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- April 2022
- Case
Conflicts of Interest at Bell Bank
By: Jonas Heese
In 2013, two employees debated whether to blow the whistle on their employer, Bell Bank, after completing an internal review that revealed undisclosed conflicts of interest. Bell Bank’s Asset Management business disproportionately invested clients’ money in Bell Bank’s...
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Keywords:
Whistleblower;
Whistleblowing;
Mutual Funds;
Conflicts Of Interest;
Decision Making;
Decisions;
Judgments;
Ethics;
Moral Sensibility;
Values and Beliefs;
Finance;
Financial Institutions;
Banks and Banking;
Financial Management;
Investment;
Investment Funds;
Governance;
Corporate Accountability;
Corporate Disclosure;
Corporate Governance;
Governance Compliance;
Governance Controls;
Policy;
Law;
Legal Liability;
Social Psychology;
Motivation and Incentives;
Perception;
Perspective;
Trust;
Financial Services Industry;
North and Central America;
United States
- Article
Policies to Influence Perceptions about COVID-19 Risk: The Case of Maps
By: Claudia Engel, Jonathan Rodden and Marco Tabellini
Choropleth disease maps have become an important tool for informing the public about the risks posed by COVID-19. In a survey conducted in the U.S. state of Georgia in June 2020, we randomly assigned respondents to view either of two maps. The first one reported...
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- January–February 2022
- Article
Operational Disruptions, Firm Risk, and Control Systems
By: William Schmidt and Ananth Raman
Operational disruptions can impact a firm's risk, which manifests in a host of operational issues, including a higher holding cost for inventory, a higher financing cost for capacity expansion, and a higher perception of the firm's risk among its supply chain partners....
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- January 2022
- Article
Rejections Make the Heart Grow Fonder: The Benefits of Articulating Risks When Declining Social Invitations
By: Ashley Whillans, Anne Wilson and Tobias Schlager (Shared Authorship)
Across six studies (N=3,591), we explore the interpersonal consequences of COVID-19 risk communication when rejecting social invitations. In Study 1, consumers underestimate the benefits and overestimate the social costs of explicitly rejecting social invitations for...
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- October 2021
- Article
Directors' Perceptions of Board Effectiveness and Internal Operations
By: J. Yo-Jud Cheng, Boris Groysberg, Paul M. Healy and Rajesh Vijayaraghavan
We contribute to the growing literature on the effectiveness of corporate boards by examining the effect of two insights that have been largely unexplored in prior studies that use public data. First, since boards’ responsibilities are wide-ranging, more holistic...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Risk Sensitivity or Social Signaling? Unmasking Behaviors with Video Analytics
By: Shunyuan Zhang, Kaiquan Xu and Kannan Srinivasan
In 2020, as the novel coronavirus spread globally, face masks were recommended in public settings to protect against and slow down the spread of the coronavirus. Why did people comply, or not, while shopping in 2020? Do these motivations relate to their shopping...
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- Article
Emotional Acknowledgment: How Verbalizing Others' Emotions Fosters Interpersonal Trust
By: Alisa Yu, Justin M. Berg and Julian Zlatev
People often respond to others’ emotions using verbal acknowledgment (e.g., “You seem upset”). Yet, little is known about the relational benefits and risks of acknowledging others’ emotions in the workplace. We draw upon Costly Signaling Theory to posit how emotional...
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- May 2021
- Article
Risk-Mitigating Technologies: The Case of Radiation Diagnostic Devices
By: Alberto Galasso and Hong Luo
We study the impact of consumers’ risk perception on firm innovation. Our analysis exploits a major surge in the perceived risk of radiation diagnostic devices following extensive media coverage of a set of over-radiation accidents involving CT scanners in late 2009....
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- August 2020
- Article
Financial Market Risk Perceptions and the Macroeconomy
By: Carolin E. Pflueger, Emil Siriwardane and Adi Sunderam
We propose a novel measure of risk perceptions: the price of volatile stocks (PVS), defined as the book-to-market ratio of low-volatility stocks minus the book-to-market ratio of high-volatility stocks. PVS is high when perceived risk directly measured from surveys and...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
In a Pandemic, People Must Remember: Friends Are Contagious
By: T. Schlager and A.V. Whillans
This article reveals a behavioral tendency that may contribute to the spread of the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2). Across seven studies—including two representative samples of Americans and Canadians (N = 3,408)—we show that people consistently underestimate...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
The Unexpected Benefits and Underlying Motivations for Communicating COVID-19 Contagion Risks When Rejecting In-Person Social Invitations
By: T. Schlager, A. Wilson and A.V. Whillans
Across five studies (N=3,071), we explore the interpersonal consequences of COVID risk communication when rejecting social invitations. In Study 1, people underestimate the benefits and overestimate the costs of rejecting social invitations for risk-related reasons. In...
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- July–September 2020
- Article
Innovation Contest: Effect of Perceived Support for Learning on Participation
By: Olivia Jung, Andrea Blasco and Karim R. Lakhani
Background: Frontline staff are well positioned to conceive improvement opportunities based on first-hand knowledge of what works and does not work. The innovation contest may be a relevant and useful vehicle to elicit staff ideas. However, the success of the...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Older People Are Less Pessimistic About the Health Risks of COVID-19
By: Pedro Bordalo, Katherine B. Coffman, Nicola Gennaioli and Andrei Shleifer
A central question for understanding behaviour during the COVID-19 pandemic, at both the individual and collective levels, is how people perceive the health and economic risks they face. We conducted a survey of over 1,500 Americans from May 6–13, 2020, to understand...
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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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- December 2019
- Case
CME Group in 2019
By: José B. Alvarez, Forest Reinhardt and Natalie Kindred
Chicago-based CME Group is the world’s largest futures and options marketplace, with annual trading volume of over 4.8 billion contracts in 2018. This case is set in late 2019, as heightened perceptions of risk stemming from the U.S.-China trade war are driving record...
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- November 2019
- Article
Procedural Justice and the Risks of Consumer Voting
By: Tami Kim, Leslie John, Todd Rogers and Michael I. Norton
Firms are increasingly giving consumers the vote. Eight studies demonstrate that when firms empower consumers to vote, consumers infer a series of implicit promises—even in the absence of explicit promises. We identify three implicit promises to which consumers react...
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- August 2019 (Revised April 2021)
- Case
Zillow Offers: Winning Online Real Estate 2.0
By: Luis Viceira, Marco Di Maggio and Allison Ciechanover
Founded in 2005, Zillow had become the leading online real estate and home-related marketplace. The brand was recognized as a trusted resource for players in the real estate market, providing information and transparency on home prices. Revenue, which was historically...
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- 2022
- Working Paper
A Preference for Revision Absent Objective Improvement
By: Ximena Garcia-Rada, Leslie K. John, Ed O’Brien and Michael I. Norton
From downloading never-ending updates to tracking ever-newer releases, consumers today are surrounded by revised offerings that purport to have improved upon what was previously available. Although revising things often makes them better, the current research reveals...
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- Article
Business, Governments and Political Risk in South Asia and Latin America since 1970
By: G. Jones and Rachael Comunale
This article contributes to the literature on political risk in business and economic history by examining both new perspectives (risk encountered by companies domestically, rather than risk for foreign investors) and new settings (emerging markets economies in Latin...
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- 2018
- Working Paper
Business, Governments and Political Risk in South Asia and Latin America since 1970
By: Geoffrey Jones and Rachael Comunale
This working paper provides a new perspective on how businesses have responded to political risk in South Asia and Latin America over the last half century. The existing business history literature on political risk is focused on the experiences of Western...
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