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  • 2021
  • Working Paper

Shared Models in Networks, Organizations, and Groups
By: Joshua Schwartzstein and Adi Sunderam
Why did the market rise yesterday? What are the implications of the latest school shooting? Why did a particular employee get promoted? To answer such questions, we often exchange models, stories, narratives, and interpretations with others. This paper provides a...  View Details
Keywords: Social Learning Theory; Theory; Social Issues; Cognition and Thinking; Social and Collaborative Networks; Attitudes
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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...  View Details
Keywords: Conundrum; Investor Demand; Monetary Policy Transmission; Interest Rates
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  • 2021
  • Article

Prisoners, Rooms, and Lightswitches
By: Daniel M. Kane and Scott Duke Kominers
We examine a new variant of the classic prisoners and lightswitches puzzle: A warden leads his n prisoners in and out of r rooms, one at a time, in some order, with each prisoner eventually visiting every room an arbitrarily large number of times. The...  View Details
Keywords: Mathematical Methods
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  • January 25, 2021
  • Blog Post

Lower Income Translates to Fewer Happy Experiences—Here Is How We Can Fix It
By: Jon M. Jachimowicz and Adam Eric Greenberg
Can money actually buy happiness? Research shows that having more money makes people evaluate their lives more favorably (what researchers call “life satisfaction”). Surprising as it may seem, whether money leads to greater life satisfaction because it makes people...  View Details
Keywords: Life Satisfaction; Social Justice; Money; Happiness; Satisfaction; Well-being
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  • November 2020
  • Case

Axis My India
By: Ananth Raman, Ann Winslow and Kairavi Dey
Pradeep Gupta founded Axis My India (AMI) as a printing and publishing company in 1998. In 2013, AMI expanded into consumer research and election forecasting. Although a relatively unknown entity, AMI predicted several election results accurately. Gupta describes AMI’s...  View Details
Keywords: Market Research; Operations; Management; Infrastructure; Logistics; Service Operations; Political Elections; Forecasting and Prediction; Asia; India
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  • 2020
  • Working Paper

Collusion in Brokered Markets
By: John William Hatfield, Scott Duke Kominers and Richard Lowery
The U.S. residential real estate agency market presents a puzzle for economic theory: commissions on real estate transactions have remained high for decades even though entry is frequent and costs are low. We model the real estate agency market, and other brokered...  View Details
Keywords: Real Estate; ＂Repeated Games＂; Collusion; Antitrust; Brokered Markets; Game Theory; Real Estate Industry
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  • 2019
  • Working Paper

The Impact of Professionals' Contributions to Online Knowledge Communities on Their Workplace Knowledge Work
By: Hila Lifshitz - Assaf and Frank Nagle
Knowledge work is becoming increasingly challenging as pace of change in the knowledge frontier is increasing. Organizations have created multiple mechanisms to minimize knowledge gaps and increase learning such internal training, mentorship programs as well as...  View Details
Keywords: Open Source; Future Of Work; Software Development; Knowledge Work; Online Community; Learning; Knowledge Sharing; Software; Open Source Distribution; Performance Productivity
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  • 2019
  • Working Paper

Connecting the Dots: Superordinate Framing Enhances the Value of Unimportant Tasks
By: Jaewon Yoon, A.V. Whillans and Ed O'Brien
Each day, people begrudgingly complete mundane tasks. Four experiments (N = 3,502; two pre-registered) reveal that a simple intervention—superordinate framing—can enhance people’s task experiences. In two initial experiments, working adults were asked to describe...  View Details
Keywords: Superordinate Framing; Employees; Motivation and Incentives; Goals and Objectives; Mission and Purpose; Perspective
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  • July 9, 2019
  • Article

Common Knowledge, Coordination, and Strategic Mentalizing in Human Social Life
By: Julian De Freitas, Kyle A. Thomas, Peter DiScioli and Steven Pinker
People often coordinate for mutual gain, such as keeping to opposite sides of a stairway, dubbing an object or place with a name, or assembling en masse to protest a regime. Because successful coordination requires complementary choices, these opportunities raise the...  View Details
Keywords: Coordination; Common Knowledge; Theory Of Mind; Bystander Effect; Knowledge; Cooperation
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  • December 2018
  • Article

Reserve Design: Unintended Consequences and the Demise of Boston's Walk Zones
By: Umut Dur, Scott Duke Kominers, Parag A. Pathak and Tayfun Sönmez
Admissions policies often use reserves to grant certain applicants higher priority for some (but not all) available seats. Boston’s school choice system, for example, reserved half of each school’s seats for local neighborhood applicants while leaving the other half...  View Details
Keywords: Neighborhoods; Equal Access; School Choice; Affirmative Action; Desegregation; Marketplace Matching; Fairness; Local Range; Education; Policy
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  • 2018
  • Book

The Gift of Global Talent: How Migration Shapes Business, Economy & Society
By: William R. Kerr
The global race for talent is on, with countries and businesses competing for the best and brightest. Foreign talent has transformed U.S. science and engineering, reshaped the economy, and influenced society at large. But America is bogged down in thorny debates on...  View Details
Keywords: Immigration; Policy; Labor; Economy; Talent and Talent Management; United States
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  • March 2018
  • Article

Making the Numbers? 'Short Termism' and the Puzzle of Only Occasional Disaster
By: Hazhir Rahmandad, Rebecca Henderson and Nelson P. Repenning
Much recent work in strategy and popular discussion suggests that an excessive focus on "managing the numbers"—delivering quarterly earnings at the expense of longer-term investments—makes it difficult for firms to make the investments necessary to build competitive...  View Details
Keywords: Capability; Short-termism; System Dynamics; Tipping Point; Business or Company Management; Earnings Management; Resource Allocation
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  • May 2017
  • Teaching Plan

Neurotrack and the Alzheimer's Puzzle
By: Richard G. Hamermesh and Carin-Isabel Knoop
Teaching Note for HBS No. 816-072.  View Details
Keywords: Health Care; Alzheimer's Disease; Career Path; Life Science Business
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  • 2017
  • Working Paper

Equality and Equity in Compensation
By: Jiayi Bao and Andy Wu
Equity compensation is widely used for incentivizing skilled employees, particularly in new technology businesses. Traditional theories explaining why firms offer equity suggest that workers with higher rank should receive compensation packages more heavily weighted in...  View Details
Keywords: Inequality Aversion; Compensation; Stock Options; Scarcity; Experiment; Compensation and Benefits; Equity; Equality and Inequality; Perception
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  • August 2, 2016
  • Article

Uncalculating Cooperation Is Used to Signal Trustworthiness
By: Jillian J. Jordan, Moshe Hoffman, Martin A. Nowak and David G. Rand
Humans frequently cooperate without carefully weighing the costs and benefits. As a result, people may wind up cooperating when it is not worthwhile to do so. Why risk making costly mistakes? Here, we present experimental evidence that reputation concerns provide an...  View Details
Keywords: Social Evaluation; Experimental Economics; Moral Psychology; Cooperation; Reputation; Decision Making
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  • February 2016 (Revised September 2017)
  • Case

Neurotrack and the Alzheimer's Puzzle
By: Richard G. Hamermesh, Liz Kind and Carin-Isabel Knoop
Elli Kaplan founded Neurotrack in 2012 with a breakthrough noninvasive cognitive diagnostics test that will detect Alzheimer's disease in its earliest pre-symptomatic stages. While the company has gained great traction in the three years since it was started, with no...  View Details
Keywords: Alzheimer's Disease; Diagnostics; Healthcare; Entrepreneurship; Health Disorders; Science-Based Business; Business Model; Medical Devices and Supplies Industry; United States
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  • Article

Visualizing and Measuring Software Portfolio Architecture: A Power Utility Case
By: Robert Lagerström, Carliss Y. Baldwin and Alan MacCormack
In this paper, we test a Design Structure Matrix (DSM) based method for visualizing and measuring software portfolio architectures. Our data is drawn from a power utility company, comprising 192 software applications with 614 dependencies between them. We show that...  View Details
Keywords: Software; Infrastructure; Utilities Industry
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  • March 2015
  • Article

Signaling to Partially Informed Investors in the Newsvendor Model
By: William Schmidt, Vishal Gaur, Richard Lai and Ananth Raman
We investigate a puzzling phenomenon in which firms make investment decisions that purposefully do not maximize expected profits. Using an extension to the newsvendor model, we focus on a relatively common scenario in which the firm's investor has imperfect information...  View Details
Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Investment
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  • 2014
  • Working Paper

Making the Numbers? 'Short Termism' & the Puzzle of Only Occasional Disaster
By: Hazhir Rahmandad, Nelson P. Repenning and Rebecca Henderson
Much recent work in strategy and popular discussion suggests that an excessive focus on "managing the numbers"―delivering quarterly earnings at the expense of longer term investments―makes it difficult for firms to make the investments necessary to build competitive...  View Details
Keywords: Earnings Management; Competitive Advantage
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  • October 2014
  • Article

Sovereigns, Upstream Capital Flows and Global Imbalances
By: Laura Alfaro, Sebnem Kalemli-Ozcan and Vadym Volosovych
We construct measures of net private and public capital flows for a large cross-section of developing countries considering both creditor and debtor side of the international debt transactions. Using these measures, we demonstrate that sovereign-to-sovereign...  View Details
Keywords: Current Account; Aid/government Debt; Reserves; Puzzles; Productivity; Sovereign Finance; Developing Countries and Economies; Macroeconomics
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