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Above: Sid Misra (MBA 2013) cofounder, Perceptive Automata (Len Rubenstein; courtesy of Perceptive Automata) Amid the hubbub of this year’s Consumer...
- May, 2021
- Article
Joy and Rigor in Behavioral Science
In the past decade, behavioral science has seen the introduction of beneficial reforms to reduce false positive results. Serving as the motivational backdrop for the present research, we wondered whether these reforms might have unintended negative consequences on...
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- May, 2021
- Article
Emotional Acknowledgment: How Verbalizing Others' Emotions Fosters Interpersonal Trust
By: Alisa Yu, Justin M. Berg and Julian Zlatev
People often respond to others’ emotions using verbal acknowledgment (e.g., “You seem upset”). Yet, little is known about the relational benefits and risks of acknowledging others’ emotions in the workplace. We draw upon Costly Signaling Theory to posit how emotional...
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- March 2021
- Article
Opting-in to Prosocial Incentives
By: Daniel Schwartz, Elizabeth A. Keenan, Alex Imas and Ayelet Gneezy
The design of effective incentive schemes that are both successful in motivating employees and keeping down costs is of critical importance. Research has demonstrated that prosocial incentives, where individuals’ effort benefits a charitable organization, can sometimes...
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- March 2021
- Article
Active Choice, Implicit Defaults, and the Incentive to Choose
By: John Beshears, James J. Choi, David Laibson and Brigitte C. Madrian
Home-delivered prescriptions have no delivery charge and lower copayments than prescriptions picked up at a pharmacy. Nevertheless, when home delivery is offered on an opt-in basis, the take-up rate is only 6%. We study a program that makes active choice of either home...
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- January 2021
- Case
Value-Based Insurance Design at Onex
By: Joshua Schwartzstein, Amitabh Chandra and Amram Migdal
The operating executives of Health and Benefits for Onex Partners, Megan Jackson Frye and Sam Camens, faced a challenge: Healthcare costs for employees of Onex’s portfolio companies were continuing to rise above the consumer price index, reflecting broader trends...
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Keywords:
Decision Making;
Cost vs Benefits;
Decision Choices and Conditions;
Decisions;
Finance;
Behavioral Finance;
Insurance;
Health;
Health Care and Treatment;
Human Resources;
Compensation and Benefits;
Markets;
Demand and Consumers;
Consumer Behavior;
Social Psychology;
Behavior;
Interests;
Motivation and Incentives;
Perception;
Health Industry;
Insurance Industry;
North America;
United States
- 2021
- Article
Helping and Happiness: A Review and Guide for Public Policy
By: Lara B. Aknin and Ashley V. Whillans
Perhaps one of the most reaffirming findings to emerge over the past several decades is that humans not only engage in generous behavior, they also appear to experience pleasure from doing so. Yet not all acts of helping lead to greater happiness. Here, we review the...
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- January 2021
- Article
How Personality and Policy Predict Pandemic Behavior: Understanding Sheltering-in-Place in 55 Countries at the Onset of COVID-19
By: Friedrich M. Götz, Andrés Gvirtz, Adam D. Galinsky and Jon M. Jachimowicz
The spread of COVID-19 within any given country or community at the onset of the pandemic depended in part on the sheltering-in-place rate of its citizens. The pandemic led us to revisit one of psychology’s most fundamental and most basic questions in a high-stakes...
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- Article
Returnable Reciprocity: Returnable Gifts Are More Effective than Unreturnable Gifts at Promoting Virtuous Behaviors
By: J.J. Zlatev and Rogers, T.
Increasing virtuous behaviors, such as initiating healthy habits, is an important goal for policymakers and social scientists. To promote compliance with requests to perform virtuous behaviors, we study “returnable reciprocity.” Whereas traditional reciprocity involves...
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Keywords:
Nudges;
Reciprocity;
Want-should Conflicts;
Wellness;
Health;
Behavior;
Change;
Well-being
- Article
Nudging: Progress to Date and Future Directions
By: John Beshears and Harry Kosowsky
Nudges influence behavior by changing the environment in which decisions are made, without restricting the menu of options and without altering financial incentives. This paper assesses past empirical research on nudging and provides recommendations for future work in...
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- Article
Going It Alone: Competition Increases the Attractiveness of Minority Status
By: Erika L. Kirgios, Edward H. Chang and Katherine L. Milkman
Past research demonstrates that people prefer to affiliate with others who resemble them demographically. However, we posit that when competing for scarce opportunities, strategic considerations moderate the strength of this tendency toward homophily. Across six...
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- Article
Feeling Authentic Serves as a Buffer Against Rejections
By: F. Gino and M. Kouchaki
Social exclusion is a painful yet common experience in many people’s personal and professional lives. This research demonstrates that feeling authentic serves as a buffer against social rejection, leading people to experience less social pain. Across five studies,...
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- Article
Conversational Receptiveness: Expressing Engagement with Opposing Views
By: M. Yeomans, J. Minson, H. Collins, H. Chen and F. Gino
We examine “conversational receptiveness”—the use of language to communicate one’s willingness to thoughtfully engage with opposing views. We develop an interpretable machine-learning algorithm to identify the linguistic profile of receptiveness (Studies 1A-B). We then...
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- September 2020
- Article
Regulatory Sandboxes: A Cure for mHealth Pilotitis?
By: Abhishek Bhatia, Rahul Matthan, Tarun Khanna and Satchit Balsari
Mobile health (mHealth) and related digital health interventions in the past decade have not always scaled globally as anticipated earlier despite large investments by governments and philanthropic foundations. The implementation of digital health tools has suffered...
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- August 2020
- Article
Machine Learning and Human Capital Complementarities: Experimental Evidence on Bias Mitigation
By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Evan Starr and Rajshree Agarwal
The use of machine learning (ML) for productivity in the knowledge economy requires considerations of important biases that may arise from ML predictions. We define a new source of bias related to incompleteness in real time inputs, which may result from strategic...
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- May 2020
- Article
To Be or Not to Be Your Authentic Self? Catering to Others' Expectations and Interests Hinders Performance
By: Francesca Gino, Ovul Sezer and Laura Huang
When approaching interpersonal first meetings (e.g., job interviews), people often cater to the target’s interests and expectations to make a good impression and secure a positive outcome such as being offered the job (pilot study). This strategy is distinct from other...
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- March 2020 (Revised August 2020)
- Case
Culture at Google
By: Nien-hê Hsieh, Amy Klopfenstein and Sarah Mehta
Beginning in 2017, technology (tech) company Google faced a series of employee-relations issues that threatened its unique culture of innovation and open communication. Issues included protests surrounding Google’s contracts with the U.S. government, restrictions of...
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Keywords:
Human Resources;
Employee Relationship Management;
Recruitment;
Retention;
Resignation and Termination;
Labor;
Working Conditions;
Employment;
Labor Unions;
Wages;
Law;
Lawsuits and Litigation;
Rights;
Ethics;
Values and Beliefs;
Fairness;
Organizations;
Organizational Culture;
Mission and Purpose;
Social Psychology;
Attitudes;
Behavior;
Conflict Management;
Trust;
Motivation and Incentives;
Prejudice and Bias;
Power and Influence;
Technology;
Search Technology;
Web;
Hardware;
Society;
Social Issues;
Culture;
Civil Society or Community;
Demographics;
Diversity;
Ethnicity;
Gender;
Race;
Technology Industry;
North and Central America;
United States;
California
- 2020
- Working Paper
Topic Preference Detection: A Novel Approach to Understand Perspective Taking in Conversation
By: Michael Yeomans and Alison Wood Brooks
Although most humans engage in conversations constantly throughout their lives, conversational mistakes are commonplace— interacting with others is difficult, and conversation re-quires quick, relentless perspective-taking and decision making. For example: during every...
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- November–December 2019
- Article
Making Sense of Soft Information: Interpretation Bias and Loan Quality
By: Dennis Campbell, Maria Loumioti and Regina Wittenberg Moerman
We explore whether behavioral biases impede the effective processing and interpretation of soft information in private lending. Taking advantage of the internal reporting system of a large federal credit union, we delineate three important biases likely to affect the...
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- October 2019 (Revised August 2020)
- Case
The Predictive Index
By: Lynda M. Applegate and James Weber
Mike Zani and Daniel Muzquiz needed to decide next steps to create a new category in the human resources consulting industry and scale their company.
Zani and Muzquiz, serial entrepreneurs, acquired Predictive Index in 2014. Previously, as clients of the... View Details
Zani and Muzquiz, serial entrepreneurs, acquired Predictive Index in 2014. Previously, as clients of the... View Details
- 2019
- Working Paper
Soul and Machine (Learning)
By: Davide Proserpio, John R. Hauser, Xiao Liu, Tomomichi Amano, Alex Burnap, Tong Guo, Dokyun Lee, Randall Lewis, Kanishka Misra, Eric Schwarz, Artem Timoshenko, Lilei Xu and Hema Yoganarasimhan
Machine learning is bringing us self-driving cars, improved medical diagnostics, and machine translation, but can it improve marketing decisions? It can. Machine learning models predict extremely well, are scalable to “big data,” and are a natural fit to rich media...
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