Doctoral Student

Ethan S Bernstein

Does privacy make us productive?

I study how the sharing of information across and within boundaries affects learning, innovation, and performance. The prevailing body of knowledge on transparency and information sharing, in theory and practice, tends to adopt a lens of more is better, and focuses its attention on how to make groups, organizations, and networks more effective at information transfer. I, instead, focus on the circumstances under which sharing information can be detrimental to learning, innovation, and performance—or, put differently, the circumstances under which privacy makes us productive.

My research finds that privacy is an important management lever but remains generally underrecognized and underutilized, despite its potential to increase learning, innovation, and performance. Drawing on field experiments, lab experiments, and qualitative field work, my research contributes to a broad community of management scholars in organizational behavior, as well as managers and business leaders across industries.

For more detail, please see my job market website at http://www.people.hbs.edu/ebernstein/.

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For the most up-to-date biography, please see my job market website at: http://www.people.hbs.edu/ebernstein/.

Ethan Bernstein is a Doctoral Candidate in Management at the Harvard Business School and a Kauffman Foundation Fellow of Law, Innovation, and Growth at Harvard Law School. His research on both sides of the river focuses on management issues related to learning and innovation.

Ethan's most recent research examines how, and under what conditions, privacy makes us more productive. More specifically, he studies how the sharing of information across and within boundaries affects learning, innovation, and performance. A core part of his dissertation work was recently published as a sole-authored article in the Administrative Science Quarterly.

In addition to his fieldwork and field experiments, Ethan conducts lab experiments. His recent lab work is focused on investigating the relationship between network structure and performance in complex problem-solving tasks.

Ethan received JD/MBA from Harvard University, as well as an A.B. in Economics from Amherst College. Prior to beginning his doctoral studies, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) in Toronto and Tokyo. From 2011-2012, Ethan took leave from Harvard to help Elizabeth Warren stand-up the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) as a member of the CFPB Implementation Team, and subequently served as the CFPB's first Deputy Assitant Director, Mortgage Markets and its first Chief Strategy Officer.

Ethan has also held positions at the Center for Organizational Fitness, J.P. Morgan, Cravath, Swaine & Moore, and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett. He has taught Operations Strategy to executives in Samsung's Premier Leadership Program, Finance and Accounting in the MBA Analytics Program at the Harvard Business School, Economics at Harvard College, and is an annual guest lecturer at Harvard's Business Leadership Program. Ethan also worked in the White House during the Clinton Administration in the Executive Office of the President, supporting Ambassador Michael Kantor (U.S. Trade Representative). He currently serves as the Vice President of the Harvard Law School Association.

In his spare time, Ethan is an culinary adventurer and avid traveler, and he has completed five 500km+ cycling trips--through Ireland, Alaska, Nova Scotia, Quebec, and California.

For the most up-to-date biography, please see my job market website at: http://www.people.hbs.edu/ebernstein/.

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Publications

Research Summary

Awards & Honors