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- December 2024
- Article
Human Bias in the Oversight of Firms: Evidence from Workplace Safety Violations
By: Jonas Heese, Gerardo Pérez Cavazos and Andreya Pérez Silva
We study the effects of mood as a source of human bias on regulators’ oversight and enforcement decisions. We use weather at facilities at the time of an OSHA inspection to proxy for the OSHA compliance officers’ mood. We find that during periods of good mood due to... View Details
- November 2024 (Revised January 2025)
- Case
MiDAS: Automating Unemployment Benefits
By: Shikhar Ghosh and Shweta Bagai
In 2015, the state of Michigan considered whether to nominate its Michigan Integrated Data Automated System (MiDAS) for a prestigious state technology award. Launched in 2013 amid severe budget pressures, the $47 million automated fraud detection system was designed to... View Details
Keywords: Artificial Intelligence; AI; Machine Learning Models; Algorithmic Data; Decision Making; Automation; Benefits; Compensation; Cost Reduction; Digital Transformation; Employment; Government; Fraud; Government Technology; Public Sector; Systems; Systems Integration; Unemployment Insurance; Waste Heat Recovery; AI and Machine Learning; Government Administration; Information Technology; Insurance; United States
- August 20, 2024
- Article
Sexual Assault Victims Face a Penalty for Adjacent Consent
By: Jillian J. Jordan and Roseanna Sommers
Across 11 experimental studies (n = 12,257), we show that female victims of sexual assault are blamed more and seen as less morally virtuous if their assault follows voluntary sexual intimacy, a factor we term “adjacent consent”. Moreover, we illuminate a... View Details
- June 2024
- Article
The Monitoring Role of Social Media
By: Jonas Heese and Joseph Pacelli
In this study, we examine whether social media activity can reduce corporate misconduct. We use the staggered introduction of 3G mobile broadband access across the United States to identify exogenous increases in social media activity and test whether access to 3G... View Details
- March 2024
- Simulation
'Storrowed'
By: Mitchell Weiss
The game was built to accompany "Storrowed": A Generative AI Exercise, available through Harvard Business Publishing. The game adds a timing element to "Storrowed" and enables the teacher to reward teams for strong prompts or penalize teams for believing AI... View Details
- March 2024
- Teaching Note
'Storrowed': A Generative AI Exercise
By: Mitchell Weiss
Teaching Note for HBS Exercise No. 824-188. “Storrowed” is an exercise to help participants raise their proficiency with generative AI. It begins by highlighting a problem: trucks getting wedged underneath bridges in Boston, Massachusetts on the city’s Storrow Drive.... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
The Real Effects of Fair Workweek Laws on Work Schedules: Evidence from Chicago, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia
By: Caleb Kwon and Ananth Raman
Effective in eight jurisdictions and banned in four, Fair Workweek Laws (FWL) aim to increase the predictability and stability of work schedules. Among other requirements, these laws penalize employers for unilaterally adjusting work schedules without providing some... View Details
- August 2023
- Article
Status and Mortality: Is There a Whitehall Effect in the United States?
By: Tom Nicholas
The influential Whitehall studies found that top-ranking civil servants in Britain experienced lower mortality than civil servants below them in the organizational hierarchy due to differential exposure to workplace stress. I test for a Whitehall effect in the United... View Details
- May 2023
- Article
Incentive Effects of Subjective Allocations of Rewards and Penalties
By: Wei Cai, Susanna Gallani and Jee-Eun Shin
We examine the incentive effects of subjectivity in allocating tournament-based rewards and punishments. We use data from a company where reward and punishment decisions are based on a combination of objective metrics and subjective performance assessments. Rankings... View Details
- November 2022
- Case
GE: A New Way Forward?
By: David J. Collis and Haisley Wert
One of the most iconic American companies, General Electric (GE) was founded in 1892 in New York state. Named among the original dozen companies on the Dow Jones index in 1896, it was the list’s most tenacious holdout, maintaining its “blue chip” stock status for over... View Details
- Article
When the Local Newspaper Leaves Town: The Effects of Local Newspaper Closures on Corporate Misconduct
By: Jonas Heese, Gerardo Pérez Cavazos and Caspar David Peter
We examine whether the local press is an effective monitor of corporate misconduct. Specifically, we study the effects of local newspaper closures on violations by local facilities of publicly listed firms. After a local newspaper closure, local facilities increase... View Details
- November 2020
- Article
When the Boss Comes to Town: The Effects of Headquarters' Visits on Facility-Level Misconduct
By: Jonas Heese and Gerardo Pérez Cavazos
We study the effects of headquarters’ visits on facility-level misconduct. We use the staggered introduction of airline routes to identify exogenous travel-time reductions between headquarters and facilities and test whether such reductions affect facility-level... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
Optimal Illiquidity
By: John Beshears, James J. Choi, Christopher Clayton, Christopher Harris, David Laibson and Brigitte C. Madrian
We calculate the socially optimal level of illiquidity in an economy populated by households with taste shocks and naive present bias. The government chooses mandatory contributions to accounts, each witha different pre-retirement withdrawal penalty. Collected... View Details
Keywords: Illiquidity; Commitment; Flexibility; Savings; Social Security; Retirement; Government Legislation; Taxation; Saving
- Article
The Impact of Penalties for Wrong Answers on the Gender Gap in Test Scores
By: Katherine B. Coffman and David Klinowski
Multiple-choice exams play a critical role in university admissions across the world. A key question is whether imposing penalties for wrong answers on these exams deters guessing from women more than men, disadvantaging female test-takers. We consider data from a... View Details
- March 2020
- Article
Which Early Withdrawal Penalty Attracts the Most Deposits to a Commitment Savings Account?
By: John Beshears, James J. Choi, Christopher Harris, David Laibson, Brigitte C. Madrian and Jung Sakong
Previous research has shown that some people voluntarily use commitment contracts that restrict their own choice sets. We study how people divide money between two accounts: a liquid account that permits unrestricted withdrawals and a commitment account that is... View Details
- Article
Seeker Beware: The Interpersonal Costs of Ignoring Advice
Prior advice research has focused on why people rely on (or ignore) advice and its impact on judgment accuracy. We expand the consideration of advice-seeking outcomes by investigating the interpersonal consequences of advice seekers’ decisions. Across nine studies, we... View Details
- August 2017
- Article
Incentives versus Reciprocity: Insights from a Field Experiment
By: Doug J. Chung and Das Narayandas
We conduct a field experiment in which we vary the sales force compensation scheme at an Asian enterprise that sells consumer durable goods. With variation generated by the experimental treatments, we model sales force performance to identify the effectiveness of... View Details
- Article
The Scandal Effect
By: Boris Groysberg, Eric Lin, George Serafeim and Robin Abrahams
Executives with scandal-tainted companies on their résumés pay a penalty on the job market, even if they clearly had nothing to do with the trouble. Because the scandal effect is lasting, a company you left long ago could have an impact on your current and future job... View Details
- 2016
- Working Paper
Experimental Evidence on Policies Aimed at Closing the Gender Gap in Willingness to Guess on Multiple-Choice Tests
Research has shown that women skip more questions than men on multiple-choice tests with penalties for wrong answers. We propose and test five policy changes aimed at eliminating this source of gender bias in test scores. Our data show that simply removing the penalty... View Details
- 2016
- Article
Penalized Fast Subset Scanning
By: Skyler Speakman, Sriram Somanchi, Edward McFowland III and Daniel B. Neill
We present the penalized fast subset scan (PFSS), a new and general framework for scalable and accurate pattern detection. PFSS enables exact and efficient identification of the most anomalous subsets of the data, as measured by a likelihood ratio scan statistic.... View Details