Faculty & Research

• HBS Book

Defining a just economy in a tenuous social-political time. If we can agree that our current social-political moment is tenuous and unsustainable—and indeed, that may be the only thing we can agree on right now—then how do markets, governments, and people interact in this next era of the world? A Political Economy of Justice considers the strained state of our political economy in terms of where it can go from here. The contributors to this timely and essential volume look squarely at how normative and positive questions about political economy interact with each other—and from that beginning, how to chart a way forward to a just economy.

• Brookings Series: The Economics and Regulation of Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies (July 7, 2022)

This article reviews recent work examining pricing strategies of major online retailers and the potential effects of pricing algorithms. We describe how pricing algorithms can lead to higher prices in a number of ways, even if some characteristics of these algorithms may appear, at first glance, to increase competition. A key feature of many pricing algorithms is that they automatically react to rivals’ prices. Some have argued that this could facilitate collusion. However, this feature can also soften price competition when rivals do not collude. Even very simple pricing algorithms can raise prices. Finally, we discuss potential policy responses to encourage competition in online retail and other markets with pricing algorithms.

• Health Care Initiative

During the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, a common strategy for public health organizations around the world has been to launch interventions via advertising campaigns on social media. Despite this ubiquity, little has been known about their average effectiveness. We conduct a large-scale program evaluation of campaigns from 174 public health organizations on Facebook and Instagram that collectively reached 2.1 billion individuals and cost around $40 million. We report the results of 819 randomized experiments that measured the impact of these campaigns across standardized, survey-based outcomes. We find on average these campaigns are effective at influencing self-reported beliefs, shifting opinions close to 1% at baseline with a cost per influenced person of about $3.41. There is further evidence that campaigns are especially effective at influencing users’ knowledge of how to get vaccines.

• Featured Case

Founded in November 2014 and based in Shanghai, NIO designed, jointly manufactured, and sold premium “smart” EVs. Its mission was to “shape a joyful lifestyle by offering high-performance smart electric vehicles and being the best user enterprise. At NIO Day 2021, Founder William Li shared plans for the company to expand to 25 different countries and regions by 2025, including the automobile juggernaut nation of Germany. Would users in other markets and cultures embrace his user enterprise and high-touch model? NIO faced tough competition ahead in the race for EV supremacy.

• Featured Case

Dr. Timnit Gebru—a leading artificial intelligence (AI) computer scientist and co-lead of Google’s Ethical AI team—was messaging with one of her colleagues when she saw the words: “Did you resign?? Megan sent an email saying that she accepted your resignation.” Heart rate spiking, Gebru was shocked to find that her company account had been cut off. She scrolled through her personal inbox to find an email stating that the company could not agree to the conditions she had stipulated about a research paper critiquing large language models and also expressing disapproval of a message she had sent to an internal listserv about halting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts without accountability. Therefore, Google was accepting Gebru’s “resignation,” effective immediately.

• HBS Working Paper

Signs of discontent with global capitalism and national capitalisms abound. Unless we find ways to create better jobs and then improve those jobs further with empathic management and thoughtful mentoring, then we will be unable to create a more stable, purposeful political and economic system. We cannot resolve any of these challenges only with money. Our crisis is about the distribution of dignity, purpose, and meaning within our societies. Failure to resolve these challenges would likely lead to a generation of ongoing disruption and the destruction of our era of globalization.

• HBS Working Paper

While there is a vast (and mixed) literature on gender differences in social preferences, little is known about believed gender differences in social preferences. This paper documents robust evidence for believed gender differences in social preferences. Across a wide range of contexts that vary in terms of strategic considerations, selfish motives, fairness concepts and applications, we find that individuals robustly expect that women are more generous and more equality-oriented. Despite the robustness of these beliefs, the believed gender gap in social preferences—in the range of contexts we consider—is largely inaccurate.