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- May 2025
- Article
Punitive but Discerning: Reputation Can Fuel Ambiguously-Deserved Punishment, but Does Not Erode Sensitivity to Nuance
By: Jillian J. Jordan and Nour S. Kteily
The desire to appear virtuous can motivate people to punish wrongdoers, a desirable outcome when punishment is clearly deserved. Yet claims that “virtue signaling” is fueling a culture of outrage suggest that reputation concerns may inspire even potentially unmerited... View Details
- May 2025 (Revised June 2025)
- Supplement
Michael Ku and Global Clinical Supply at Pfizer Inc.: Bringing Hope to Patients (D)
By: Linda A. Hill and Lydia Begag
This fourth installment in the Pfizer Global Clinical Supply (GCS) transformation case series highlights how over a decade of cultural and digital evolution positioned GCS to meet unprecedented global challenges. In 2011, Michael Ku became the Vice President of GCS and... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Incentive-Compatible Recovery from Manipulated Signals, with Applications to Decentralized Physical Infrastructure
By: Jason Milionis, Jens Ernstberger, Joseph Bonneau, Scott Duke Kominers and Tim Roughgarden
We introduce the first formal model capturing the elicitation of unverifiable information from a party (the "source") with implicit signals derived by other players (the "observers"). Our model is motivated in part by applications in decentralized physical... View Details
- March 2025
- Article
Does Communicating Measurable Diversity Goals Attract or Repel Historically Marginalized Job Applicants? Evidence from the Lab and Field
By: Erika L. Kirgios, Ike Silver and Edward H. Chang
Many organizations struggle to attract a demographically diverse workforce. How does adding a measurable goal to a public diversity commitment—for example, “We care about diversity” versus “We care about diversity and plan to hire at least one woman or racial minority... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Discrimination, Rejection, and Job Search
By: Anne Boring, Katherine Coffman, Dylan Glover and María José González-Fuentes
We investigate how candidates’ willingness to apply responds to (potential) discrimination and rejection using a simulated labor market. Past work has shown that “blinding” job applications reduces discrimination and increases the rate at which women are hired. Our... View Details
- February 2025 (Revised April 2025)
- Case
Institutional Neutrality, Restraint or Convenience?
By: Clayton S. Rose, Nicole Zelazko and Alexis Lefort
In the fall of 2023 and winter of 2024, college campuses across the U.S. experienced protests and encampments in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023 terrorist attack on Israel by the Islamist militant group Hamas, and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza. These... View Details
Keywords: Distribution; Cost vs Benefits; Ethics; Governance; Leadership; Crisis Management; Risk Management; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Mission and Purpose; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Culture; Civil Society or Community; Social Issues; Adaptation; Disruption; Communication Strategy; Higher Education; United States
- Working Paper
AI in Disguise—How AI-generated Ads' Visual Cues Shape Consumer Perception and Performance
By: Yannick Exner, Jochen Hartmann, Oded Netzer and Shunyuan Zhang
Generative AI’s recent advancements in creating content have offered vast potential to transform the advertising industry. This research investigates the impact of generative AI-enabled visual ad creation on real-world advertising effectiveness. For this purpose, we... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Climate Solutions, Transition Risk, and Stock Returns
By: Shirley Lu, Edward J. Riedl, Simon Xu and George Serafeim
Using large language models to measure firms' climate solution products and services, we find that high-climate solution firms exhibit lower stock returns and higher market valuation multiples. Their stock prices respond positively to events signaling increased demand... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Catalysts for Climate Solutions: Corporate Responses to Venture Capital Financing of Climate-tech Startups
By: Shirley Lu, George Serafeim and Simon Xu
We study whether incumbent firms increase their product focus on climate solutions in response to venture capital (VC) financing of climate-tech startups. Using large language models to measure a firm's focus on climate solutions, we find that incumbents in similar... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Categorical Processing in a Complex World
By: Marco Sammon, Thomas Graeber and Christopher Roth
In real-world news environments, quantitative information is rarely presented in isolation; it is characterized through qualitative comparisons with various reference levels. Company earnings, for example, are commonly compared to analyst forecasts, previous earnings,... View Details
- November–December 2024
- Article
Group Size and Its Impact on Diversity-Related Perceptions and Hiring Decisions in Homogeneous Groups
By: Aneesh Rai, Edward H. Chang, Erika Kirgios and Katherine L. Milkman
Why do some homogeneous groups face backlash for lacking diversity, whereas others escape censure? We show that a homogeneous group’s size changes how it is perceived and whether decision makers pursue greater diversity in its ranks. We theorize that people make... View Details
- October 2024 (Revised February 2025)
- Case
Lanco Medical Group: Fostering Happiness for Growth
By: Susanna Gallani, Jenyfeer Martínez Buitrago and Katherine Sonnefeldt
This case describes how Lanco Medical Group, a fast-growing pharmaceutical distributor serving Latin America, approached the design of their employee benefits and incentives program. After learning about gaps between what leadership believed motivated employees and... View Details
- October 2024
- Article
Canary Categories
By: Eric Anderson, Chaoqun Chen, Ayelet Israeli and Duncan Simester
Past customer spending in a category is generally a positive signal of future customer spending. We show that there exist “canary categories” for which the reverse is true. Purchases in these categories are a signal that customers are less likely to return to that... View Details
- August 2024
- Case
Oculii
By: Andy Wu and Lucas Defilippo
It was a bright June day in 2016. Steven Hong, co-founder and COO of Oculii had just signed a letter of intent agreeing to a 51% stake acquisition by Nexteer Automotive, a global steering and driveline supplier company that developed advanced driver assistance systems... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Immodest Victims: Victims Who Broadcast Their Victimization Are Seen as Less Morally Virtuous
By: Nathan Dhaliwal, Jillian J. Jordan, Anoushka Kiyawat and Pat Barclay
How do people evaluate victims who advertise their victim status? Because such broadcasting can elicit sympathy and support, we propose that declining to broadcast serves as a costly act of modesty: one is withholding a fact about oneself that could garner resources... View Details
- August 2024
- Article
Partisans neither Expect nor Receive Reputational Rewards for Sharing Falsehoods over Truth Online.
By: Isaias Ghezae, Jillian J. Jordan, Izzy Gainsburg, Mohsen Mosleh, Gordon Pennycook, Robb Willer and David Rand
A frequently invoked explanation for the sharing of false over true political information is that partisans are motivated by their reputations. In particular, it is often argued that by indiscriminately sharing news that is favorable to one’s political party,... View Details
- July–August 2024
- Article
Doing More with Less: Overcoming Ineffective Long-Term Targeting Using Short-Term Signals
By: Ta-Wei Huang and Eva Ascarza
Firms are increasingly interested in developing targeted interventions for customers with the best response,
which requires identifying differences in customer sensitivity, typically through the conditional average treatment
effect (CATE) estimation. In theory, to... View Details
- May 2024
- Article
Going Beyond the 'Self' in Self-control: Interpersonal Consequences of Commitment Strategies
By: Ariella S. Kristal and Julian Zlatev
Commitment strategies are effective mechanisms individuals can use to overcome self-control problems. Across seven studies (and two supplemental studies), we explore the negative interpersonal consequences of commitment strategy choice and use. In Study 1, using an... 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
- April–May 2024
- Article
Gone with the Big Data: Institutional Lender Demand for Private Information
By: Jung Koo Kang
I explore whether big-data sources can crowd out the value of private information acquired through lending relationships. Institutional lenders have been shown to exploit their access to borrowers’ private information by trading on it in financial markets. As a shock... View Details