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  • 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
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  • January 2021
  • Article

Veil-of-Ignorance Reasoning Mitigates Self-Serving Bias in Resource Allocation During the COVID-19 Crisis

By: Karen Huang, Regan Bernhard, Netta Barak-Corren, Max Bazerman and Joshua D. Greene
The COVID-19 crisis has forced healthcare professionals to make tragic decisions concerning which patients to save. Furthermore, the COVID-19 crisis has foregrounded the influence of self-serving bias in debates on how to allocate scarce resources. A utilitarian... View Details
Keywords: Self-serving Bias; Procedural Justice; Bioethics; COVID-19; Fairness; Health Pandemics; Resource Allocation; Decision Making
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  • February 2020
  • Article

Using Charity Performance Metrics as an Excuse Not to Give

By: Christine L. Exley
There is an increasing pressure to give more wisely and effectively. There is, relatedly, an increasing focus on charity performance metrics. Via a series of experiments, this paper provides a caution to such a focus. While information on charity performance metrics... View Details
Keywords: Charitable Giving; Prosocial Behavior; Altruism; Excuses; Self-serving Biases; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; Performance; Measurement and Metrics; Behavior
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  • February 2018
  • Article

The Impact of a Surprise Donation Ask

By: Christine L. Exley and Ragan Petrie
Individuals frequently exploit "flexibility" built into decision environments to give less. They use uncertainty to justify options benefiting themselves over others, they avoid information that may encourage them to give, and they avoid the ask itself. In this paper,... View Details
Keywords: Charitable Giving; Prosocial Behavior; Self-serving Biases; Excuses; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; Behavior
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  • 2019
  • Working Paper

Relative Performance Transparency: Effects on Sustainable Choices

By: Ryan W. Buell, Shwetha Mariadassou and Yanchong Zheng
We study how transparency into the levels and changes of relative sustainability performance affects consumer choices. Our work considers two forms of transparency: process transparency, in which customers receive information about the company's sustainability... View Details
Keywords: Relative Performance Tranparency; Process Transparency; Customer Transparency; Levels; Changes; Reflectiveness; Self-serving Attribution Biases; Sustainability; Consumer Choice
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  • 2010
  • Working Paper

Cognitive Barriers to Environmental Action: Problems and Solutions

By: Lisa L. Shu and Max Bazerman
We explore interventions at the individual level and focus on recognized cognitive barriers from behavioral decision-making literature. In particular, we highlight three cognitive barriers that impede sound individual decision making that have particular relevance to... View Details
Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Judgments; Consumer Behavior; Environmental Sustainability; Cognition and Thinking; Prejudice and Bias
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  • 15 Dec 2010
  • Working Paper Summaries

Cognitive Barriers to Environmental Action: Problems and Solutions

Keywords: by Lisa L.Shu & Max H. Bazerman
  • 16 Nov 2010
  • First Look

First Look: November 16, 2010

merit action. Third, we interpret events in a self-serving manner, a tendency that causes us to expect others to do more than we do to solve energy problems. We then propose ways in which these biases could... View Details
Keywords: Sean Silverthorne
  • 12 Jun 2018
  • First Look

New Research and Ideas, June 12, 2018

to believe they are high ability update on entirely uninformative signals. When we remove self-serving motives, agents appear completely (or much more) rational. Biases due to motivated errors survive... View Details
Keywords: Dina Gerdeman
  • 09 Dec 2002
  • Research & Ideas

Most Accountants Aren’t Crooks—Why Good Audits Go Bad

another party's, they interpret data to favor that party. Attachment breeds bias. Approval. An audit ultimately endorses or rejects the client's accounting—in other words, it assesses the judgments that someone in the client firm has already made. Research shows that... View Details
Keywords: by Max H. Bazerman, George Loewenstein & Don A. Moore; Accounting; Financial Services
  • 22 Aug 2005
  • Research & Ideas

The Hard Work of Failure Analysis

important social and organizational benefits. First, discussion provides an opportunity for others who may not have been directly involved in the failure to learn from it. Second, others may bring new perspectives and insights that deepen the analysis and help to... View Details
Keywords: by Amy Edmondson & Mark D. Cannon
  • 19 Sep 2016
  • Research & Ideas

Why Isn't Business Research More Relevant to Business Practitioners?

and the Role of Communication” in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. The study looked at how individual self-serving biases can blur the judgment of decision-makers, who... View Details
Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Education
  • 10 Sep 2001
  • Research & Ideas

The Negotiator’s Secret: More Than Merely Effective

wildly inaccurate, the psychology of perception systematically leads negotiators to major errors.  Self-Serving Role Bias. People tend unconsciously to interpret information pertaining to their own side in a strongly View Details
Keywords: by James K. Sebenius
  • 25 Oct 2004
  • Research & Ideas

Planning for Surprises

so common? A: Our research shows that there are psychological, organizational, and political factors that conspire to keep us from dealing with problems that are worthy of our attention. Psychological vulnerabilities have to do with well-recognized View Details
Keywords: by Martha Lagace
  • 24 Feb 2015
  • First Look

First Look: February 24

markets, corporate managers are largely unopposed-because of their own expertise and the general public's low awareness of the issues. This enables managers to structure the "rules of the game" in self-serving ways. The result... View Details
Keywords: Sean Silverthorne
  • 07 Jun 2011
  • First Look

First Look: June 7

people intuitively discount the future to a greater degree than can be rationally defended. Second, positive illusions lead us to conclude that energy problems do not exist or are not severe enough to merit action. Third, we interpret events in a View Details
Keywords: Sean Silverthorne
  • 21 Mar 2016
  • HBS Case

Can Customer Reviews Be 'Managed?'

They selectively try to choose the better reviews. And at that point in class the students start debating what is appropriate, what is not appropriate, what is actual manipulation, what is actually self-serving by selecting the better... View Details
Keywords: by Brian Kenny; Advertising; Travel
  • 12 Feb 2019
  • First Look

New Research and Ideas, February 12, 2019

performance comparison, thus strengthening motivation in the domain of process transparency. In contrast, changes information helps to mitigate self-serving attribution biases in the customer transparency... View Details
Keywords: Dina Gerdeman
  • 06 Mar 2018
  • First Look

First Look at Research and Ideas, March 6, 2018

expressions of gratitude with another positive-valence emotion: excitement. We show that expressing gratitude promotes self-interested behavior compared to expressing excitement or neutral emotion. In Study 4, we find that gratitude expression triggers View Details
Keywords: Sean Silverthorne