Publications
Publications
Show Results For
-
All HBS Web
(550)
- Faculty Publications (40)
Page 1 of
40
Results
→
- 2023
- Working Paper
Design-Based Confidence Sequences: A General Approach to Risk Mitigation in Online Experimentation
By: Dae Woong Ham, Michael Lindon, Martin Tingley and Iavor I Bojinov
Randomized experiments have become the standard method for companies to evaluate the performance of new products or services. In addition to augmenting managers’ decision-making, experimentation mitigates risk by limiting the proportion of customers exposed to...
View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Crowding in Private Quality: The Equilibrium Effects of Public Spending in Education
By: Tahir Andrabi, Natalie Bau, Jishnu Das, Asim Ijaz Khwaja and Naureen Karachiwalla
We estimate the equilibrium effects of a public-school grant program administered through school councils in Pakistani villages with multiple public and private schools and clearly defined catchment boundaries. The program was randomized at the village-level, allowing...
View Details
- August 2022
- Case
Rocket Learning: Evidence in Action
By: Brian Trelstad, Tomas Rosales and Malini Sen
Founders of Rocket Learning, an India-based nonprofit which focused on early childhood education (ECE), received an invitation from MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (JPAL), a development research organization, to test its intervention for ECE with a...
View Details
- 2022
- Article
Values and Inequality: Prosocial Jobs and the College Wage Premium
By: Nathan Wilmers and Letian Zhang
Employers often recruit workers by invoking corporate social responsibility, organizational purpose, or other claims to a prosocial mission. In an era of substantial labor
market inequality, commentators typically dismiss these claims as hypocritical: prosocial...
View Details
- 2021
- Working Paper
Cognitive Biases: Mistakes or Missing Stakes?
By: Benjamin Enke, Uri Gneezy, Brian Hall, David Martin, Vadim Nelidov, Theo Offerman and Jeroen van de Ven
Despite decades of research on heuristics and biases, empirical evidence on the effect of large incentives—as present in relevant economic decisions—on cognitive biases is scant. This paper tests the effect of incentives on four widely documented biases: base rate...
View Details
- March 16, 2021
- Article
From Driverless Dilemmas to More Practical Commonsense Tests for Automated Vehicles
By: Julian De Freitas, Andrea Censi, Bryant Walker Smith, Luigi Di Lillo, Sam E. Anthony and Emilio Frazzoli
For the first time in history, automated vehicles (AVs) are being deployed in populated environments. This unprecedented transformation of our everyday lives demands a significant undertaking: endowing
complex autonomous systems with ethically acceptable behavior. We...
View Details
- March 2021
- Article
Opting-in to Prosocial Incentives
By: Daniel Schwartz, Elizabeth A. Keenan, Alex Imas and Ayelet Gneezy
The design of effective incentive schemes that are both successful in motivating employees and keeping down costs is of critical importance. Research has demonstrated that prosocial incentives, where individuals’ effort benefits a charitable organization, can sometimes...
View Details
- Article
The Impact of Penalties for Wrong Answers on the Gender Gap in Test Scores
By: Katherine B. Coffman and David Klinowski
Multiple-choice exams play a critical role in university admissions across the world. A key question is whether imposing penalties for wrong answers on these exams deters guessing from women more than men, disadvantaging female test-takers. We consider data from a...
View Details
- Article
The Hidden Costs of Initial Coin Offerings
By: Jeffrey J. Bussgang and Ramana Nanda
In recent years, much has been written about how the Blockchain is poised to transform traditional industries such as banking, real estate, and healthcare. More recently, it has gained attention as a way to finance new ventures, through what is known as an Initial Coin...
View Details
- Article
Applying Random Coefficient Models to Strategy Research: Identifying and Exploring Firm Heterogeneous Effects
By: Juan Alcácer, Wilbur Chung, Ashton Hawk and Gonçalo Pacheco-de-Almeida
Strategy aims at understanding the differential effects of firms’ actions on performance. However, standard regression models estimate only the average effects of these actions across firms. Our paper discusses how random coefficient models (RCMs) may generate new...
View Details
- 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...
View Details
- Article
Scenario Generation for Long Run Interest Rate Risk Assessment
By: Robert F. Engle, Guillaume Roussellet and Emil N. Siriwardane
We propose a statistical model of the term structure of U.S. treasury yields tailored for long-term probability-based scenario generation and forecasts. Our model is easy to estimate and is able to simultaneously reproduce the positivity, persistence, and factor...
View Details
- September 2017 (Revised January 2018)
- Case
Adaptive Platform Trials: The Clinical Trial of the Future?
By: Ariel D. Stern and Sarah Mehta
In July 2017, Dr. Brian M. Alexander, president and CEO of the AGILE Research Foundation, was preparing to launch a new type of clinical trial—an adaptive platform trial—to study potential therapies for glioblastoma (GBM), an aggressive form of brain cancer....
View Details
- 2017
- Working Paper
Nowcasting the Local Economy: Using Yelp Data to Measure Economic Activity
By: Edward L. Glaeser, Hyunjin Kim and Michael Luca
Can new data sources from online platforms help to measure local economic activity? Government datasets from agencies such as the U.S. Census Bureau provide the standard measures of economic activity at the local level. However, these statistics typically appear only...
View Details
- 2017
- Case
Uncommon Schools (A): A Network of Networks
By: John J-H Kim and Sarah McAra
In 2013, Brett Peiser, CEO of the charter school management organization (CMO) Uncommon Schools, is reassessing the nonprofit’s strategy. For nearly 10 years, Uncommon had fulfilled its mission to bring high-quality education to students in low-income, urban areas...
View Details
- 2017
- Supplement
Uncommon Schools (B): Seeking Excellence at Scale through Standardized Practice
By: John J-H Kim and Sarah McAra
The (B) case provides an update to the (A) case by illustrating how charter school management organization Uncommon Schools responded to the disparity in its students’ 2013 standardized test results. In 2015, CEO Brett Peiser and his management team decided to align...
View Details
Keywords:
Charter Schools;
Nonprofit Organizations;
Strategy;
Teaching;
Talent And Talent Management;
Innovation;
Education;
Early Childhood Education;
Middle School Education;
Organizational Structure;
Performance Consistency;
Growth and Development Strategy;
Innovation and Invention;
Education Industry
- December 2016
- Article
The Effects of Endowment Size and Strategy Method on Third Party Punishment
By: Jillian J. Jordan, Katherine McAuliffe and David G. Rand
Numerous experiments have shown that people often engage in third-party punishment (3PP) of selfish behavior. This evidence has been used to argue that people respond to selfishness with anger, and get utility from punishing those who mistreat others. Elements of the...
View Details
- 2016
- Working Paper
Experimental Evidence on Policies Aimed at Closing the Gender Gap in Willingness to Guess on Multiple-Choice Tests
Research has shown that women skip more questions than men on multiple-choice tests with penalties for wrong answers. We propose and test five policy changes aimed at eliminating this source of gender bias in test scores. Our data show that simply removing the penalty...
View Details
- March 8, 2016
- Article
Cognitive Fatigue Influences Students' Performance on Standardized Tests
By: Hans Henrik Sievertsen, F. Gino and Marco Piovesan
Using test data for all children attending Danish public schools between school years 2009–2010 and 2012–2013, we examine how the time of the test affects performance. Test time is determined by the weekly class schedule and computer availability at the school. We find...
View Details
- July 2015
- Article
Prosocial Norms in the Classroom: The Role of Self-regulation in Following Norms of Giving
By: P. R. Blake, M. Piovesan, N. Montinari, F. Werneken and F. Gino
Children who are prosocial in elementary school tend to have higher academic achievement and experience greater acceptance by their peers in adolescence. Despite this positive influence on educational outcomes, it is still unclear why some children are more prosocial...
View Details