgments; Motivation and Incentives

Article

Offline Showrooms in Omni-channel Retail: Demand and Operational Benefits

By: David R. Bell, Santiago Gallino and Antonio Moreno

Omnichannel environments where customers shop online and offline at the same retailer are ubiquitous and are deployed by online-first and traditional retailers alike. We focus on the relatively understudied domain of online-first retailers and the engagement of a key... View Details

Keywords: Experience Attributes; Marketing–operations Interface; Omnichannel Retailing; Quasi-experimental Methods; Retail Operations; Showrooms; Marketing Channels; Demand and Consumers; Performance Efficiency; Retail Industry

Purchase

Article

The (Perceived) Meaning of Spontaneous Thoughts

By: Carey K. Morewedge, Colleen Giblin and Michael I. Norton

Spontaneous thoughts, the output of a broad category of uncontrolled and inaccessible higher-order mental processes, arise frequently in everyday life. The seeming randomness by which spontaneous thoughts arise might give people good reason to dismiss them as... View Details

Keywords: Spontaneous Thoughts; Self-Insight; Meaning; Attribution; Judgment And Decision Making; Decision Making; Cognition and Thinking

2011
Article

Group Size and Incentives to Contribute: A Natural Experiment at Chinese Wikipedia

By: Michael Zhang and Feng Zhu

In this paper, we examine the causal relationship between group size and incentives to contribute in the setting of Chinese Wikipedia, the Chinese language version of an online encyclopedia that relies entirely on voluntary contributions. The group at Chinese Wikipedia... View Details

Keywords: Rights; Motivation and Incentives; Internet and the Web; Valuation; Groups and Teams; Knowledge Sharing; Behavior; Satisfaction; Size; Government and Politics; Economics; Information Technology Industry; Hong Kong; Taiwan; Singapore

August 2018 (Revised February 2023)
Case

Hubble Contact Lenses: Data Driven Direct-to-Consumer Marketing

By: Jill Avery and Ayelet Israeli

As its Series A extension round approaches, the founders of Hubble, a subscription-based, social-media fueled, direct-to-consumer (DTC) brand of contact lenses, are reflecting on the marketing strategies that have taken them to a valuation of $200 million and debating... View Details

Educators

Purchase

Article

Unraveling Results from Comparable Demand and Supply: An Experimental Investigation

By: Muriel Niederle, Alvin E. Roth and M. Utku Ünver

Markets sometimes unravel, with offers becoming inefficiently early. Often this is attributed to competition arising from an imbalance of demand and supply, typically excess demand for workers. However this presents a puzzle, since unraveling can only occur when firms... View Details

Keywords: Two-side Matching; Unraveling; Experiments; Market Design

February 2021
Article

Testing the Waters: Behavior across Participant Pools

By: Erik Snowberg and Leeat Yariv

We leverage a large-scale incentivized survey eliciting behaviors from (almost) an entire university student population, a representative sample of the U.S. population, and Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to address concerns about the external validity of experiments... View Details

Keywords: Lab Selection; External Validity; Experiments; Behavior; Surveys; Analytics and Data Science; Analysis

January 2019 (Revised February 2024)
Teaching Note

Hubble Contact Lenses: Data Driven Direct-to-Consumer Marketing

By: Ayelet Israeli

Teaching Note for HBS No. 519-011. As its Series A extension round approaches, the founders of Hubble, a subscription-based, social-media fueled, direct-to-consumer (DTC) brand of contact lenses, are reflecting on the marketing strategies that have taken them to a... View Details

Purchase

June 2020
Article

In Generous Offers I Trust: The Effect of First-offer Value on Economically Vulnerable Behaviors

By: M. Jeong, J. Minson and F. Gino

Negotiation scholarship espouses the importance of opening a bargaining situation with an aggressive offer, given the power of first offers to shape concessionary behavior and outcomes. In our research, we identify a surprising consequence to this common prescription.... View Details

Keywords: Attribution; Interpersonal Interaction; Judgment; Social Interaction; Inference; Open Data; Open Materials; Preregistered; Negotiation Offer; Strategy; Behavior; Interpersonal Communication; Trust; Outcome or Result

December 2003 (Revised April 2005)
Case

Camilla Denison (A)

By: H. Kent Bowen, Bryce LaPierre and Virginia Fuller

Follows a successful manager as she takes on challenging assignments to lead manufacturing and development organizations. Details many experiences that influenced her character and attitudes from her youth to her graduate education and first jobs. Students discover the... View Details

Keywords: Personal Development and Career; Success; Management Skills; Experience and Expertise