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- May 2025
- Article
Transaction Cost Economics in the Digital Economy: A Research Agenda
By: Frank Nagle, Robert Seamans and Steve Tadelis
Transaction cost economics theory explains when it is more efficient for a transaction between two parties to occur across the market or within an organization. How does transaction cost economics apply in the digital economy, which relies on digital transactions? In... View Details
- September 2024
- Article
A Potential Pitfall of Passion: Passion Is Associated with Performance Overconfidence
By: Erica R. Bailey, Kai Krautter, Wen Wu, Adam D. Galinsky and Jon M. Jachimowicz
Having passion is almost universally lauded. People strive to follow their passion at work, and organizations increasingly seek out passionate employees. Supporting the benefits of passion, prior research finds a robust relationship between passion and higher levels of... View Details
- July 2024
- Article
Chatbots and Mental Health: Insights into the Safety of Generative AI
By: Julian De Freitas, Ahmet Kaan Uğuralp, Zeliha Uğuralp and Stefano Puntoni
Chatbots are now able to engage in sophisticated conversations with consumers. Due to the ‘black box’ nature of the algorithms, it is impossible to predict in advance how these conversations will unfold. Behavioral research provides little insight into potential safety... View Details
- June 2024 (Revised September 2024)
- Case
Major League Baseball: Changing the Rules of America's Pastime
By: Stephen A. Greyser, Mac Levin and Brent Schwarz
This case describes the efforts of Major League Baseball (MLB) to make meaningful changes in the rules affecting the ways the game is played. These changes are intended to speed the pace of the game and make it more appealing to younger fans. The principal changes... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Evaluations Amid Measurement Error: Determining the Optimal Timing for Workplace Interventions
By: Matthew DosSantos DiSorbo, Iavor I. Bojinov and Fiammetta Menchetti
Researchers have embraced factorial experiments to simultaneously evaluate multiple treatments, each with different levels. Typically, in large-scale factorial experiments, the primary objective is identifying the treatment with the largest causal effect, especially... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Immigrant Entrepreneurship: New Estimates and a Research Agenda
By: Saheel Chodavadia, Sari Pekkala Kerr, William R. Kerr and Louis Maiden
Immigrants contribute disproportionately to entrepreneurship in many countries, accounting for a quarter of new employer businesses in the US. We review recent research on the measurement of immigrant entrepreneurship, the traits of immigrant founders, their economic... View Details
- May–June 2024
- Article
Setting Gendered Expectations? Recruiter Outreach Bias in Online Tech Training Programs
By: Jacqueline N. Lane, Karim R. Lakhani and Roberto Fernandez
Competence development in digital technologies, analytics, and artificial intelligence is increasingly important to all types of organizations and their workforce. Universities and corporations are investing heavily in developing training programs, at all tenure... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Greenlighting Innovative Projects: How Evaluation Format Shapes the Perceived Feasibility of Early-Stage Ideas
By: Jacqueline N. Lane, Simon Friis, Tianxi Cai, Michael Menietti, Griffin Weber and Eva C. Guinan
The evaluation of innovative early-stage projects is essential for allocating limited resources. We
investigate how the evaluation format affects the identification of feasibility issues through a
field experiment at a leading research university. Experts were... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
New Facts and Data about Professors and Their Research
By: Kyle Myers, Wei Yang Tham, Jerry Thursby, Marie Thursby, Nina Cohodes, Karim R. Lakhani, Rachel Mural and Yilun Xu
We introduce a new survey of professors at roughly 150 of the most research-intensive institutions of higher education in the US. We document seven new features of how research-active professors are compensated, how they spend their time, and how they perceive their... View Details
- December 2023
- Article
Discerning Saints: Moralization of Intrinsic Motivation and Selective Prosociality at Work
By: Mijeong Kwon, Julia Lee Cunningham and Jon M. Jachimowicz
Intrinsic motivation has received widespread attention as a predictor of positive work outcomes, including employees’ prosocial behavior. In the current research, we offer a more nuanced view by proposing that intrinsic motivation does not uniformly increase prosocial... View Details
- December 2023
- Article
Save More Today or Tomorrow: The Role of Urgency in Precommitment Design
By: Joseph Reiff, Hengchen Dai, John Beshears, Katherine L. Milkman and Shlomo Benartzi
To encourage farsighted behaviors, past research suggests that marketers may be wise to invite consumers to pre-commit to adopt them “later.” However, the authors propose that people will draw different inferences from different types of pre-commitment offers, and that... View Details
- November 2023 (Revised January 2024)
- Case
Bridgit: Persevere or Pivot?
By: Reza Satchu and Patrick Sanguineti
In late 2012, Mallorie Brodie and Lauren Lake, two young women in their final year of college, founded Bridgit, a technology startup that developed solutions to simplify vital but laborious processes within the construction industry. In the Fall of 2013, after months... View Details
- September 2023
- Article
The Dynamics of Team Learning: Harmony and Rhythm in Teamwork Arrangements for Innovation
By: Jean-François Harvey, Johnathan R. Cromwell, Kevin J. Johnson and Amy C. Edmondson
Innovation teams must navigate inherent tensions between different learning activities to produce high levels of performance. Yet, we know little about how teams combine these activities—notably reflexive, experimental, vicarious, and contextual learning—most... View Details
- July–August 2023
- Article
Demand Learning and Pricing for Varying Assortments
By: Kris Ferreira and Emily Mower
Problem Definition: We consider the problem of demand learning and pricing for retailers who offer assortments of substitutable products that change frequently, e.g., due to limited inventory, perishable or time-sensitive products, or the retailer’s desire to... View Details
- June 2023 (Revised November 2024)
- Case
Albert Einstein: Changing the World
By: Robert Simons and Shirley Sun
This case traces the rise of Albert Einstein from a small town in Germany to a towering intellectual leader who revolutionized the field of physics. The case describes his early education and his penchant for individual thinking and non-conformity. A committed... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Setting Gendered Expectations? Recruiter Outreach Bias in Online Tech Training Programs
By: Jacqueline N. Lane, Karim R. Lakhani and Roberto Fernandez
Competence development in digital technologies, analytics, and artificial intelligence is increasingly important to all types of organizations and their workforce. Universities and corporations are investing heavily in developing training programs, at all tenure... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Culture as a Signal: Evidence from a Natural Field Experiment
By: Wei Cai, Dennis Campbell and Jiehang Yu
The importance of culture as an informal management control system is increasingly acknowledged in academia. While prior research mainly focuses on the value of culture on internal stakeholders (e.g., employees), we examine whether culture serves as a credible signal... View Details
- April 2023
- Article
A Field Experiment on Subgoal Framing to Boost Volunteering: The Trade-off Between Goal Granularity and Flexibility
By: Aneesh Rai, Marissa A. Sharif, Edward H. Chang, Katherine L. Milkman and Angela L. Duckworth
Research suggests that breaking overarching goals into more granular subgoals is beneficial for goal progress. However, making goals more granular often involves reducing the flexibility provided to complete them, and recent work shows that flexibility can also be... View Details
- Spring 2023
- Article
Incentive Contract Design and Employee-Initiated Innovation: Evidence from the Field
By: Wei Cai, Susanna Gallani and Jee-Eun Shin
This study examines how the design of incentive contracts for tasks defined as workers’ official responsibilities (i.e., standard tasks) influences workers’ propensity to engage in employee-initiated innovation (EII). EII corresponds to innovation activities that are... View Details
- April 2023
- Article
Learning Down to Train Up: Mentors Are More Effective When They Value Insights from Below
By: Ting Zhang, Dan Wang and Adam D. Galinsky
Although mentorship is vital for individual success, potential mentors often view it as a costly burden. To understand what motivates mentors to overcome this barrier and more fully engage with their mentees, we introduce a new construct, learning direction, which... View Details