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- Article
Returnable Reciprocity: Returnable Gifts Are More Effective than Unreturnable Gifts at Promoting Virtuous Behaviors
By: J.J. Zlatev and Rogers, T.
Increasing virtuous behaviors, such as initiating healthy habits, is an important goal for policymakers and social scientists. To promote compliance with requests to perform virtuous behaviors, we study “returnable reciprocity.” Whereas traditional reciprocity involves...
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Keywords:
Nudges;
reciprocity;
Want-should Conflicts;
Wellness;
Health;
Behavior;
Change;
Well-being
- July 2020
- Case
Oxygen Esports
By: John R. Wells and Benjamin Weinstock
On May 4, 2020, a press release from Boston, Massachusetts, announced the launch of Oxygen Esports (Oxygen), a new organization that hoped to dominate the rising esports scene in New England. Oxygen was created from a merger between Helix eSports (Helix), an owner and...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Social Interactions in Pandemics: Fear, Altruism, and Reciprocity
By: Laura Alfaro, Ester Faia, Nora Lamersdorf and Farzad Saidi
In SIR models, homogeneous or with a network structure, infection rates are assumed to be exogenous. However, individuals adjust their behavior. Using daily data for 89 cities worldwide, we document that mobility falls in response to fear, as approximated by Google...
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- May 2020
- Article
Ancient Origins of the Global Variation in Economic Preferences
By: Anke Becker, Benjamin Enke and Armin Falk
This paper shows that contemporary population-level heterogeneity in risk aversion, time preference, altruism, positive reciprocity, negative reciprocity, and trust partly traces back to the structure of the migration patterns of our very early ancestors. To document...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Incentive Effects of Subjective Allocations of Rewards and Penalties
By: Wei Cai, Susanna Gallani and Jee Eun Shin
We examine the incentive effects of subjective adjustments in the allocation of tournament-based financial rewards and penalties based on performance rankings. We use data from a company where the reward and penalty allocations are based on a combination of objective...
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- 2019
- Working Paper
Rehabilitating Corporate Purpose
In this paper, I address how the ascendance of the theory of shareholder value maximization into the central consciousness of public corporations and its canonization as the only legitimate expression of corporate purpose has contributed to both a widening breach...
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- March 2019 (Revised January 2021)
- Module Note
Strategic Interactions
By: Ashish Nanda
This note provides a perspective and some tools to predict and shape interactions with other players when making strategic decisions. As a strategist, you must consider that your firm’s actions evoke reactions from other players in the market and that, reciprocally,...
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- Article
Are You Suited for a Start-up?
By: Jeffrey Bussgang
Relative to established organizations, start-ups can be hard to figure out. What are the jobs to be done? The best entry points? How can you tell whether a company has potential for success and is the right fit for you?
The author advises that you first assess whether...
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- August 2017
- Article
Incentives versus Reciprocity: Insights from a Field Experiment
By: Doug J. Chung and Das Narayandas
We conduct a field experiment in which we vary the sales force compensation scheme at an Asian enterprise that sells consumer durable goods. With variation generated by the experimental treatments, we model sales force performance to identify the effectiveness of...
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- June 2017
- Article
Creating Reciprocal Value Through Operational Transparency
By: Ryan W. Buell, Tami Kim and Chia-Jung Tsay
We investigate whether organizations can create value by introducing visual transparency between consumers and producers. Although operational transparency has been shown to improve consumer perceptions of service value, existing theory posits that increased contact...
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- September 2016
- Article
When 3+1>4: Gift Structure and Reciprocity in the Field
By: Duncan S. Gilchrist, Michael Luca and Deepak Malhotra
Do higher wages elicit reciprocity and lead to increased productivity? In a field experiment with 266 employees, we find that paying higher wages, per se, does not have a discernible effect on productivity (in a context with no future employment opportunities)....
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- July–August 2016
- Article
How to Negotiate with a Liar
By: Leslie John
People, including negotiators, lie every day, so when you're trying to make a deal, it's important to defend against deception. The best strategy, says the author, is to focus not on detecting lies but on preventing them. She outlines five tactics that research has...
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- October 2015
- Article
The Multinational Firm and Geopolitics: Europe, Russian Energy, and Power
By: Rawi Abdelal
Multinational firms unavoidably exert influence over politics through power that is generated by both structure and process. While both political economy and management scholars address international firms, neither field has an adequate understanding of the reciprocal...
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- 2015
- Working Paper
Incentives versus Reciprocity: Insights from a Field Experiment
By: Doug J. Chung and Das Narayandas
We conduct a field experiment in which we vary the sales force compensation scheme at an Asian enterprise that sells consumer durable goods. With variation generated by the experimental treatments, we model sales force performance to identify the effectiveness of...
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- April 2014
- Article
The Emergence of 'Us and Them' in 80 Lines of Code: Modeling Group Genesis in Homogeneous Populations
By: Kurt Gray, David G. Rand, Eyal Ert, Kevin Lewis, Steve Hershman and Michael I. Norton
Psychological explanations of group genesis often require population heterogeneity in identity or other characteristics, whether deep (e.g., religion) or superficial (e.g., eye color). We use game-theoretical agent-based models to explore group genesis in homogeneous...
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Keywords:
Groups And Teams
- January 2014 (Revised October 2014)
- Case
Andreessen Horowitz
By: Thomas R. Eisenmann and Liz Kind
Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), a venture capital firm launched in 2009, has quickly broken into the VC industry's top ranks, in terms of its ability to invest in Silicon Valley's most promising startups. The case recounts the firm's history; describes its co-founders'...
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- 2014
- Article
Paying It Forward: Generalized Reciprocity and the Limits of Generosity
By: Kurt Gray, Adrian F. Ward and Michael I. Norton
When people are the victims of greed or recipients of generosity, their first impulse is often to pay back that behavior in kind. What happens when people cannot reciprocate, but instead have the chance to be cruel or kind to someone entirely different—to pay it...
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- 2012
- Chapter
Firing Your Best Customers: How Smart Firms Destroy Relationships Using CRM
By: Jill Avery and Susan Fournier
With incidences in the 20%–25% range, the practice of firing customers has become increasingly attractive as firms try to maximize the lifetime value of their customer portfolios. This chapter traces the relationship trajectory of a 30-year customer of Filene's...
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- September 2011
- Article
The Labor Illusion: How Operational Transparency Increases Perceived Value
By: Ryan W. Buell and Michael I. Norton
A ubiquitous feature of even the fastest self-service technology transactions is the wait. Conventional wisdom and operations theory suggests that the longer people wait, the less satisfied they become; we demonstrate that due to what we term the labor illusion, when...
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- August 2011
- Case
Denise Frazer and Paolo Canto: A Case Vignette on Feedback - Denise Frazer's Perspective
By: Joshua D. Margolis and Anthony J. Mayo
Denise Frazer and Paolo Canto, two HBS students, have decided to give each other feedback on their class participation. While Denise believes that she has provided concrete, actionable feedback to Paolo, she does not feel that Paolo is reciprocating. His feedback is...
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