Publications

01 Apr 2008
Working Paper Summaries

No Harm, No Foul: The Outcome Bias in Ethical Judgments

Keywords: by Francesca Gino, Don A. Moore & Max H. Bazerman

2018
Working Paper

How Scheduling Can Bias Quality Assessment: Evidence from Food Safety Inspections

By: Maria Ibanez and Michael W. Toffel

Many production processes are subject to inspection to ensure they meet quality, safety, and environmental standards imposed by companies and regulators. Inspection accuracy is critical to inspections being a useful input to assessing risks, allocating quality... View Details

Keywords: Assessment; Bias; Inspection; Scheduling; Econometric Analysis; Empirical Research; Regulation; Health; Food; Safety; Quality; Performance Consistency; Performance Evaluation; Food and Beverage Industry; Service Industry

SSRN

June 2020
Article

How Scheduling Can Bias Quality Assessment: Evidence from Food Safety Inspections

By: Maria Ibanez and Michael W. Toffel

Accuracy and consistency are critical for inspections to be an effective, fair, and useful tool for assessing risks, quality, and suppliers—and for making decisions based on those assessments. We examine how inspector schedules could introduce bias that erodes... View Details

Keywords: Assessment; Bias; Inspection; Scheduling; Econometric Analysis; Empirical Research; Regulation; Health; Food; Safety; Quality; Performance Consistency; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms

Article

Optimality Bias in Moral Judgment

By: Julian De Freitas and Samuel G.B. Johnson

We often make decisions with incomplete knowledge of their consequences. Might people nonetheless expect others to make optimal choices, despite this ignorance? Here, we show that people are sensitive to moral optimality: that people hold moral agents accountable... View Details

Keywords: Moral Judgment; Lay Decision Theory; Theory Of Mind; Causal Attribution; Moral Sensibility; Decision Making

2008
Chapter

Business Archives and Overcoming Survivor Bias

By: G. Jones

Among the most longstanding criticisms of business history as an academic discipline is the bias caused towards studying successful firms rather than failures, and the related use of longevity as a major criterion for success. The grand narratives of business history... View Details

Keywords: Business Ventures; Business History; Archives; Failure; Success

2023
Working Paper

Feature Importance Disparities for Data Bias Investigations

By: Peter W. Chang, Leor Fishman and Seth Neel

It is widely held that one cause of downstream bias in classifiers is bias present in the training data. Rectifying such biases may involve context-dependent interventions such as training separate models on subgroups, removing features with bias in the collection... View Details

Keywords: AI and Machine Learning; Analytics and Data Science; Prejudice and Bias

2022
Working Paper

Confidence, Self-Selection and Bias in the Aggregate

By: Benjamin Enke, Thomas Graeber and Ryan Oprea

The influence of behavioral biases on aggregate outcomes like prices and allocations depends in part on self-selection: whether rational people opt more strongly into aggregate interactions than biased individuals. We conduct a series of betting market, auction and... View Details

Keywords: Prejudice and Bias; Cognition and Thinking; Markets; Price

Purchase

2011
Article

Bias in Search Results?: Diagnosis and Response

By: Benjamin Edelman

I explore allegations of search engine bias, including understanding a search engine's incentives to bias results, identifying possible forms of bias, and evaluating methods of verifying whether bias in fact occurs. I then consider possible legal and policy responses,... View Details

Keywords: Prejudice and Bias; Motivation and Incentives; Outcome or Result; Markets; Legal Liability; Policy; Search Technology; Performance Evaluation; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms

Article

Physician–patient Racial Concordance and Disparities in Birthing Mortality for Newborns

By: Brad N. Greenwood, Rachel R. Hardeman, Laura Huang and Aaron Sojourner

Recent work has emphasized the benefits of patient–physician concordance on clinical care outcomes for underrepresented minorities, arguing it can ameliorate outgroup biases, boost communication, and increase trust. We explore concordance in a setting where racial... View Details

Keywords: Racial Bias; Birthing Outcomes; Concordance; Mortality; Health Care and Treatment; Race

02 Aug 2021
Blog Post

ALUMNI WORK TO REVERSE BIAS THROUGH PHILANTHROPY

Thought, one of the organizations that has received a grant from the New Commonwealth Racial Equity and Social Justice Fund. Photo by Noelia Castillo/Elevated Thought The high-profile deaths last year of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and George Floyd were... View Details

18 Oct 2004
Research & Ideas

The Bias of Wall Street Analysts

when investors will disregard stock research entirely? And if they did, what other forms of analysis would they likely find more reliable? A: This would be a great outcome indeed, but probably for different reasons than intended by the... View Details

Keywords: by Ann Cullen; Financial Services

18 Oct 2022
Research & Ideas

When Bias Creeps into AI, Managers Can Stop It by Asking the Right Questions

look at the outcomes of these algorithms to detect these biases in the first place. “The positive outlook here is—if you compare algorithmic bias to human bias—with algorithmic bias, you can at least offer... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne

15 Jun 2021
News

Alumni Work to Reverse Bias Through Philanthropy

The high-profile deaths last year of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and George Floyd were not the first tragic outcomes of racial injustice in the United States to send shock waves across the globe. But in their wake—and in... View Details

Keywords: Deborah Blagg

The Limits of Algorithmic Measures of Race in Studies of Outcome Disparities

We show that the use of algorithms to predict race has significant limitations in measuring and understanding the sources of racial disparities in finance, economics, and other contexts. First, we derive theoretically the direction and magnitude of measurement... View Details

Summer 2021
Article

Predictable Country-level Bias in the Reporting of COVID-19 Deaths

By: Botir Kobilov, Ethan Rouen and George Serafeim

We examine whether a country’s management of the COVID-19 pandemic relate to the downward biasing of the number of reported deaths from COVID-19. Using deviations from historical averages of the total number of monthly deaths within a country, we find that the... View Details

Keywords: COVID-19; Deaths; Reporting; Incentives; Government Policy; Health Pandemics; Health Care and Treatment; Country; Crisis Management; Outcome or Result; Reports; Policy

2023
Working Paper

The Limits of Algorithmic Measures of Race in Studies of Outcome Disparities

By: David S. Scharfstein and Sergey Chernenko

We show that the use of algorithms to predict race has significant limitations in measuring and understanding the sources of racial disparities in finance, economics, and other contexts. First, we derive theoretically the direction and magnitude of measurement bias in... View Details

Keywords: Racial Disparity; Paycheck Protection Program; Measurement Error; AI and Machine Learning; Race; Measurement and Metrics; Equality and Inequality; Prejudice and Bias; Forecasting and Prediction; Outcome or Result

SSRN

15 Jul 2009
Working Paper Summaries

Policy Bundling to Overcome Loss Aversion: A Method for Improving Legislative Outcomes

Keywords: by Katherine L. Milkman, Mary Carol Mazza, Lisa L. Shu, Chia-Jung Tsay & Max H. Bazerman

Article

Price and Quality Decisions by Self-Serving Managers

By: Marco Bertini, Daniel Halbheer and Oded Koenigsberg

We present a theory of price and quality decisions by managers who are self-serving. In the theory, firms stress the price or quality of their products, but not both. Accounting for this, managers exploit any uncertainty about the cause of market outcomes to credit... View Details

Keywords: Causal Reasoning; Self-serving Bias; Strategic Orientation; Managerial Decision-making; Price; Quality; Decision Making; Theory