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- 2022
- Working Paper
Post-market Surveillance of Software Medical Devices: Evidence from Regulatory Data
By: Alexander O. Everhart and Ariel D. Stern
Medical devices increasingly include software components, which facilitate remote patient monitoring. The introduction of software into previously analog medical devices as well as innovation in software-driven devices may introduce new safety concerns—all the more so...
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- 2022
- Working Paper
The Issuance and Design of Sustainability-linked Loans
By: Maria Loumioti and George Serafeim
Sustainability-linked loans (i.e., syndicated loans for which pricing is linked to a sustainability performance indicator) have rapidly evolved into a significant private debt product. We find that sustainability-linked lending has been available mostly to borrowers...
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- 2022
- Working Paper
When Less Is More: Using Short-term Signals to Overcome Systematic Bias in Long-run Targeting
By: Ta-Wei Huang and Eva Ascarza
Firms are increasingly interested in developing targeted interventions for customers with the best response. Doing so requires firms to identify differences in customer sensitivity, which they often obtain using uplift modeling (i.e., heterogeneous treatment effect...
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- September 2022
- Article
A Spanner in the Works: Category-Spanning Entrants and Audience Valuation of Incumbents
By: Rory M. McDonald and Ryan T. Allen
Previous work has examined how audiences evaluate category-spanning organizations, but little is known about how their entrance affects evaluations of other, proximate organizations. We posit that the emergence of category-spanning entrants signals the advent of an...
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- August 2022
- Article
The Bulletproof Glass Effect: Unintended Consequences of Privacy Notices
By: Aaron R. Brough, David A. Norton, Shannon L. Sciarappa and Leslie K. John
Drawing from a content analysis of publicly traded companies’ privacy notices, a survey of managers, a field study, and five online experiments, this research investigates how consumers respond to privacy notices. A privacy notice, by placing legally enforceable limits...
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- 2022
- Working Paper
Punishing Without Looking for Reputational Gain
By: Jillian J. Jordan and Nour S. Kteily
Punishing wrongdoers can confer reputational benefits, and people sometimes punish without
careful consideration. But are these two observations related? Do people “punish without looking”
for reputational gain? And if so, is this because unquestioning...
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- April 2022
- Article
Consumers Value Effort over Ease When Caring for Close Others
By: Ximena Garcia-Rada, Mary Steffel, Elanor F. Williams and Michael I. Norton
Many products and services are designed to make caregiving easier, from premade meals for feeding families to robo-cribs that automatically rock babies to sleep. Yet, using these products may come with a cost: consumers may feel they have not exerted enough effort....
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- 2022
- Working Paper
Gone with the Big Data: Institutional Lender Demand for Private Information
By: Jung Koo Kang
I explore whether the value of borrowers’ private information is an important determinant of institutional lender participation in syndicated loans. Institutional lenders have been shown to exploit their access to borrowers’ private information by trading on it in...
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- 2022
- Working Paper
Consumer Reviews and Regulation: Evidence from NYC Restaurants: Evidence from NYC Restaurants
By: Chiara Farronato and Georgios Zervas
We investigate the informativeness of hygiene signals in online reviews, and their effect on consumer choice and restaurant hygiene. We first extract signals of hygiene from Yelp. Among all dimensions that regulators monitor through mandated restaurant inspections, we...
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- 2023
- Working Paper
Going Beyond the ‘Self’ in Self-Control: Interpersonal Consequences of Commitment Strategy Use
By: Ariella Kristal and Julian Zlatev
Commitment strategies are effective mechanisms individuals can use to overcome self-control problems. In this paper we explore the negative interpersonal consequences of commitment strategy use. In an incentivized trust game (Study 1), we demonstrate that individuals...
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Keywords:
Self-control;
Willpower;
Commitment Strategies;
Goals and Objectives;
Behavior;
Strategy;
Perception
- September 15, 2021
- Article
Improving Deconvolution Methods in Biology Through Open Innovation Competitions: An Application to the Connectivity Map
By: Andrea Blasco, Ted Natoli, Michael G. Endres, Rinat A. Sergeev, Steven Randazzo, Jin Hyun Paik, N.J. Maximilian Macaluso, Rajiv Narayan, Xiaodong Lu, David Peck, Karim R. Lakhani and Aravind Subramanian
A recurring problem in biomedical research is how to isolate signals of distinct populations (cell types, tissues, and genes) from composite measures obtained by a single analyte or sensor. Existing computational deconvolution approaches work well in many specific...
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- September 2021
- Article
Learning from Deregulation: The Asymmetric Impact of Lockdown and Reopening on Risky Behavior During COVID-19
By: Edward L. Glaeser, Ginger Zhe Jin, Michael Luca and Benjamin T. Leyden
During the COVID-19 pandemic, states issued and then rescinded stay-at-home orders that restricted mobility. We develop a model of learning by deregulation, which predicts that lifting stay-at-home orders can signal that going out has become safer. Using restaurant...
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- August 2021
- Technical Note
Brand You: Crafting Your Personal Brand
By: Jill Avery and Rachel Greenwald
Selling oneself is something that we have to do every day in both professional and personal settings. We face it when we apply for a job, advocate for a promotion or a raise, vie for a leadership position, attempt to land a new client, write a dating profile, or meet a...
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- August 2021
- Article
Voter Mobilization and Trust in Electoral Institutions: Evidence from Kenya
By: Benjamin Marx, Vincent Pons and Tavneet Suri
Voter mobilization campaigns face trade-offs in young democracies. In a large-scale experiment implemented in 2013 with the Kenyan Electoral Commission (IEBC), text messages intended to mobilize voters boosted participation but also decreased trust in electoral...
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- June 2021
- Article
Does the Freedom of Information Act Foil the Securities and Exchange Commission's Intent to Keep Investigations Confidential?
By: Braiden Coleman, Kenneth Merkley, Brian Miller and Joseph Pacelli
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has a long-standing policy to keep formal investigations confidential. In this study, we examine the extent to which compliance with the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) provides investors with information about ongoing SEC...
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- 2021
- Article
To Thine Own Self Be True? Incentive Problems in Personalized Law
By: Jordan M. Barry, John William Hatfield and Scott Duke Kominers
Recent years have seen an explosion of scholarship on “personalized law.” Commentators foresee a world in which regulators armed with big data and machine learning techniques determine the optimal legal rule for every regulated party, then instantaneously disseminate...
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Keywords:
Personalized Law;
Regulation;
Regulatory Avoidance;
Regulatory Arbitrage;
Law And Economics;
Law And Technology;
Law And Artificial Intelligence;
Futurism;
Moral Hazard;
Elicitation;
Signaling;
Privacy;
Law;
Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms;
Information Technology;
AI and Machine Learning
- May 2021 (Revised September 2021)
- Case
CPE and SUS Environmental: You've Got to Know When to Hold 'Em (A)
By: Josh Lerner and Franko Jira
In July 2016, Di Yang and Grace Guo of the leading Chinese private equity group CPE faced a dilemma—a happy dilemma, but a challenge nonetheless. CPE’s investment in the waste-to-energy firm SUS Environment had proved to be exceedingly successful. This success had...
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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
The Firm Next Door: Using Satellite Images to Study Local Information Advantage
By: Jung Koo Kang, Lorien Stice-Lawrence and Forester Wong
We use novel satellite data that track the number of cars in the parking lots of 92,668 stores for 71 publicly listed U.S. retailers to study the local information advantage of institutional investors. We establish car counts as a timely measure of store-level...
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- 2022
- Working Paper
Canary Categories
By: Eric Anderson, Chaoqun Chen, Ayelet Israeli and Duncan Simester
Past customer spending in a category is generally a positive signal of future customer spending. We show that there exist “Canary Categories” for which the reverse is true. The more customers purchase in these categories, the less likely these customers are to return...
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