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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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- 2021
- 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
- Article
The Pitfalls of Pricing Algorithms: Be Mindful of How They Can Hurt Your Brand
By: Marco Bertini and Oded Koenigsberg
More and more companies are relying on pricing algorithms to maximize profits. The use of artificial intelligence and machine learning enables real-time price adjustments based on supply and demand, competitors’ activities, delivery schedules, and so forth. But...
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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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- 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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- 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
- 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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- 2021
- Book
Sales Management That Works: How to Sell in a World That Never Stops Changing
Selling is changing, but the impact on sales of megatrends like ecommerce, big data, and AI is often misunderstood and not supported by empirical data. Managers who fail to separate fact from hype will make decisions based on bad assumptions and, in a competitive...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
False Signaling and Personal Moral Failings: Two Distinct Pathways to Hypocrisy with Unequal Moral Weight
By: Jillian J. Jordan and Roseanna Sommers
Moral engagement is a key feature of human nature: we hold moral values, condemn those who violate those values, and attempt to adhere to them ourselves. Yet moral engagement can make us appear hypocritical if we fail to behave morally. When does moral engagement risk...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Reputation Fuels Moralistic Punishment That People Judge to Be Questionably Merited
By: Jillian J. Jordan and Nour Kteily
Critics of outrage culture allege that virtue signaling fuels morally questionable punishment. But does reputation actually have the power to motivate punishment that people see as ambiguously deserved? Across four studies (total n = 9,587), among both liberals and...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
The Market for Healthcare in Low Income Countries
By: Abhijit Banerjee, Jishnu Das, Jeffrey Hammer, Reshmaan Hussam and Aakash Mohpal
New research clearly identifies trust as an important driver of the demand for healthcare. However, doctors who realize that patients may not trust them may also alter their behavior in response. We assemble a large dataset that assesses clinical performance using...
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- Article
Forgoing Earned Incentives to Signal Pure Motives
By: Erika L. Kirgios, Edward H. Chang, Emma E. Levine, Katherine L. Milkman and Judd B. Kessler
Policy makers, employers, and insurers often provide financial incentives to encourage citizens, employees, and customers to take actions that are good for them or for society (e.g., energy conservation, healthy living, safe driving). Although financial incentives are...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Can Shared Service Delivery Increase Customer Engagement? A Study of Shared Medical Appointments
By: Ryan W. Buell, Kamalini Ramdas and Nazlı Sönmez
Problem Definition: Customers and providers alike often consider one-on-one service delivery to be ideal, assuming – perhaps unquestioningly – that devoting individualized attention maximizes customer engagement and improves outcomes. Alternatively, shared...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
The Pursuit of Passion Propagates Privilege
By: Josephine Tan and Jon M. Jachimowicz
For many graduating college students entering the workforce, “pursue your passion” is not only a frequently repeated graduation mantra but also a commonly embraced ideal. In line with this view, prior academic research finds that passion connotes work-related benefits,...
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- June 2020
- Article
Lazy Prices
By: Lauren Cohen, Christopher J. Malloy and Quoc Nguyen
We explore the implications of a subtle "default" choice that firms make in their regular reporting practices, namely that firms typically repeat what they most recently reported. Using the complete history of regular quarterly and annual filings by U.S. corporations...
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- Article
Signaling When Nobody Is Watching: A Reputation Heuristics Account of Outrage and Punishment in One-shot Anonymous Interactions
By: Jillian J. Jordan and David G. Rand
Moralistic punishment can confer reputation benefits by signaling trustworthiness to observers. However, why do people punish even when nobody is watching? We argue that people often rely on the heuristic that reputation is typically at stake, such that reputation...
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Keywords:
Signaling;
Morality;
Trustworthiness;
Anger;
Third-party Punishment;
Moral Sensibility;
Behavior;
Trust;
Reputation
- December 2019
- Article
It Helps to Ask: The Cumulative Benefits of Asking Follow-up Questions
By: Michael Yeomans, Alison Wood Brooks, Karen Huang, Julia A. Minson and Francesca Gino
In a recent article published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP; Huang, Yeomans, Brooks, Minson, & Gino, 2017), we reported the results of 2 experiments involving “getting acquainted” conversations among strangers and an observational field...
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- 2019
- White Paper
Impact-Weighted Financial Accounts: The Missing Piece for an Impact Economy
By: George Serafeim, T. Robert Zochowski and Jennifer Downing
Reimagining capitalism is an imperative. We need to create a more inclusive and sustainable form of capitalism that works for every person and the planet. Massive environmental damage, growing income and wealth disparity, stress, and depression within developed...
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- 2010
- Article
I May Not Agree With You, but I Trust You: Caring About Social Issues Signals Integrity
By: Julian Zlatev
What characteristics of an individual signal trustworthiness to other people? I propose that individuals who care about contentious social issues signal to observers that they have integrity and thus can be trusted. Critically, this signal conveys trustworthiness...
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