Publications
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- April 2025
- Case
Giving Up on a Passion: Elizabeth Rowe at the Boston Symphony Orchestra
By: Jon M. Jachimowicz, Maisie Wiltshire-Gordon and Alexis Lefort
For 20 years, Elizabeth Rowe was a world-renowned principal flutist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. But in 2024, Rowe decided to leave her position to pursue a new full-time career as a leadership coach. At 50, Rowe was well under the typical retirement age, and,... View Details
Keywords: Arts; Small Business; Social Media; Cost vs Benefits; Decision Choices and Conditions; Decisions; Learning; Music Entertainment; Values and Beliefs; Creativity; Happiness; Identity; Interests; Satisfaction; Motivation and Incentives; Prejudice and Bias; Reputation; Culture; Resignation and Termination; Personal Development and Career; Consulting Industry; Fine Arts Industry; Music Industry; United States
- April 2025
- Article
Serving with a Smile on Airbnb: Analyzing the Economic Returns and Behavioral Underpinnings of the Host’s Smile
By: Shunyuan Zhang, Elizabeth Friedman, Kannan Srinivasan, Ravi Dhar and Xupin Zhang
Non-informational cues, such as facial expressions, can significantly influence judgments and interpersonal impressions. While past research has explored how smiling affects business outcomes in offline or in-store contexts, relatively less is known about how smiling... View Details
- April 2025
- Article
The Impact of Minority Representation at Mortgage Lenders
By: W. Scott Frame, Ruidi Huang, Erica Jiang, Yeonjoon Lee, Will Liu, Erik J. Mayer and Adi Sunderam
We study links between the labor market for loan officers and access to mortgage credit. Using novel data matching the (near) universe of mortgage applications to loan officers, we find that minorities are significantly underrepresented among loan officers. Minority... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Discrimination, Rejection, and Job Search
By: Anne Boring, Katherine Coffman, Dylan Glover and María José González-Fuentes
We investigate how candidates’ willingness to apply responds to (potential) discrimination and rejection using a simulated labor market. Past work has shown that “blinding” job applications reduces discrimination and increases the rate at which women are hired. Our... View Details
- January 2025
- Module Note
Understanding and Addressing Gender Gaps
This module provides a framework for students to analyze how gender stereotypes, through their impact on beliefs about others and beliefs about ourselves, contribute to gender gaps in the workplace. The module proceeds in three parts. First, through a case and an... View Details
- 2025
- Article
Humor as a Window into Generative AI Bias
By: Roger Samure, Julian De Freitas and Stefano Puntoni
A preregistered audit of 600 images by generative AI across 150 different prompts explores the link between humor and discrimination in consumer-facing AI solutions. When ChatGPT updates images to make them “funnier”, the prevalence of stereotyped groups changes. While... View Details
- January 2025
- Article
Everyone Steps Back?: The Widespread Retraction of Crowd-Funding Support for Minority Creators When Migration Fear Is High
By: John (Jianqui) Bai, William R. Kerr, Chi Wan and Alptug Yorulmaz
We study funding gaps on Kickstarter across multiple ethnic groups from 2009 to 2021. Scaling the concept of racially salient events, we quantify the close co-movement of minority funding gaps in crowd-funding to inflamed political rhetoric surrounding migration. The... View Details
- January 2025
- Article
Reducing Prejudice with Counter-stereotypical AI
By: Erik Hermann, Julian De Freitas and Stefano Puntoni
Based on a review of relevant literature, we propose that the proliferation of AI with human-like and social features presents an unprecedented opportunity to address the underlying cognitive and affective drivers of prejudice. An approach informed by the psychology of... View Details
- December 2024
- Article
Human Bias in the Oversight of Firms: Evidence from Workplace Safety Violations
By: Jonas Heese, Gerardo Pérez Cavazos and Andreya Pérez Silva
We study the effects of mood as a source of human bias on regulators’ oversight and enforcement decisions. We use weather at facilities at the time of an OSHA inspection to proxy for the OSHA compliance officers’ mood. We find that during periods of good mood due to... View Details
- December 2024
- Article
Public Attitudes on Performance for Algorithmic and Human Decision-Makers
By: Kirk Bansak and Elisabeth Paulson
This study explores public preferences for algorithmic and human decision-makers (DMs) in high-stakes contexts, how these preferences are shaped by performance metrics, and whether public evaluations of performance differ depending on the type of DM. Leveraging a... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
A Gender Backlash: Does Exposure to Female Labor Market Participation Fuel Gender Conservatism?
By: Paula Rettl, Diane Bolet, Catherine E. De Vries, Simone Cremaschi, Tarik Abou-Chadi and Sergi Pardos-Prado
The growing participation of women in the labor market has marked a significant societal transformation, coinciding with the rise of gender conservatism and far-right support. We study whether the economic consequences of labor market feminization and gender backlash... View Details
- October 2024
- Article
Racial Disparities in the Paycheck Protection Program
By: Sergey Chernenko and David Scharfstein
Using a large sample of Florida restaurants, we document significant racial disparities in borrowing through the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and investigate the causes of these disparities. Black-owned restaurants are 25% less likely to receive PPP loans.... View Details
- October 2024
- Article
Racial Inequality in Organizations: A Systems Psychodynamic Perspective
By: Sanaz Mobasseri, William A. Kahn and Robin J. Ely
This paper uses systems psychodynamic concepts to develop theory about the persistence of racial inequality in U.S. organizations and to inform an approach for disrupting it. We treat White men as the dominant group and Black people as the archetypal subordinate group... View Details
- Fall, 2024
- Article
Sixty Years of the Voting Rights Act: Progress and Pitfalls
By: Andrea Bernini, Giovanni Facchini, Marco Tabellini and Cecilia Testa
We review the literature on the effects of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA), which removed formal restrictions to Black political participation. After a brief description of racial discrimination suffered by Black Americans since Reconstruction, we introduce the goals... View Details
- September 2024 (Revised March 2025)
- Case
Burn the Gondolas? Venice, the Ghetto, and the Seasons of Capitalism
By: Sophus A. Reinert, Charlotte Robertson and Robert Fredona
This case uses the history of Venice—from the driving of the first pylons in the lagoon to the abdication of the city’s last doge, across the ages of Marco Polo and Vivaldi—to explore the invention and global diffusion of capitalism, as well as the cyclical rise and... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
How Real Is Hypothetical?: A High-Stakes Test of the Allais Paradox
By: Uri Gneezy, Yoram Halevy, Brian Hall, Theo Offerman and Jeroen van de Ven
Researchers in behavioral and experimental economics often argue that only
incentive-compatible mechanisms can elicit effort and truthful responses from participants.
Others argue that participants make less-biased decisions when the stakes
are sufficiently high.... View Details
- August 20, 2024
- Article
Sexual Assault Victims Face a Penalty for Adjacent Consent
By: Jillian J. Jordan and Roseanna Sommers
Across 11 experimental studies (n = 12,257), we show that female victims of sexual assault are blamed more and seen as less morally virtuous if their assault follows voluntary sexual intimacy, a factor we term “adjacent consent”. Moreover, we illuminate a... View Details
- July 2024
- Article
Acceptance of Automated Vehicles Is Lower for Self than Others
By: Stuti Agarwal, Julian De Freitas, Anya Ragnhildstveit and Carey K. Morewedge
Road traffic accidents are the leading cause of death worldwide for people aged 2–59. Nearly all deaths are due to human error. Automated vehicles could reduce mortality risks, traffic congestion, and air pollution of human-driven vehicles. However, their adoption... View Details
- May 2024
- Teaching Note
Making Progress at Progress Software (A) and (B)
By: Katherine Baldiga Coffman, Hannah Riley Bowles, Emma Ronzetti and Alexis Lefort
Teaching Note for HBS Case Nos. 924-010 and 924-011. View Details
- May–June 2024
- Article
Setting Gendered Expectations? Recruiter Outreach Bias in Online Tech Training Programs
By: Jacqueline N. Lane, Karim R. Lakhani and Roberto Fernandez
Competence development in digital technologies, analytics, and artificial intelligence is increasingly important to all types of organizations and their workforce. Universities and corporations are investing heavily in developing training programs, at all tenure... View Details