Faculty & Research

• HBS Book

Democracy is often described in two opposite ways, as either wonderfully resilient or dangerously fragile. Curiously, both characterizations can be correct, depending on the context. When Democracy Breaks aims to deepen our understanding of what separates democratic resilience from democratic fragility by focusing on the latter. The volume’s collaborators—experts in the history and politics of the societies covered in their chapters—explore eleven episodes of democratic breakdown, ranging from ancient Athens to Weimar Germany to present-day Turkey, Russia, and Venezuela.

• American Economic Review 114, no. 9 (September 2024): 2792-2824

How do poor entrepreneurs trade off investments in business enterprises versus children's human capital, and how do these choices influence intergenerational socio-economic mobility? To examine this, we exploit experimental variation in household income resulting from a one-time relaxation of household liquidity constraints (Field et al., 2013), and track schooling and business outcomes over the subsequent 11 years. On average, treatment households, who were made wealthier through the experiment, increase human capital investment such that their children are 35% more likely to attend college. However, schooling gains only accrue to children with literate parents, among whom college attendance nearly doubles. In contrast, treatment effects on investment among the illiterate accrue only on the business margin and are accompanied by adverse educational outcomes for children. As a result, treatment lowers relative educational mobility.

• Artificial Intelligence

Chatbots are now able to engage in sophisticated conversations with consumers. Due to the ‘black box’ nature of the algorithms, it is impossible to predict in advance how these conversations will unfold. Behavioral research provides little insight into potential safety issues emerging from the current rapid deployment of this technology at scale. We begin to address this urgent question by focusing on the context of mental health and “companion AI”: applications designed to provide consumers with synthetic interaction partners. A Pilot Study reports an extensive performance test of several commercially available companion AIs. Studies 1 and 2 present field evidence: actual consumer interactions with two different companion AIs. Study 3 is an experiment testing consumer reaction to risky and unhelpful chatbot responses.

• Featured Case

In 1997, Patrick Awuah had a dream: to bring liberal arts education to Ghana. Amid the country’s declining economy and pervasive corruption problems, Awuah saw education as an opportunity to reverse its fortunes by investing in the next generation of African leaders. Five years later, he and his team established Ashesi University, which differentiated itself from Ghana’s traditional educational model by remaining privately funded (and therefore independent from Ghana’s public school system), religiously unaffiliated, and – in service of its mission of developing future leaders – operative under an honor code that allowed students to take exams without supervision, an unprecedented practice in Ghana. This case follows Awuah’s efforts to establish and grow Ashesi University and provides insight into the role that leadership can play in operationalizing purpose, especially in entrepreneurial ventures.

• Featured Case

The 2023 release of live-action film Barbie, and its accompanying marketing blitz, incited a worldwide Barbie craze. Suddenly Barbie was everywhere, a celebrated icon reinstated at the forefront of cultural conversation. This goodwill stood in contrast to decades of criticism of the Barbie brand. Although proponents celebrated Barbie for her promise to “inspire the limitless potential in every girl,” detractors felt that the doll promoted a narrow beauty standard and perpetuated gender stereotypes. Past efforts to diversify the Barbie doll had met mixed reactions. Did the movie’s superlative success mean that Barbie’s dark days of controversy were behind her? In a fast-changing, turbulent industry, Mattel executives need to decide how to sustain Barbie’s positive momentum, and whether the strategy can be replicated across other brands in Mattel’s portfolio.

• HBS Working Paper

In recent years, voter ID laws and convenience voting have generated heated partisan debates. To shed light on these policy issues, we survey the recent evidence on the institutional determinants and effects of voter turnout and broaden the perspective beyond the most debated rules. We begin by discussing the importance of electoral participation both for its consequences on policy choices and for democratic legitimacy. Building on a simple cost-benefit model of voting, we then review (quasi)-experimental work studying the effects of voting procedures and of other election rules. Voting procedures (which determine how people vote) primarily affect the cost of participation. The obstacles they create matter more when they occur ahead of the election, when the stakes are not salient (e.g., voter registration requirements), and less when parties mobilize voters against them and when alternative ways to vote exist (e.g., when people can choose whether to vote by mail or in person).

• Working Paper

The rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming creative problem-solving, necessitating new approaches for evaluating innovative solutions. This study explores how human-AI collaboration can enhance early-stage evaluations, focusing on the interplay between objective criteria, which are quantifiable, and subjective criteria, which rely on personal judgment. We conducted a field experiment with MIT Solve, involving 72 experts and 156 community screeners who evaluated 48 solutions for the 2024 Global Health Equity Challenge. Screeners received assistance from GPT-4, offering recommendations and, in some cases, rationale. We compared a human-only control group with two AI-assisted treatments: a black box AI and a narrative AI with probabilistic explanations justifying its decisions.