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- Faculty Publications (18)
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- 2022
- Article
The Ordinary Concept of a Meaningful Life: The Role of Subjective and Objective Factors in Third-Person Attributions of Meaning
By: Michael Prinzing, Julian De Freitas and Barbara L. Fredrickson
The desire for a meaningful life is ubiquitous, yet the ordinary concept of a meaningful life is poorly understood. Across six experiments (total N = 2,539), we investigated whether third-person attributions of meaning depend on the psychological states an agent...
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- July 9, 2019
- Article
Common Knowledge, Coordination, and Strategic Mentalizing in Human Social Life
By: Julian De Freitas, Kyle A. Thomas, Peter DiScioli and Steven Pinker
People often coordinate for mutual gain, such as keeping to opposite sides of a stairway, dubbing an object or place with a name, or assembling en masse to protest a regime. Because successful coordination requires complementary choices, these opportunities raise the...
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- Article
Maimonides' Ladder: States of Mutual Knowledge and the Perception of Charitability
By: Julian De Freitas, Peter DiScioli, Kyle A. Thomas and Steven Pinker
Why do people esteem anonymous charitable giving? We connect normative theories of charitability
(captured in Maimonides’ Ladder of Charity) with evolutionary theories of partner choice to test predictions on how attributions of charitability are affected by states of...
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- Article
Optimality Bias in Moral Judgment
By: Julian De Freitas and Samuel G.B. Johnson
We often make decisions with incomplete knowledge of their consequences. Might people nonetheless expect others to make optimal choices, despite this ignorance? Here, we show that people are sensitive to moral optimality: that people hold moral agents accountable...
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- 2017
- Chapter
Corporate Moral Agency, Positive Duties, and Purpose
By: Nien-hê Hsieh
A long-standing question in business ethics is whether business enterprises are themselves moral agents with distinct moral responsibilities. To date, the debate about corporate moral agency has focused on responsibility for past wrongdoing that involves violating...
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- July 16, 2016
- Article
A Game Theoretic Model for Resource Allocation Among Countermeasures with Multiple Attributes
By: Elisabeth C. Paulson, Igor Linkov and Jeffrey Keisler
We study a strategic, two-player, sequential game between an attacker and defender. The defender must allocate resources amongst possible countermeasures and across possible targets. The attacker then chooses a type of threat and a target to attack. This paper proposes...
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- 2016
- Book
Strategy Beyond Markets
By: John de Figueiredo, Michael Lenox, Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Rick Vanden Bergh
Strategy beyond markets has been an active area of research inquiry since the early 1990s. Since its inception, the scholarship emanating from this research stream has grown substantially in quantity, quality, and breadth. Likewise, firms across the world have...
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Keywords:
Strategy
- February 2016
- Article
Unearned Status Gain: Evidence from a Global Language Mandate
By: Tsedal Neeley and Tracy Dumas
Theories of status rarely address unearned status gain—an unexpected and unsolicited increase in relative standing, prestige, or worth, attained not through individual effort or achievement, but from a shift in organizationally valued characteristics. We build theory...
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- 2015
- Working Paper
Understanding Conformity: An Experimental Investigation
By: B. Douglas Bernheim and Christine L Exley
Some theories of conformity hold that social equilibrium either standardizes inferences or promotes a shared understanding of conventions and norms among individuals with fixed heterogeneous preferences (belief mechanisms). Others depict tastes as fluid and hence...
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- Article
Strategic Disclosure: The Case of Business School Rankings
By: Michael Luca and Jonathan Smith
We empirically analyze disclosure decisions made by 240 MBA programs about which rankings to display on their websites. We present three main findings. First, consistent with theories of countersignaling, top schools are least likely to disclose their rankings, whereas...
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- Article
The (Perceived) Meaning of Spontaneous Thoughts
By: Carey K. Morewedge, Colleen Giblin and Michael I. Norton
Spontaneous thoughts, the output of a broad category of uncontrolled and inaccessible higher-order mental processes, arise frequently in everyday life. The seeming randomness by which spontaneous thoughts arise might give people good reason to dismiss them as...
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- November 2013
- Article
Learning from My Successes and from Others' Failures: Evidence from Minimally Invasive Cardiac Surgery
By: D. KC, B. Staats and F. Gino
Learning from past experience is central to an organization's adaptation and survival. A key dimension of prior experience is whether an outcome was successful or unsuccessful. While empirical studies have investigated the effects of success and failure in...
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- 2014
- Working Paper
Strategic Disclosure: The Case of Business School Rankings
By: Michael Luca
We empirically analyze disclosure decisions made by 240 MBA programs about which rankings to display on their websites. We present three main findings. First, consistent with theories of countersignaling, top schools are least likely to disclose their rankings, whereas...
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- 2011
- Working Paper
Inside the Black Box of the Corporate Staff: An Exploratory Analysis Through the Lens of E-Mail Networks
By: Toby E. Stuart
The corporate staff is central in theories of the multi-business firm, but empirical evidence on its function is limited. In this paper, we examine the high-level role of two units of a corporate staff through analysis of electronic communications. We find sharp...
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- Article
When Dreaming Is Believing: The (Motivated) Interpretation of Dreams
By: Carey K. Morewedge and Michael I. Norton
This research investigated laypeople's interpretation of their dreams. Participants from both Eastern and Western cultures believed that dreams contain hidden truths (Study 1) and considered dreams to provide more meaningful information about the world than similar...
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- June 2008
- Article
Bringing the Context Back In: Settings and the Search for Syndicate Partners in Venture Capital Investment Networks
By: Toby E. Stuart
Most existing network-based theories of relationship formation, whether based on homophily or structural constraint, imply that actors form highly cohesive, homogenous clusters. Yet real networks also include many "bridging" ties—isolated links between parties that...
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- 2007
- Working Paper
What Causes Industry Agglomeration? Evidence from Coagglomeration Patterns
By: Glenn Ellison, Edward Glaeser and William R. Kerr
Many industries are geographically concentrated. Many mechanisms that could account for such agglomeration have been proposed. We note that these theories make different predictions about which pairs of industries should be coagglomerated. We discuss the measurement of...
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