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- 2022
- Article
Missing Novelty in Drug Development
By: Joshua Krieger, Danielle Li and Dimitris Papanikolaou
We provide evidence that risk aversion leads pharmaceutical firms to underinvest in radical innovation. We introduce a new measure of drug novelty based on chemical similarity and show that firms face a risk-reward trade-off: novel drug candidates are less likely to...
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- 2022
- Working Paper
Heterogeneous Investors and Stock Market Fluctuations
By: Odhrain McCarthy and Sebastian Hillenbrand
We introduce a heterogeneous agent model which features extrapolative beliefs and time-varying risk aversion. The model leads to an empirical framework which we estimate with stock prices, survey data and risk aversion measures. We find that extrapolative beliefs and...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
What Drives Variation in Investor Portfolios? Evidence from Retirement Plans
We study empirical patterns in investment behavior using a comprehensive data set of defined contribution plans. Using plan-level portfolio allocation data for the near universe of 401(k) plans over the period 2009–2019, we document substantial differences in...
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- 2021
- Article
Fair Influence Maximization: A Welfare Optimization Approach
By: Aida Rahmattalabi, Shahin Jabbari, Himabindu Lakkaraju, Phebe Vayanos, Max Izenberg, Ryan Brown, Eric Rice and Milind Tambe
Several behavioral, social, and public health interventions, such as suicide/HIV prevention or community preparedness against natural disasters, leverage social network information to maximize outreach. Algorithmic influence maximization techniques have been proposed...
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- February 2020
- Article
Being 'Good' or 'Good Enough': Prosocial Risk and the Structure of Moral Self-regard
By: Julian Zlatev, Daniella M. Kupor, Kristin Laurin and Dale T. Miller
The motivation to feel moral powerfully guides people’s prosocial behavior. We propose that people’s efforts to preserve their moral self-regard conform to a moral threshold model. This model predicts that people are primarily concerned with whether their...
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- 2010
- Article
Fretting About Modest Risks Is a Mistake
By: Matthew Rabin and Max Bazerman
Managers often engage in risk-averse behavior, and economists, decision analysts, and managers treat risk aversion as a preference. In many cases, acting in a risk-averse manner is a mistake, but managers can correct this mistake with greater reflection. This article...
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- Article
Choice Architects Reveal a Bias Toward Positivity and Certainty
By: David P. Daniels and Julian Zlatev
Biases influence important decisions, but little is known about whether and how individuals try to exploit others’ biases in strategic interactions. Choice architects—that is, people who present choices to others—must often decide between presenting choice sets with...
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- 2018
- Working Paper
Detecting Anomalies: The Relevance and Power of Standard Asset Pricing Tests
By: Malcolm Baker, Patrick Luo and Ryan Taliaferro
The two standard approaches for identifying capital market anomalies are cross-sectional coefficient tests, in the spirit of Fama and MacBeth (1973), and time-series intercept tests, in the spirit of Jensen (1968). A new signal can pass the first test, which we label a...
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- April 2017
- Teaching Note
Sesame Workshop: Bringing Big Bird Back to Health (Abridged)
By: Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Ryan Raffaelli, Ai-Ling Jamila Malone and Jonathan Cohen
Sesame Workshop was in the middle of a turnaround in 2016. CEO Jeff Dunn had reorganized and shifted the iconic institution to respond to digital disruption and a consensus culture. This Teaching Note helps instructors teach the abridged and full-length versions of...
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Keywords:
Turnaround;
NGO;
Non-profit;
Organization Alignment;
Managing Change;
Philanthropy;
Media;
Television;
Reorganization;
Talent;
Innovation;
Risk Aversion;
Organizational Change and Adaptation;
Change Management;
Restructuring;
Identity;
Transformation;
Education Industry;
Media and Broadcasting Industry
- Article
Excusing Selfishness in Charitable Giving: The Role of Risk
Decisions involving charitable giving often occur under the shadow of risk. A common finding is that potential donors give less when there is greater risk that their donation will have less impact. While this behavior could be fully rationalized by standard economic...
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- Article
Matching Firms, Managers, and Incentives
By: Oriana Bandiera, Luigi Guiso, Andrea Prat and Raffaella Sadun
We combine unique administrative and survey data to study the match between firms and managers. The data include manager characteristics, firm characteristics, detailed measures of managerial practices, and outcomes for the firm and the manager. A parsimonious model of...
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- 2015
- Working Paper
Customers and Investors: A Framework for Understanding Financial Institutions
By: Robert C. Merton and Robert T. Thakor
Financial institutions have both investors and customers. Investors, such as those who invest in stocks and bonds or private/public-sector guarantors of institutions, expect an appropriate risk-adjusted return in exchange for the financing and risk-bearing that they...
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Keywords:
Financial Institutions
- Article
Seeking the Roots of Entrepreneurship: Insights from Behavioral Economics
By: Thomas Astebro, Holger Herz, Ramana Nanda and Roberto A. Weber
There is a growing body of evidence that many entrepreneurs seem to enter and persist in entrepreneurship despite earning low risk-adjusted returns. This has lead to attempts to provide explanations—using both standard economic theory and behavioral economics—for why...
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- October 2012
- Case
Hill Country Snack Foods Co.
By: W. Carl Kester and Craig Stephenson
Hill Country Snack Foods, located in Austin, Texas, manufactures, markets, and distributes snack foods and frozen treats. The CEO is passionate about maximizing shareholder value and believes in keeping tight control over costs and operating the business as efficiently...
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- September–October 2012
- Article
One-Switch Conditions for Multiattribute Utility Functions
By: Ali E. Abbas and David E. Bell
We introduce a variety of new independence conditions for multiattribute utility functions that permit preference dependencies among the attributes of a decision problem. The hierarchy of new conditions varies in the degree to which it specifies the functional form,...
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- Article
How Institutional Investors Frame Their Losses: Evidence on Dynamic Loss Aversion from Currency Portfolios
By: Kenneth A. Froot, John Arabadjis, Sonya Cates and Stephen Lawrence
Currency investors exhibit a tendency to cut risk by pairing both longs and shorts following losses and a weaker tendency to add risk following gains. By differentiating between position level, portfolio level, and aggregate cross-portfolio losses in currency...
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- 2011
- Working Paper
'Last-place Aversion': Evidence and Redistributive Implications
By: Ilyana Kuziemko, Ryan W. Buell, Taly Reich and Michael I. Norton
Why do low-income individuals often oppose redistribution? We hypothesize that an aversion to being in "last place" undercuts support for redistribution, with low-income individuals punishing those slightly below themselves to keep someone "beneath" them. In laboratory...
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Keywords:
Wages;
Surveys;
Wealth and Poverty;
Behavior;
Income;
Research;
Rank and Position;
Attitudes;
Personal Characteristics;
Economics
- 2003
- Working Paper
The Risk Tolerance of International Investors
By: Kenneth A. Froot and Paul G. J. O'Connell
- 2002
- Working Paper
Risk Aversion and Apparently Persuasive Advertising
By: Bharat Anand and Ron Shachar