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- March 2023
- Technical Note
The Traits of Entrepreneurs
By: Jo Tango and Alys Ferragamo
Entrepreneurship has the potential for extreme success but also comes with high risks. Given this risk-reward profile, we might wonder why individuals choose to become entrepreneurs. Are there personality traits that lead someone to become an entrepreneur? Can you...
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- 2023
- Working Paper
Using GPT for Market Research
By: James Brand, Ayelet Israeli and Donald Ngwe
Large language models (LLMs) have quickly become popular as labor-augmenting tools for programming, writing, and many other processes that benefit from quick text generation. In this paper we explore the uses and benefits of LLMs for marketing researchers and...
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- March 2023
- Case
FinTunes, Inc., Board of Directors
By: Lynn S. Paine and Jennifer Fonstad
The board of FinTunes, Inc., a start-up aimed at helping musicians distribute their work and manage their finances, must decide among three candidates to serve as the company’s first independent director. The terms of FinTunes’ last round of financing provided that the...
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- 2023
- Working Paper
Unselfish Alibis Increase Choices of Selfish Autonomous Vehicles
Human drivers routinely make implicit tradeoffs between their selfish interests and the safety of passengers, as when they perform a rolling stop in order to reach their destination faster. Here I explore whether they are comfortable with autonomous vehicles (AVs) that...
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- 2022
- Working Paper
Between Human Dignity and Security: Identifying Citizen and Elite Preferences and Concerns over Refugee Reception
By: Kristin Fabbe, Eleni Kyrkopoulou and Mara Vidali
Under what conditions do citizens and elites support the creation of migrant and refugee hosting facilities in their area, and what types of facilities do they prefer? What types of concerns underlay these preferences and how do they differ by ideology and elite...
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- 2022
- Working Paper
How Do Investors Value ESG?
By: Malcolm Baker, Mark Egan and Suproteem K. Sarkar
Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) objectives have risen to near the top of the agenda for corporate executives and boards, driven in large part by their perceptions of shareholder interest. We quantify the value that shareholders place on ESG using a revealed...
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- 2022
- Working Paper
When Do Individuals Give Up Agency? The Role of Decision Avoidance
By: Holly Dykstra, Christine L. Exley and Muriel Niederle
A common policy problem is that individuals reject recommended options and insist on making their own choices. Via a large-scale experiment, we document and investigate what factors contribute to this preference for agency. Our main results show that individuals’...
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- 2022
- Working Paper
The Gender Minority Gaps in Confidence and Self-Evaluations
By: Billur Aksoy, Christine L. Exley and Judd B. Kessler
An increasing share of the population identifies as something other than male or female. Yet, we know very little about the economic preferences and beliefs of gender minorities. In this paper, we document a “gender minority gap” in confidence and in self-evaluations....
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- September 2022
- Article
Health Externalities and Policy: The Role of Social Preferences
By: Laura Alfaro, Ester Faia, Nora Lamersdorf and Farzad Saidi
Social preferences facilitate the internalization of health externalities, for example by reducing mobility during a pandemic. We test this hypothesis using mobility data from 258 cities worldwide alongside experimentally validated measures of social preferences....
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- July 2022
- Article
The Developmental Origins and Behavioral Consequences of Attributions for Inequality
By: Antonya Marie Gonzalez, Lucia Macchia and Ashley V. Whillans
Attributions, or lay explanations for inequality, have been linked to inequality-relevant behavior. In adults and children, attributing inequality to an individual rather than contextual or structural causes is linked to greater support for economic inequality and less...
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- 2023
- Working Paper
How Reputation Does (and Does Not) Drive People to Punish Without Looking
By: Jillian J. Jordan and Nour S. Kteily
Punishing wrongdoers can confer reputational benefits, and people sometimes punish without
careful consideration. But are these two observations related? Do people “punish without looking”
for reputational gain? And if so, is this because unquestioning...
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- 2022
- Working Paper
Beliefs about Gender Differences in Social Preferences
By: Christine L Exley, Oliver P. Hauser, Molly Moore and John-Henry Pezzuto
While there is a vast (and mixed) literature on gender differences in social preferences, little is known about believed gender differences in social preferences. This paper documents robust evidence for believed gender differences in social preferences. Across a wide...
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- 2022
- Article
How to Choose a Default
By: John Beshears, Richard T. Mason and Shlomo Benartzi
We have developed a model for setting a default when a population is choosing among ordered choices—that is, ones listed in ascending or descending order. A company, for instance, might want to set a default contribution rate that will increase employees’ average...
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- 2022
- Working Paper
Are Experts Blinded by Feasibility?: Experimental Evidence from a NASA Robotics Challenge
By: Jacqueline N. Lane, Zoe Szajnfarber, Jason Crusan, Michael Menietti and Karim R. Lakhani
Resource allocation decisions play a dominant role in shaping a firm’s technological trajectory and competitive advantage. Recent work indicates that innovative firms and scientific institutions tend to exhibit an anti-novelty bias when evaluating new projects and...
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- May 2022
- Case
Rawbank's Illico Cash: Can 'Fast Money' Overcome Cash Dependency in the DRC?
By: Lauren Cohen and Grace Headinger
Thomas de Dreux-Brézé, the Head of Strategy and Project Management at Rawbank Congo in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), was perplexed as he reviewed annual adoption rates for the bank’s launch of Illico Cash 2.0. As the bank’s mobile money app, Illico Cash...
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Keywords:
Fintech;
Inflation;
Deflation;
Rural;
Urban;
Emerging Market;
Mobile Technology;
Finance;
Money;
Inflation and Deflation;
Business Growth and Maturation;
Decision Choices and Conditions;
Demographics;
Developing Countries and Economies;
Corporate Entrepreneurship;
Behavioral Finance;
Currency;
Banks and Banking;
Commercial Banking;
Financial Strategy;
Rural Scope;
Urban Scope;
Innovation Strategy;
Emerging Markets;
Network Effects;
Consumer Behavior;
Mobile and Wireless Technology;
Technology Adoption;
Banking Industry;
Financial Services Industry;
Technology Industry;
Congo, Democratic Republic of the
- April 2022
- Case
Highland Park Wood Co. (Abridged)
By: David E. Bell
A major home builder wishes to purchase lumber (Southern pine). The builder wants delivery in six months but prefers to lock-in the price near current rates. The lumber wholesaler must decide on a pricing and sourcing strategy. Examples include: 1) buy & hold, 2) wait...
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- 2022
- Chapter
Capitalism and the Environment
By: Geoffrey Jones
Capitalism drove the environmental decimation of the planet. The environment was seen as a free good, while the consequences of dirty industrial and agricultural processes were seen as external to the firm. Public policies largely allowed this to happen, as politicians...
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- April 2022
- Article
Going Out or Opting Out? Capital, Political Vulnerability, and the State in China's Outward Investment
By: Meg Rithmire
How do state-business relations interact with outward investment in authoritarian regimes? This paper examines this question in the context of China’s rapid transformation into a major capital exporter. While most political economy scholarship focuses on firms’...
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- 2022
- Chapter
Prioritarianism and Optimal Taxation
By: Matti Tuomala and Matthew Weinzierl
Prioritarianism has been at the center of the formal approach to optimal tax theory since its modern starting point in Mirrlees (1971), but most theorists’ use of it is motivated by tractability rather than explicit normative reasoning. We characterize analytically and...
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Keywords:
Prioritarianism;
Optimal Taxation;
Utilitarianism;
Redistribution;
Inverse-optimum;
Taxation;
Theory;
Policy
- 2022
- Working Paper
Can Evidence-Based Information Shift Preferences Towards Trade Policy?
By: Laura Alfaro, Maggie X. Chen and Davin Chor
We investigate the role of evidence-based information in shaping individuals' preferences for trade policies, through a series of survey experiments that contain randomized information treatments. Each treatment provides a concise statement of economics research...
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