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- 2021
- Working Paper
The Unintended Consequences of Raising Awareness: Knowing About the Existence of Algorithmic Racial Bias Widens Racial Inequality
By: Shunyuan Zhang and Yang Yang
In May 2016, a series of news articles on algorithmic racial bias went viral and triggered a nationwide outrage on social media, raising public awareness of the existence of algorithmic racial bias. The new public awareness raised an important question: How does...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Most Individuals Prefer to Compromise among Competing Normative Principles of Taxation
By: Itai Sher and Matthew C. Weinzierl
We use a novel survey to gather direct and indirect evidence on how individuals reconcile their simultaneous support for opposing normative principles when forming their policy preferences. Our evidence suggests that, when choosing policy, a minority (approximately...
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- September 2, 2021
- Article
The Digital Economy Runs on Open Source. Here's How to Protect It.
By: Hila Lifshitz-Assaf and Frank Nagle
Free and open source software (FOSS) is essential to much of the tech we use every day—from cars to phones to planes to the cloud. While traditionally, it was developed by an army of volunteer developers and given away for free, companies are increasingly taking a more...
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- Article
Regulating Hospital Prices Based on Market Concentration Is Likely to Leave High-Price Hospitals Unaffected
By: Maximilian J. Pany, Michael E. Chernew and Leemore S. Dafny
Concern about high hospital prices for commercially insured patients has motivated several proposals to regulate these prices. Such proposals often limit regulations to highly concentrated hospital markets. Using a large sample of 2017 US commercial insurance claims,...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
BEAT Unintended Bias in Personalized Policies
By: Eva Ascarza and Ayelet Israeli
An inherent risk of algorithmic personalization is disproportionate targeting of individuals from certain groups (or demographic characteristics such as gender or race), even when the decision maker does not intend to discriminate based on those "protected" attributes....
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- Summer 2021
- Article
Predictable Country-level Bias in the Reporting of COVID-19 Deaths
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...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Multi-location Workers in Multinational Firms? Tradeoffs in Contextual Specialization of Employees and Organizational Outcomes
We study how “contextual specialization,” the act of focusing workers’ organizational tasks within a particular locational context, and “contextual non-specialization,” the practice of diversifying workers’ organizational tasks among multiple locational contexts,...
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- August 2021
- Article
Rate-Amplifying Demand and the Excess Sensitivity of Long-Term Rates
By: Samuel G. Hanson, David O. Lucca and Jonathan H. Wright
Long-term nominal interest rates are surprisingly sensitive to high-frequency (daily or monthly) movements in short-term rates. Since 2000, this high-frequency sensitivity has grown even stronger in U.S. data. By contrast, the association between low-frequency changes...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
The Changing Role of Business in Society
Business interaction with the U.S. government, historically based on securing industry or company special interests at the expense of the public good, has enabled and furthered government dysfunction. Gridlock within the American political system has precluded the...
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Keywords:
Politics;
Shared Value;
Social Progress Index;
Competitiveness;
Walmart;
BlackRock;
ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) Performance;
ESG;
Transparency;
Campaign Contributions;
Campaign Finance;
Lobbying;
Revolving Door;
Political Ideology;
Political Parties;
Political Partisanship;
Government And Business;
Government Innovation;
Elections;
Democracy;
Capitalism;
Stakeholder Capitalism;
Shareholder Engagement;
Competition;
Strategy;
Government and Politics;
Society;
Social Issues;
Human Needs;
Wealth and Poverty;
Business and Community Relations;
Business and Government Relations;
Corporate Accountability;
Financial Services Industry;
Banking Industry;
United States
- July 2021
- Case
Trouble at Basecamp: Managing Politics, Polarization, and Conflict in the Workplace (A)
By: Nour Kteily, Deepak Malhotra and David Lane
As founders of the software company Basecamp, Jason Fried and David H. Hansson were used to being the subjects of social media attention. Both maintained active and dedicated Twitter followings for their unique perspectives on management and life. But on April 26,...
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Keywords:
Change;
Communication;
Policy;
Diversity;
Fairness;
Values and Beliefs;
Governance;
Employees;
Working Conditions;
Leading Change;
Leadership Style;
Mission and Purpose;
Organizational Culture;
Work-Life Balance;
Labor and Management Relations;
Conflict and Resolution;
Identity;
Social Issues;
Equality and Inequality;
Technology Platform;
Conflict Management;
Information Technology Industry;
United States
- 2021
- Working Paper
Dirty Money: How Banks Influence Financial Crime
By: Joseph Pacelli, Janet Gao, Jan Schneemeier and Yufeng Wu
On September 21st, 2020, a consortium of international journalists leaked nearly 2,500 suspicious activity reports (SAR) obtained from the U.S. Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, exposing nearly $2 trillion of money laundering activity. The event raises important...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Do Policies to Increase Access to Treatment for Opioid Use Disorder Work?
By: Eric Barrette, Leemore S. Dafny and Karen Shen
As of 2016 there were an estimated 2.1 million Americans suffering from opioid use disorder (OUD). To date, most policy interventions have focused on curbing opioid prescriptions and extending insurance coverage to include substance use disorder. However, relatively...
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- July 2021
- Article
Information Transparency, Multihoming, and Platform Competition: A Natural Experiment in the Daily Deals Market
By: Hui Li and Feng Zhu
Platform competition is shaped by the likelihood of multi-homing (i.e., complementors or consumers adopt more than one platform). To take advantage of multi-homing, platform firms often attempt to motivate their rivals’ high-performing complementors to adopt their own...
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- July 2021
- Article
Invisible Inequality Leads to Punishing the Poor and Rewarding the Rich
By: Oliver P. Hauser, Gordon T. Kraft-Todd, David Rand, Martin A. Nowak and Michael I. Norton
Four experiments examine how the lack of awareness of inequality affects behaviour towards the rich and poor. In Experiment 1, participants who became aware that wealthy individuals donated a smaller percentage of their income switched from rewarding the wealthy to...
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Keywords:
Income Transparency;
Income;
Wealth;
Equality and Inequality;
Knowledge;
Behavior;
Outcome or Result;
Society;
Policy
- July 2021
- Article
Redistribution through Markets
By: Piotr Dworczak, Scott Duke Kominers and Mohammad Akbarpour
Policymakers frequently use price regulations as a response to inequality in the markets they control. In this paper, we examine the optimal structure of such policies from the perspective of mechanism design. We study a buyer-seller market in which agents have private...
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- July 2021
- Article
Structuring Local Environments to Avoid Diversity: Anxiety Drives Whites' Geographical and Institutional Self-Segregation Preferences
By: Eric Anicich, Jon M. Jachimowicz, Merrick Osborne and L. Taylor Phillips
The current research explores how local racial diversity affects Whites’ efforts to structure their local communities to avoid incidental intergroup contact. In two experimental studies (N=509; Studies 1a-b), we consider Whites’ choices to structure a fictional,...
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- July 2021
- Article
The Effect of Price on Firm Reputation
By: Michael Luca and Oren Reshef
While a business's reputation can affect its pricing, prices can also affect its reputation. To explore the effect of prices on reputation, we investigate daily data on menu prices and online ratings from a large rating and ordering platform. We find that a price...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Fecal Microbiota Transplants (FMT): Case Histories of Significant Medical Advances
By: Amar Bhide and Srikant M. Datar
By 2013, after many decades of very slow development and adoption, Fecal Microbiota Transplantation procedures were attracting widespread attention. This case history chronicles the: 1) pioneering fecal transplants performed in the 20th century; 2) development of the...
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