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Recent work argues that experimentation is the appropriate framework for entrepreneurial strategy. We investigate this proposition by exploiting the...
Online experiments measuring whether “A,” usually the current approach, is inferior to “B,” a proposed improvement, have become integral to the...
- 2021
- Working Paper
Multiple Team Membership, Turnover, and On-Time Delivery: Evidence from Construction Services
By: Hise O. Gibson, Bradely R. Staats and Ananth Raman
Firms who want to compete in dynamic markets are finding that they must build more agile operations to ensure success. One way for a firm to increase organizational agility is to allocate employees to multiple project teams, simultaneously - a practice known as...
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- July 2021
- Article
Creating Exercise Habits Using Incentives: The Trade-off Between Flexibility and Routinization
By: John Beshears, Hae Nim Lee, Katherine L. Milkman, Robert Mislavsky and Jessica Wisdom
Habits involve regular, cue-triggered routines. In a field experiment, we tested whether incentivizing exercise routines—paying participants each time they visit the gym within a planned, daily two-hour window—leads to more persistent exercise than offering flexible...
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- July 2021
- Article
Do Interactions with Candidates Increase Voter Support and Participation? Experimental Evidence from Italy
By: Enrico Cantoni and Vincent Pons
We test whether politicians can use direct contact to reconnect with citizens, increase turnout, and win votes. During the 2014 Italian municipal elections, we randomly assigned 26,000 voters to receive visits from city council candidates, from canvassers supporting...
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- July 2021
- Article
Information Transparency, Multihoming, and Platform Competition: A Natural Experiment in the Daily Deals Market
By: Hui Li and Feng Zhu
Platform competition is shaped by the likelihood of multi-homing (i.e., complementors or consumers adopt more than one platform). To take advantage of multi-homing, platform firms often attempt to motivate their rivals’ high-performing complementors to adopt their own...
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- July 2021
- Article
Making Medications Stick: Improving Medication Adherence by Highlighting the Personal Health Costs of Non-compliance
By: Jon M. Jachimowicz, Joe J. Gladstone, Dan Berry, Charlotte L. Kirkdale, Tracey Thornley and Adam D. Galinsky
Poor compliance of prescription medication is an ongoing public health crisis. Nearly half of patients do not take their medication as prescribed, harming their own health while also increasing public health care costs. Despite these detrimental consequences, prior...
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- Summer 2021
- Article
Platform Leadership and Supply Chains: Intel, Centrino, and the Restructuring of Wi-Fi Supply
By: Roberto Fontana and Shane Greenstein
In this paper we examine Intel’s launch of Centrino and interpret it as platform leaders attempt to restructure a supply chain. We provide a narrative of key actions and how they coordinated changes and offer a framework of the predictable consequences for...
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- July 2021
- Article
Tabulated Nonsense? Testing the Validity of the Ethnographic Atlas
By: Duman Bahrami-Rad, Anke Becker and Joseph Henrich
The Ethnographic Atlas (Murdock, 1967), an anthropological database, is widely used across the social sciences. The Atlas is a quantified and discretely categorized collection of information gleaned from ethnographies covering more than 1200...
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- 2021
- Article
Work Group Rituals Enhance the Meaning of Work
By: Tami Kim, Ovul Sezer, Juliana Schroeder, Jane L. Risen, Francesca Gino and Michael I. Norton
The many benefits of finding meaning in work suggest the importance of identifying activities that increase job meaningfulness. The current paper identifies one such activity: engaging in rituals with workgroups. Five studies (N = 1,099) provide evidence that...
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Keywords:
Groups;
Meaningfulness;
Task Meaning;
Ritual;
Teams;
Organizational Citizenship;
Groups and Teams;
Behavior;
Familiarity
- June 23, 2021
- Article
Research: When A/B Testing Doesn't Tell You the Whole Story
By: Eva Ascarza
When it comes to churn prevention, marketers traditionally start by identifying which customers are most likely to churn, and then running A/B tests to determine whether a proposed retention intervention will be effective at retaining those high-risk customers. While...
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Keywords:
Customer Retention;
Churn;
Targeting;
Market Research;
Marketing;
Investment Return;
Customers;
Retention;
Research
- June 11, 2021
- Article
Addressing Demographic Disparities in Clinical Trials
By: Kathy Giusti, Richard G. Hamermesh and Mark Krasnow
Disparities in health care are not just limited to the delivery of care. They also exist in the way that clinical trials are structured. Women, people of color, and the elderly often are not adequately represented. This article offers three strategies for addressing...
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- June 2021
- Case
uBiome
By: Thomas R. Eisenmann and Olivia Graham
uBiome provided clinical tests that sequenced the DNA of human microbiome samples, providing data on health conditions directly to consumers or to prescribing physicians. Founded in 2012, the San Francisco-based startup raised $105 million from top-tier venture capital...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Who Closed the Schools?
By: Joshua D. Coval
This paper examines the differences in characteristics between U.S. public schools that opted for virtual instruction because of COVID-19, and schools that did not. Much of the variation can be explained by measures of the degree to which districts favored teachers...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Equilibrium Effects of Pay Transparency
By: Zoë B. Cullen and Bobak Pakzad-Hurson
The public discourse around pay transparency has focused on the direct effect: how workers seek
to rectify newly-disclosed pay inequities through renegotiations. The question of how wage-setting
and hiring practices of the firm respond in equilibrium has received...
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- 2021
- Article
Use of Connected Digital Products in Clinical Research Following the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Comprehensive Analysis of Clinical Trials
By: Caroline Marra, William J. Gordon and Ariel Dora Stern
Objectives: In an effort to mitigate COVID-19 related challenges for clinical research, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued new guidance for the conduct of ‘virtual’ clinical trials in late March 2020. This study documents trends in the use of...
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- May 2021
- Case
Airbnb During the Pandemic: Stakeholder Capitalism Faces a Critical Test
By: Benjamin C. Esty and Allison Ciechanover
As the COVID pandemic spread in early 2020, global travel ground to a halt. For Airbnb, the San Francisco-based platform for renting accommodations, the impact was both swift and severe as revenues plummeted more than 70% over the prior year. Responding to the sudden...
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Keywords:
Business and Stakeholder Relations;
Corporate Governance;
Crisis Management;
Leadership;
Two-Sided Platforms;
Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact;
Mission and Purpose;
Value Creation;
Decision Making;
Goals and Objectives;
Travel Industry;
Tourism Industry;
Service Industry;
United States
- 2021
- Article
A Megastudy of Text-Based Nudges Encouraging Patients to Get Vaccinated at an Upcoming Doctor's Appointment
By: Katherine L. Milkman, Mitesh S. Patel, Linnea Gandhi, Heather N. Graci, Dena M. Gromet, Hung Ho, Joseph S. Kay, Timothy W. Lee, Modupe Akinola, John Beshears, Jonathan E. Bogard, Alison Buttenheim, Christopher F. Chabris, Gretchen B. Chapman, James J. Choi, Hengchen Dai, Craig R. Fox, Amir Goren, Matthew D. Hilchey, Jillian Hmurovic, Leslie K. John, Dean Karlan, Melanie Kim, David Laibson, Cait Lamberton, Brigitte C. Madrian, Michelle N. Meyer, Maria Modanu, Jimin Nam, Todd Rogers, Renante Rondina, Silvia Saccardo, Maheen Shermohammed, Dilip Soman, Jehan Sparks, Caleb Warren, Megan Weber, Ron Berman, Chalanda N. Evans, Christopher K. Snider, Eli Tsukayama, Christophe Van den Bulte, Kevin G. Volpp and Angela L. Duckworth
Many Americans fail to get life-saving vaccines each year, and the availability of a vaccine for COVID-19 makes the challenge of encouraging vaccination more urgent than ever. We present a large field experiment (N = 47,306) testing 19 nudges delivered to patients via...
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Keywords:
Vaccination;
COVID-19;
Nudge;
Influenza;
Field Experiment;
Health;
Communication Strategy;
Behavior
- May 2021
- Article
Is No News (Perceived as) Bad News? An Experimental Investigation of Information Disclosure
By: Ginger Zhe Jin, Michael Luca and Daniel Martin
This paper uses laboratory experiments to directly test a central prediction of disclosure theory: that strategic forces can lead those who possess private information to voluntarily provide it. In a simple sender-receiver game, we find that senders disclose favorable...
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- 2021
- Article
Large-Scale Field Experiment Shows Null Effects of Team Demographic Diversity on Outsiders' Willingness to Support the Team
By: Edward H. Chang, Erika L. Kirgios and Rosanna K. Smith
Demographic diversity in the United States is rising, and increasingly, work is conducted in teams. These co-occurring phenomena suggest that it might be increasingly common for work to be conducted by demographically diverse teams. But to date, in spite of copious...
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- May–June 2021
- Article
Why Start-ups Fail
If you’re launching a business, the odds are against you: Two-thirds of start-ups never show a positive return. Unnerved by that statistic, a professor of entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School set out to discover why. Based on interviews and surveys with hundreds...
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