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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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- 2023
- Working Paper
Behavioral Transmission: Evidence from a Public Health Campaign in Bangladesh
By: Reshmaan Hussam and Dayea Oh
We examine how behavior change transmits across contexts in the setting of hand hygiene in
rural Bangladesh. We randomize an edutainment intervention across classrooms to trace schoolto-home transmission in handwashing behavior and randomize the proportion of students...
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- 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...
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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
Joy and Rigor in Behavioral Science
In the past decade, behavioral science has seen the introduction of beneficial reforms to reduce false positive results. Serving as the motivational backdrop for the present research, we wondered whether these reforms might have unintended negative consequences on...
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- 2022
- Article
Gender Inequality in Research Productivity During the COVID-19 Pandemic
By: Ruomeng Cui, Hao Ding and Feng Zhu
We study the disproportionate impact of the lockdown as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak on female and male academics' research productivity in social science. The lockdown has caused substantial disruptions to academic activities, requiring people to work from home....
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Look the Part? The Role of Profile Pictures in Online Labor Markets
By: Isamar Troncoso and Lan Luo
Profile pictures are a key component of many freelancing platforms, a design choice that can impact hiring and matching outcomes. In this paper, we examine how appearance-based perceptions of a freelancer's fit for the job (i.e., whether a freelancer "looks the part"...
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- January 23, 2020
- Article
Sanctions and the End of Trans-Atlanticism: Iran, Russia, and the Unintended Division of the West
By: Rawi Abdelal and Aurélie Bros
Sanctions have become the dominant tool of statecraft in the United States and other Western states, especially the European Union, since the end of the Cold War. But the systematic use of this instrument may produce unintended and somewhat paradoxical geopolitical...
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Keywords:
Geopolitics;
Economic Sanctions;
International Relations;
United States;
Russia;
Iran;
Europe
- October 14, 2019
- Article
The Truth About Open Offices: There Are Reasons Why They Don't Produce the Desired Interactions
By: Ethan Bernstein and Ben Waber
It’s never been easier for workers to collaborate—or so it seems. Open, flexible, activity-based spaces are displacing cubicles, making people more visible. Messaging is displacing phone calls, making people more accessible. Enterprise social media such as Slack and...
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- September 2019
- Article
The Interpersonal Costs of Dishonesty: How Dishonest Behavior Reduces Individuals' Ability to Read Others' Emotions
By: J.J. Lee, H. Hardin, B. Parmar and F. Gino
In this research, we examine the unintended consequences of dishonest behavior for one’s interpersonal abilities and subsequent ethical behavior. Specifically, we unpack how dishonest conduct can reduce one’s generalized empathic accuracy—the ability to accurately read...
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- May 2019
- Article
The Role of Gatekeepers in Capital Markets
By: Suraj Srinivasan and Sugata Roychowdhury
Gatekeepers in financial markets have the power to provide the institutional stability, fortitude and direction necessary for the development and the smooth functioning of capital markets. At the same time, they are often motivated by their own private incentives....
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- 2022
- Working Paper
The Lifesaving Benefits of Convenient Infrastructure: Quantifying the Mortality Impact of Abandoning Shallow Tubewells Contaminated by Arsenic in Bangladesh
By: Nina Buchmann, Erica Field, Rachel Glennerster and Reshmaan Hussam
We document the consequences of a public health campaign which led to the sudden abandonment of local water infrastructure by one-fifth of Bangladesh’s population. Households who experienced quasi-randomly distributed arsenic contamination, and thus were likely to...
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- December 2018
- Article
Reserve Design: Unintended Consequences and the Demise of Boston's Walk Zones
By: Umut Dur, Scott Duke Kominers, Parag A. Pathak and Tayfun Sönmez
Admissions policies often use reserves to grant certain applicants higher priority for some (but not all) available seats. Boston’s school choice system, for example, reserved half of each school’s seats for local neighborhood applicants while leaving the other half...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Incentive Power and Knowledge Sharing Among Employees: Evidence from the Field
By: Wei Cai, Susanna Gallani and Jee-Eun Shin
There is consensus, both in the literature and in practice, about knowledge sharing within organizations being a key determinant of success. However, organizations struggle to sustain employees’ engagement in knowledge sharing. One challenge lies in the fact that,...
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Keywords:
Organizational Knowledge Sharing;
Employee Driven Innovation;
Innovation Appropriability;
Contract Design;
High-powered Incentives;
Low-powered Incentives;
Incentives;
Pay-for-Performance;
Rank-and-file;
Employees;
Knowledge Sharing;
Innovation and Invention;
Motivation and Incentives;
Creativity;
Performance
- Article
The Unintended Consequences of the Zero Lower Bound Policy
By: Marco Di Maggio and Marcin Kacperczyk
We study the impact of the zero lower bound interest rate policy on the industrial organization of the U.S. money fund industry. We find that in response to policies that maintain low interest rates, money funds change their product offerings by investing in riskier...
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- December 2014
- Article
The Contaminating Effects of Building Instrumental Ties: How Networking Can Make Us Feel Dirty
By: Tiziana Casciaro, Francesca Gino and Maryam Kouchaki
To create social ties to support their professional or personal goals, people actively engage in instrumental networking. Drawing from moral psychology research, we posit that this intentional behavior has unintended consequences for an individual's morality. Unlike...
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Keywords:
Networking;
Morality;
Dirtiness;
Power;
Networks;
Moral Sensibility;
Identity;
Power and Influence
- 2014
- Working Paper
The Contaminating Effects of Building Instrumental Ties: How Networking Can Make Us Feel Dirty
By: Tiziana Casciaro, Francesca Gino and Maryam Kouchaki
To create social ties to support their professional or personal goals, people actively engage in instrumental networking. Drawing from moral psychology research, we posit that this intentional behavior has unintended consequences for an individual's morality. Unlike...
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- 2014
- Working Paper
Digital Discrimination: The Case of Airbnb.com
By: Benjamin Edelman and Michael Luca
Online marketplaces often contain information not only about products, but also about the people selling the products. In an effort to facilitate trust, many platforms encourage sellers to provide personal profiles and even to post pictures of themselves. However,...
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- December 2011
- Article
Economics Education and Greed
By: Long Wang, Deepak Malhotra and J. Keith Murnighan
The recent financial crisis, and repeated corporate scandals, raise serious questions about whether a business school education contributes to what some have described as a culture of greed. The dominance of economic-related courses in MBA curricula led us to assess...
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- June 2011
- Article
Watch What I Do, Not What I Say: The Unintended Consequences of the Homeland Investment Act
By: Dhammika Dharmapala, C. Fritz Foley and Kristin J. Forbes
This paper analyzes the impact of the Homeland Investment Act of 2004, which provided a one-time tax holiday for the repatriation of foreign earnings and thereby reduced the cost to U.S. multinationals of accessing a source of internal capital. Lawmakers and lobbyists...
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