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- 2023
- Working Paper
Life After Death: A Field Experiment with Small Businesses on Information Frictions, Stigma, and Bankruptcy
By: Shai Benjamin Bernstein, Emanuele Colonnelli, Mitchell Hoffman and Benjamin Iverson
In a randomized control trial (RCT) with U.S. small businesses, we document that a large share of firms are not well-informed about bankruptcy. Many assume that bankruptcy necessarily entails the death of a business and do not know about Chapter 11 bankruptcy, where...
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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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- August 2022 (Revised October 2022)
- Case
Sian Flowers: Fresher by Sea?
By: Willy C. Shih, Michael W. Toffel and Pippa Tubman Armerding
The setting for this case is the Sian Flowers, a company headquartered in Kitengela, Kenya that exports roses to predominantly Europe. Because cut flowers have a limited shelf life and consumers want them to retain their appearance for as long as possible, Sian or its...
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- November 2021
- Article
The Effects of Retirement on Sense of Purpose in Life: Crisis or Opportunity?
By: Ayse Yemiscigil, Nattavudh Powdthavee and Ashley V. Whillans
Does retirement lead to an existential crisis or present an opportunity to experience a renewed sense of purpose in life? Prior research has documented a negative association between retirement and sense of purpose in life, suggesting that retirement could lead people...
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- September 2021
- Article
Income More Reliably Predicts Frequent Than Intense Happiness
By: Jon M. Jachimowicz, Ruo Mo, Adam Eric Greenberg, Bertus Jeronimus and Ashley V. Whillans
There is widespread consensus that income and subjective well-being are linked, but when and why they are connected is subject to ongoing debate. We draw on prior research that distinguishes between the frequency and intensity of happiness to suggest that higher income...
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- July 2021 (Revised September 2021)
- Case
Sarah Robb O'Hagan: The Rocky Road of Passion
By: Jon M. Jachimowicz and Francesca Gino
In November 2018, Sarah Robb O’Hagan is reeling from an unceremonious exit as CEO of Flywheel, a chain of indoor cycling studios. In the past, Robb O’Hagan had led transformational change across companies throughout the sports and fitness industry, including as...
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- 2020
- Tool
Time Smart: Tools for Reclaiming Your Time and Living a Happier Life
There's an 80 percent chance you're poor. Time poor, that is. Four out of five adults report feeling that they have too much to do and not enough time to do it. These time-poor people experience less joy each day. They laugh less. They are less healthy, less...
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- 2020
- Book
Time Smart: How to Reclaim Your Time and Live a Happier Life
By: A.V. Whillans
There's an 80 percent chance you're poor. Time poor, that is. Four out of five adults report feeling that they have too much to do and not enough time to do it. These time-poor people experience less joy each day. They laugh less. They are less healthy, less...
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- October 2020
- Article
What Goes Down When Advice Goes Up: Younger Advisers Underestimate Their Impact
By: Ting Zhang and Michael S. North
Common wisdom suggests that older is wiser. Consequently, people rarely give advice to older individuals—even when they are relatively more expert—leading to missed learning opportunities. Across six studies (N=3,445), we explore the psychology of advisers when they...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Work Values Shape the Relationship Between Stress and (Un)Happiness
While global wealth has risen over the past few decades, this has not translated into a less stressful life for most people. In fact, stress has risen for people worldwide. Across six studies— including large-scale survey data from over 150 countries—we show that the...
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- August 2020
- Case
Sheena Gupta (A)
By: Leslie Perlow and Matthew Preble
Sheena Gupta (A) is a first-person narrative of a Harvard Business School alumna (class of 2008) who has thoughtfully and purposefully crafted the various components of her life in a way that aligns with her personal values and needs. Gupta shares her life story, and...
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- March 24, 2020
- Article
Delayed Negative Effects of Prosocial Spending on Happiness
By: Armin Falk and Thomas Graeber
Does prosocial behavior promote happiness? We test this longstanding hypothesis in a behavioral experiment that extends the scope of previous research. In our Saving a Life paradigm, every participant either saved one human life in expectation by triggering a targeted...
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- June 2019
- Case
ClearLife: From Prospect to Platform
By: Alexander Braun, Lauren Cohen, Mauro Elvedi and Jiahua Xu
ClearLife’s first product was a trading and analytics platform for participants in the U.S. life settlement market, the secondary market for life insurance. ClearLife played a key role in facilitating transactions and devising a common language for expressing value and...
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- 2019
- Article
Preferences for Experienced Versus Remembered Happiness
By: Cassie Mogilner and Michael I. Norton
Consider two types of happiness: one experienced on a moment-to-moment basis, the other a reflective evaluation where people feel happy looking back. Though researchers have measured and argued the merits of each, we inquired into which happiness people say they want....
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Keywords:
Well-being;
Life Satisfaction;
Experience;
Retrospective;
Time;
Happiness;
Satisfaction;
Welfare;
Perception
- 2018
- Working Paper
Status Inconsistency: Variance in One's Status Across Groups Harms Well-being but Improves Perspective-taking
By: Catarina Fernandes and Alison Wood Brooks
Most people belong to many different groups. While some people experience consistently high or low status across all of their groups, others experience wildly different levels of status in each group. In this research, we examine how status inconsistency – the degree...
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- 2018
- Working Paper
Helping Children Catch Up: Early Life Shocks and the Progresa Experiment
By: Achyuta Adhvaryu, Anant Nyshadham, Theresa Molina and Jorge Tamayo
Can investing in children who faced adverse events in early childhood help them catch up? We answer this question using two orthogonal sources of variation – resource availability at birth (local rainfall) and cash incentives for school enrollment – to identify the...
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- March 2018
- Case
GiveDirectly
How should nonprofits design compensation systems to attract and retain talent? GiveDirectly is a respected charitable organization with an unconventional approach. Instead of spending on traditional aid programs in areas such as health care and food access in...
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- March 2018
- Supplement
McKinsey & Company: Early Career Choices (B)
By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Carin-Isabel Knoop and Nathaniel Schwalb
The (B) case outlines the choices made by the associates in real life and the consequences of such choices.
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- 2018
- Chapter
Time, Money, and Subjective Wellbeing
By: Cassie Mogilner, A.V. Whillans and Michael I. Norton
Time and money are scarce and precious resources: people experience stress about having insufficient time and worry about having insufficient money. This chapter reviews research showing that the ways in which people spend their time and money, the tradeoffs that...
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- Article
In Pursuit of Everyday Creativity
Creativity researchers have long paid careful attention to individual creativity, beginning with studies of well-known geniuses and expanding to personality, biographical, cognitive, and social-psychological studies of individual creative behavior. Little is known,...
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