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  • 2022
  • Working Paper

When Less Is More: Using Short-term Signals to Overcome Systematic Bias in Long-run Targeting
By: Ta-Wei Huang and Eva Ascarza
Firms are increasingly interested in developing targeted interventions for customers with the best response. Doing so requires firms to identify differences in customer sensitivity, which they often obtain using uplift modeling (i.e., heterogeneous treatment effect...  View Details
Keywords: Long-run Targeting; Heterogeneous Treatment Effect; Statistical Surrogacy; Customer Churn; Field Experiments; Consumer Behavior; Customer Focus and Relationships; AI and Machine Learning; Marketing
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  • 2022
  • Working Paper

Confidence, Self-Selection and Bias in the Aggregate
By: Benjamin Enke, Thomas Graeber and Ryan Oprea
The influence of behavioral biases on aggregate outcomes like prices and allocations depends in part on self-selection: whether rational people opt more strongly into aggregate interactions than biased individuals. We conduct a series of betting market, auction and...  View Details
Keywords: Prejudice and Bias; Cognition and Thinking; Markets; Price
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  • May 2022
  • Article

When Harry Fired Sally: The Double Standard in Punishing Misconduct
By: Mark Egan, Gregor Matvos and Amit Seru
We examine gender differences in misconduct punishment in the financial advisory industry. We find evidence of a “gender punishment gap”: following an incident of misconduct, female advisers are 20% more likely to lose their jobs and 30% less likely to find new jobs...  View Details
Keywords: Financial Advisers; Brokers; Gender Discrimination; Consumer Finance; Financial Misconduct And Fraud; FINRA; Financial Institutions; Employees; Crime and Corruption; Gender; Prejudice and Bias; Personal Finance; Financial Services Industry
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  • 2021
  • Working Paper

Invisible Primes: Fintech Lending with Alternative Data
By: Marco Di Maggio, Dimuthu Ratnadiwakara and Don Carmichael
We exploit anonymized administrative data provided by a major fintech platform to investigate whether using alternative data to assess borrowers’ creditworthiness results in broader credit access. Comparing actual outcomes of the fintech platform’s model to...  View Details
Keywords: Fintech Lending; Alternative Data; Machine Learning; Algorithm Bias; Finance; Information Technology; Financing and Loans; Analytics and Data Science; Credit
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  • Summer 2021
  • Article

Predictable Country-level Bias in the Reporting of COVID-19 Deaths
By: Botir Kobilov, Ethan Rouen and George Serafeim
We examine whether a country’s management of the COVID-19 pandemic relate to the downward biasing of the number of reported deaths from COVID-19. Using deviations from historical averages of the total number of monthly deaths within a country, we find that the...  View Details
Keywords: COVID-19; Deaths; Reporting; Incentives; Government Policy; Health Pandemics; Health Care and Treatment; Country; Crisis Management; Outcome or Result; Reports; Policy
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  • Article

Sizing Up Entrepreneurial Potential: Gender Differences in Communication and Investor Perceptions of Long-Term Growth and Scalability
By: Laura Huang, Priyanka D. Joshi, Cheryl J. Wakslak and Andy Wu
Female entrepreneurs have been found to face disadvantages as compared with male entrepreneurs, especially in acquiring the financial resources they need to sustain and grow their ventures. Across three studies, we examine how disparities in funding outcomes may be due...  View Details
Keywords: Business Startups; Finance; Gender; Prejudice and Bias; Communication; Perception
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  • 2021
  • Working Paper

How Much Should We Trust Staggered Difference-In-Differences Estimates?
By: Andrew C. Baker, David F. Larcker and Charles C.Y. Wang
Difference-in-differences analysis with staggered treatment timing is frequently used to assess the impact of policy changes on corporate outcomes in academic research. However, recent advances in econometric theory show that such designs are likely to be biased in the...  View Details
Keywords: Difference In Differences; Staggered Difference-in-differences Designs; Generalized Difference-in-differences; Dynamic Treatment Effects; Mathematical Methods
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  • 2020
  • Working Paper

Look the Part? The Role of Profile Pictures in Online Labor Markets
By: Isamar Troncoso and Lan Luo
Profile pictures are a key component of many freelancing platforms, a design choice that can impact hiring and matching outcomes. In this paper, we examine how appearance-based perceptions of a freelancer's fit for the job (i.e., whether a freelancer "looks the part"...  View Details
Keywords: Freelancers; Gig Workers; Recruitment; Perception; Performance; Prejudice and Bias; Decision Choices and Conditions
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  • June 2020
  • Article

How Scheduling Can Bias Quality Assessment: Evidence from Food Safety Inspections
By: Maria Ibanez and Michael W. Toffel
Accuracy and consistency are critical for inspections to be an effective, fair, and useful tool for assessing risks, quality, and suppliers—and for making decisions based on those assessments. We examine how inspector schedules could introduce bias that erodes...  View Details
Keywords: Assessment; Bias; Inspection; Scheduling; Econometric Analysis; Empirical Research; Regulation; Health; Food; Safety; Quality; Performance Consistency; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms
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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...  View Details
Keywords: Moral Judgment; Lay Decision Theory; Theory Of Mind; Causal Attribution; Moral Sensibility; Decision Making
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  • 2017
  • Working Paper

Biased Beliefs About Random Samples: Evidence from Two Integrated Experiments
By: Daniel J. Benjamin, Don A. Moore and Matthew Rabin
This paper describes results of a pair of incentivized experiments on biases in judgments about random samples. Consistent with the Law of Small Numbers (LSN), participants exaggerated the likelihood that short sequences and random subsets of coin flips would be...  View Details
Keywords: Probability; Economic Theory; Analysis; Incentives
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  • 2018
  • Working Paper

How Scheduling Can Bias Quality Assessment: Evidence from Food Safety Inspections
By: Maria Ibanez and Michael W. Toffel
Many production processes are subject to inspection to ensure they meet quality, safety, and environmental standards imposed by companies and regulators. Inspection accuracy is critical to inspections being a useful input to assessing risks, allocating quality...  View Details
Keywords: Assessment; Bias; Inspection; Scheduling; Econometric Analysis; Empirical Research; Regulation; Health; Food; Safety; Quality; Performance Consistency; Performance Evaluation; Food and Beverage Industry; Service Industry
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  • April–May 2017
  • Article

Career Concerns of Banking Analysts
By: Joanne Horton, George Serafeim and Shan Wu
We study how career concerns influence banking analysts' forecasts and how their forecasting behavior benefits both them and bank managers. We show that banking analysts issue early in the year relatively more optimistic and later in the year more pessimistic forecasts...  View Details
Keywords: Sell-side Analysts; Analyst Forecasts; Analysts; Investment Recommendations; Career Advancement; Career Management; Labor Mobility; Labor Market; Prejudice and Bias; Personal Development and Career; Forecasting and Prediction; Investment Banking
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  • Article

Overcoming the Outcome Bias: Making Intentions Matter
By: Ovul Sezer, Ting Zhang, Francesca Gino and Max Bazerman
People often make the well-documented mistake of paying too much attention to the outcomes of others’ actions while neglecting information about the original intentions leading to those outcomes. In five experiments, we examine interventions aimed at reducing this...  View Details
Keywords: Outcome Bias; Intentions; Joint Evaluation; Judgment; Separate Evaluation; Goals and Objectives; Prejudice and Bias; Judgments; Performance Evaluation; Outcome or Result
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  • Summer 2016
  • Article

Open Content, Linus' Law, and Neutral Point of View
By: Shane Greenstein and Feng Zhu
The diffusion of the Internet and digital technologies has enabled many organizations to use the open-content production model to produce and disseminate knowledge. While several prior studies have shown that the open-content production model can lead to high-quality...  View Details
Keywords: Prejudice and Bias; Internet and the Web; Balance and Stability; Operations; Knowledge Management; Knowledge Dissemination
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  • October 6, 2015
  • Article

Compared to Men, Women View Professional Advancement as Equally Attainable, but Less Desirable
By: Francesca Gino, Caroline Ashley Wilmuth and Alison Wood Brooks
Women are underrepresented in most high-level positions in organizations. While a great deal of research has provided evidence that bias and discrimination give rise to and perpetuate this gender disparity, in the current research, we explore another explanation: men...  View Details
Keywords: Personal Development and Career; Gender
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  • April 2011
  • Article

Why Leaders Don't Learn from Success
By: Francesca Gino and Gary P. Pisano
We argue that for a variety of psychological reasons, it is often much harder for leaders and organizations to learn from success than to learn from failure. Success creates three kinds of traps that often impede deep learning. The first is attribution error or the...  View Details
Keywords: Learning; Innovation and Management; Leadership; Failure; Success; Performance Evaluation; Prejudice and Bias
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  • March 2011 (Revised April 2011)
  • Exercise

The Future of BioPasteur
By: Giovanni Gavetti and Francesca Gino
The purpose of this exercise is to let students experience a few biases that can be deleterious to strategic decision-making. In particular, students are induced to fall into a confirmatory trap, and to experience other biases such as anchoring and sampling bias....  View Details
Keywords: Interpersonal Communication; Decision Choices and Conditions; Outcome or Result; Groups and Teams; Prejudice and Bias; Strategy
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  • 2008
  • Chapter

Business Archives and Overcoming Survivor Bias
By: G. Jones
Among the most longstanding criticisms of business history as an academic discipline is the bias caused towards studying successful firms rather than failures, and the related use of longevity as a major criterion for success. The grand narratives of business history...  View Details
Keywords: Business Ventures; Business History; Archives; Failure; Success
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  • September 2004
  • Article

Rational Overoptimism (and Other Biases)
By: Eric J. Van den Steen
Rational agents with differing priors tend to be overoptimistic about their chances of success. In particular, an agent who tries to choose the action that is most likely to succeed, is more likely to choose an action of which he overestimated, rather than...  View Details
Keywords: Prejudice and Bias; Decision Choices and Conditions; Performance Expectations; Outcome or Result; Opportunities; Risk and Uncertainty; Failure; Success; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques; Personal Characteristics; Values and Beliefs; Ethics
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