Faculty & Research

• HBS Book

This book explores the transformative potential of ChatGPT, Web3, and their impact on productivity and various industries. It delves into Generative AI (GenAI) and its representative platform ChatGPT, their synergy with Web3, and how they can revolutionize business operations. It covers the potential impact surpassing prior industrial revolutions. After providing an overview of GenAI, ChatGPT, and Web3, it investigates business applications in various industries and areas, such as product management, finance, real estate, gaming, and government, highlighting value creation and operational revolution through their integration. It also explores their impact on content generation, customer service, personalization, and data analysis and examines how the technologies can enhance content quality, customer experiences, sales, revenue, and resource efficiency.

• Review of Accounting Studies 28, no. 4 (December 2023): 2075–2103.

In this study, we offer novel evidence on how the nature of brokerage-client relationships can influence the quality of equity research. We exploit a unique setting provided by the Protocol for Broker Recruiting to examine whether relaxed broker non-compete agreement (NCA) enforcement generates spillover effects on sell-side analysts. Entry into this agreement reassigns ownership of the client relationship from the brokerage house to individual brokers, potentially generating a greater standard of care. Using a generalized difference-in-difference research design, we provide evidence consistent with brokers reducing pressure on analysts to produce optimistic research following protocol entry. This effect is concentrated among less experienced and non-All Star analysts, who previously may have faced the greatest pressures to sacrifice objectivity.

• Health Care Initiative

Using commercial health insurance claims data from 2017-2019, we assessed whether quaternary hospitals charged higher prices for common, unspecialized services also offered by nonquaternary hospitals. We found quaternary-hospital price premiums of 8.2 percent, on average, across a set of common inpatient admissions, and price premiums of 3.7 percent, on average across a set of common outpatient services – with higher premiums for colonoscopies and no significant premium for mammographies. These premiums may reflect market power and bargaining leverage vis a vis insurers derived from offering quaternary services, implying the leverage may extend to competitively provided services.

• Featured Case

In 2019, Daniel Pinto, President and COO of JPMorgan Chase, has to make a recommendation to the bank’s Chairman and CEO, Jamie Dimon, about where to physically locate the bank’s European trading operations after Brexit takes effect in 2020. The decision-making process considered a range of European locations, including Dublin, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, and Paris, and ultimately Pinto is left with a choice between Frankfurt and Paris. The case describes the decision-making process and gives an overview of JPMorgan’s history in France and the French government’s efforts to make the country more economically competitive to lure banks moving from London in the wake of Brexit.

• Featured Case

Founded in 2015, ReUp Education helps “stopped out students”—learners who have stopped making progress towards graduation—achieve their college completion goals. The company relies on a team of success coaches to engage with learners and help them reenroll. In 2019, ReUp developed an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm to help coaches better tailor the support they provide. A disappointing 2021 experiment showing limited utility of the algorithm, however, causes ReUp’s senior leaders to question the value of AI for such a personalized, nuanced task like success coaching.

• Working Paper

For many decisions, people rely on information received from others by word of mouth. How does the process of verbal transmission distort economic information? In our experiments, participants listen to audio recordings containing economic forecasts and are paid to accurately transmit the information via voice messages. Other participants listen either to an original recording or a transmitted version and then state incentivized beliefs. Our main finding is that, across a variety of transmitter incentive schemes, information about the reliability of a forecast is lost in transmission more than twice as much as information about the forecast’s level.

• HBS Working Paper

Common identity often provides a foundation for workplace rapport. Though gender is perhaps the most frequently studied dimension of identity among workers, little is known about how gender match between managers and their workers might affect team performance. Using personnel and productivity data from the universe of fast food restaurants of a large chain in Colombia, we study whether mismatched gender identity between managers and workers affects the team’s ability to deal with demand shocks. We leverage the staggered expansion of a leading food delivery platform across the country to study how well managers are able to adjust worker staffing to match resulting increases in demand.