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- 2025
- Working Paper
Training Within Firms
By: Brayan Diaz, Andrea Neyra-Nazarrett, Julian Ramirez, Raffaella Sadun and Jorge Tamayo
Training investments are essential for improving worker and firm productivity, yet their
implementation is often hindered by low participation rates and insufficient worker engagement.
This study uses data from three firms–a car manufacturer, a quick-service... View Details
- March 2025
- Article
Boomerasking: Answering Your Own Questions
By: Alison Wood Brooks and Michael Yeomans
Humans spend much of their lives in conversation, where they tend to hold many simultaneous motives. We examine two fundamental desires: to be responsive to a partner and to disclose about oneself. We introduce one pervasive way people attempt to reconcile these... View Details
- March 2025
- Article
Does Communicating Measurable Diversity Goals Attract or Repel Historically Marginalized Job Applicants? Evidence from the Lab and Field
By: Erika L. Kirgios, Ike Silver and Edward H. Chang
Many organizations struggle to attract a demographically diverse workforce. How does adding a measurable goal to a public diversity commitment—for example, “We care about diversity” versus “We care about diversity and plan to hire at least one woman or racial minority... View Details
- January 24, 2025
- Article
Behaviorally Designed Training Leads to More Diverse Hiring
By: Cansin Arslan, Edward H. Chang, Siri Chilazi, Iris Bohnet and Oliver P. Hauser
Many organizations have shown interest in increasing the diversity of their workforces for various reasons. Collectively, they have spent millions of dollars and countless employee hours on diversity training. Yet, there is little empirical evidence that such training... View Details
- January 2025
- Case
AI Meets VC: The Data-Driven Revolution at Quantum Light Capital
By: Lauren Cohen, Grace Headinger and Sophia Pan
Ilya Kondrashov, CEO of Quantum Light Capital, was driven to harness AI for identifying high-potential scale-ups. Collaborating with Nik Storonsky, founder of Revolut, the duo observed that most venture capital (VC) decisions were heavily influenced by emotion, with... View Details
Keywords: Artificial Intelligence; Business Finance; Data Analysis; Angel Investors; Cognitive Biases; Scale; Venture Capital; Investment; Business Model; Forecasting and Prediction; Technological Innovation; Innovation Strategy; Behavior; Cognition and Thinking; Public Opinion; Private Sector; Business Strategy; Competitive Advantage; Business Earnings; Behavioral Finance; AI and Machine Learning; Analytics and Data Science; Business Startups; Financial Services Industry; London; United Kingdom
- 2024
- Working Paper
Why Most Resist AI Companions
By: Julian De Freitas, Zeliha Oğuz-Uğuralp, Ahmet Kaan Uğuralp and Stefano Puntoni
Chatbots are now able to form emotional relationships with people and alleviate loneliness—a growing public health concern. Behavioral research provides little insight into whether everyday people are likely to use these applications and why. We address this question... View Details
- October 2024
- Article
Canary Categories
By: Eric Anderson, Chaoqun Chen, Ayelet Israeli and Duncan Simester
Past customer spending in a category is generally a positive signal of future customer spending. We show that there exist “canary categories” for which the reverse is true. Purchases in these categories are a signal that customers are less likely to return to that... View Details
- September–October 2024
- Article
Working Around the Clock: Temporal Distance, Intrafirm Communication, and Time Shifting of the Employee Workday
By: Jasmina Chauvin, Prithwiraj Choudhury and Tommy Pan Fang
This paper examines the effects of temporal distance generated by time zone separation on communication in geographically distributed organizations. We build on prior research, which highlights time zone separation as a significant challenge, but argue that employees... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Determinants of Top-Down Sabotage
By: Hashim Zaman and Karim R. Lakhani
We investigate the conditions that motivate managers to impede the growth of talented subordinates due to fears of future competition for their own positions. Our research expands on existing tournament and contest theory literature that considers peer-to-peer sabotage... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Smaller than We Thought? The Effect of Automatic Savings Policies
By: James J. Choi, David Laibson, Jordan Cammarota, Richard Lombardo and John Beshears
Medium- and long-run dynamics undermine the effect of automatic enrollment and default savings-rate auto-escalation on retirement savings. Our analysis of 401(k) plans incorporates the facts that employees frequently leave firms (often before matching contributions... View Details
- July 2024
- Article
How Artificial Intelligence Constrains Human Experience
By: A. Valenzuela, S. Puntoni, D. Hoffman, N. Castelo, J. De Freitas, B. Dietvorst, C. Hildebrand, Y.E. Huh, R. Meyer, M. Sweeney, S. Talaifar, G. Tomaino and K. Wertenbroch
Many consumption decisions and experiences are digitally mediated. As a consequence, consumer behavior is increasingly the joint product of human psychology and ubiquitous algorithms (Braun et al. 2024; cf. Melumad et al. 2020). The coming of age of Large Language... View Details
- May–June 2024
- Article
Setting Gendered Expectations? Recruiter Outreach Bias in Online Tech Training Programs
By: Jacqueline N. Lane, Karim R. Lakhani and Roberto Fernandez
Competence development in digital technologies, analytics, and artificial intelligence is increasingly important to all types of organizations and their workforce. Universities and corporations are investing heavily in developing training programs, at all tenure... View Details
- 2024
- Book
The Ritual Effect: From Habit to Ritual, Harness the Surprising Power of Everyday Actions
By: Michael Norton
Our lives are filled with repetitive tasks meant to keep us on track—what we come to know as habits. Over time, these routines (for example, brushing your teeth or putting on your right sock first) tend to be performed automatically. But when we’re more mindful about... View Details
- March 7, 2024
- Article
Integrating Digital Tools into Every Stage of Your Sales Strategy
By: Frank V. Cespedes and Georg Krentzel
In their growth and customer-acquisition activities, most companies now face twin challenges: understanding and responding to omni-channel buying behavior and doing that without inadvertently decreasing sales productivity. Thirty years ago, Peter Drucker noted that... View Details
- February 2024
- Case
Levels.fyi: How Negotiations Coaching and Pay Transparency Change Job Market Outcomes
By: Zoë B. Cullen
Salary information is everywhere. What impact does it have on compensation? How should employees and employers use salary information in negotiations? This case brings to light how pay information affects behavior and job market outcomes in surprising ways. View Details
- February 2024
- Article
Conveying and Detecting Listening in Live Conversation
By: Hanne Collins, Julia A. Minson, Ariella S. Kristal and Alison Wood Brooks
Across all domains of human social life, positive perceptions of conversational listening (i.e., feeling heard) predict well-being, professional success, and interpersonal flourishing. But a fundamental question remains: Are perceptions of listening accurate? Prior... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Warnings and Endorsements: Improving Human-AI Collaboration Under Covariate Shift
By: Matthew DosSantos DiSorbo and Kris Ferreira
Problem definition: While artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms may perform well on data that are representative of the training set (inliers), they may err when extrapolating on non-representative data (outliers). These outliers often originate from covariate shift,... View Details
- January 2024
- Supplement
Winning Business at Russell Reynolds
By: Ethan Bernstein and Cara Mazzucco
In an effort to make compensation drive collaboration, Russell Reynolds Associates’ (RRA) CEO Clarke Murphy sought to re-engineer the bonus system for his executive search consultants in 2016. As his HR analytics guru, Kelly Smith, points out, that risks upsetting—and... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Employer-Based Short-Term Savings Accounts
By: Sarah Holmes Berk, John Beshears, Jay Garg, James J. Choi and David Laibson
We study the introduction of a choice architecture design intended to increase short-term savings among employees at five U.K. firms. Employees were offered the opportunity to opt into a payroll deduction program that auto-deposits funds from each paycheck into a... View Details
- December 4, 2023
- Article
Stop Assuming Introverts Aren't Passionate About Work
By: Kai Krautter, Anabel Büchner and Jon M. Jachimowicz
Society often assumes that the only way to be passionate is to act extroverted, but that is simply not true. In their new research, the authors found that regardless of their actual level of passion, extroverted employees are perceived as more passionate than... View Details