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HBS HomeHBS IndexContact Us A New Vision An Essay by Professors Michel Anteby and Rakesh Khurana Introduction The Hawthorne Plant NextEmployee...
Skip to Main Content Cold Call A podcast featuring faculty discussing cases they've written and the lessons they impart. Subscribe on iTunes 29 Sep...
- 2021
- Article
Leisure Beliefs and the Subjective Well-being of Nations
By: A.V. Whillans and Lucia Macchia
Here, we construct a data set of 79 countries (N = 220,000) and explore whether differences in the prioritization of time (leisure) vs. money (work) explain cross-country differences in happiness. Consistent with our predictions, countries whose citizens value leisure...
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Keywords:
Leisure;
Work;
Subjective Well-being;
Public Policy;
Employment;
Happiness;
Governance;
Policy
- 2021
- Working Paper
The Health Costs of Cost-Sharing
By: Amitabh Chandra, Evan Flack and Ziad Obermeyer
We use the design of Medicare’s prescription drug benefit program to demonstrate three facts about the health consequences of cost-sharing. First, we show that an as-if-random increase of 33.6% in out-of-pocket price (11.0 percentage points (p.p.) change in...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Private and Social Returns to R&D: Drug Development and Demographics
By: Efraim Benmelech, Janice Eberly, Dimitris Papanikolaou and Joshua Krieger
Investment in intangible capital—in particular, research and development—increased dramatically since the 1990s. However, output and measured productivity growth remains sluggish in recent years. One potential reason is that a significant share of the increase in...
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- Winter 2021
- Editorial
The Start of Time Smart Leadership
By: Ashley Whillans
The author discusses the concept of “time poverty,” which she defines as “having too many things to do and not enough time to do them.” It is a problem because it undermines happiness and productivity and increases stress. For instance, in 2012, 50 percent of working...
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- December 2020 (Revised February 2021)
- Supplement
The Tulsa Massacre and the Call for Reparations
By: Mihir A. Desai and Suzanne Antoniou
How should historic social injustices be addressed? Survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Massacre and their descendants, including Representative Regina Goodwin of Tulsa, believe they should be addressed through reparations and have consequently continued to push the government...
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Keywords:
Cost vs Benefits;
Decision Choices and Conditions;
Decisions;
Judgments;
Race;
Fairness;
Moral Sensibility;
Values and Beliefs;
Corporate Accountability;
Corporate Governance;
Policy;
Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms;
Government Legislation;
Government and Politics;
Government Administration;
Lawsuits and Litigation;
Legal Liability;
Leading Change;
Mission and Purpose;
Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact;
Conflict and Resolution;
Conflict Management;
Loss;
Motivation and Incentives;
Perspective;
Prejudice and Bias;
Civil Society or Community;
Social Issues;
Welfare;
Tulsa;
Oklahoma;
United States
- December 2020 (Revised February 2021)
- Teaching Note
The Tulsa Massacre and the Call for Reparations
By: Mihir A. Desai and Suzanne Antoniou
How should historic social injustices be addressed? Survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Massacre and their descendants, including Representative Regina Goodwin of Tulsa, believe they should be addressed through reparations and have consequently continued to push the government...
View Details
Keywords:
Cost vs Benefits;
Decision Choices and Conditions;
Decisions;
Judgments;
Race;
Fairness;
Moral Sensibility;
Values and Beliefs;
Corporate Accountability;
Corporate Governance;
Policy;
Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms;
Government Legislation;
Government and Politics;
Government Administration;
Lawsuits and Litigation;
Legal Liability;
Leading Change;
Mission and Purpose;
Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact;
Conflict and Resolution;
Conflict Management;
Loss;
Motivation and Incentives;
Perspective;
Prejudice and Bias;
Civil Society or Community;
Social Issues;
Welfare;
Tulsa;
Oklahoma;
United States
- December 2020
- Article
Can't Buy Me Love (or Friendship): Social Consequences of Financially Contingent Self-Worth
By: D. Ward, L.E. Park, K. Naragon-Gainey, H. Jung and A.V. Whillans
Although people may think that money improves one’s relationships, research suggests otherwise. Focusing on money is associated with spending less time maintaining relationships (Whillans & Dunn, 2018) and less desire to rely on others for help (Vohs, Mead, & Goode,...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Dog Eat Dog: Measuring Network Effects Using a Digital Platform Merger
By: Chiara Farronato, Jessica Fong and Andrey Fradkin
Digital platforms are increasingly the subject of regulatory scrutiny. In comparison to multiple competitors, a single platform may increase consumer welfare if network effects are large or may decrease welfare due to higher prices or reduction in platform variety. We...
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- November 19, 2020
- Article
How to Build a Life: Sedentary Pandemic Life Is Bad for Our Happiness
By: Arthur C. Brooks
The times when we most want comfort and rest may paradoxically be the times we most need to move, for the sake of our well-being.
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- Article
Returnable Reciprocity: Returnable Gifts Are More Effective than Unreturnable Gifts at Promoting Virtuous Behaviors
By: J.J. Zlatev and Rogers, T.
Increasing virtuous behaviors, such as initiating healthy habits, is an important goal for policymakers and social scientists. To promote compliance with requests to perform virtuous behaviors, we study “returnable reciprocity.” Whereas traditional reciprocity involves...
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Keywords:
Nudges;
Reciprocity;
Want-should Conflicts;
Wellness;
Health;
Behavior;
Change;
Well-being
- 2020
- Working Paper
Financing the Litigation Arms Race
By: Samuel Antill and Steven R. Grenadier
Using a continuous-time model of litigation, we show that the increasingly popular practice of third-party litigation financing has ambiguous welfare implications. A defendant and a plaintiff bargain over a settlement payment. The defendant takes costly actions to...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Designing, Not Checking, for Policy Robustness: An Example with Optimal Taxation
By: Benjami Lockwood, Afras Y. Sial and Matthew C. Weinzierl
Economists typically check the robustness of their results by comparing them across plausible ranges of parameter values and model structures. A preferable approach to robustness—for the purposes of policymaking and evaluation—is to design policy that takes these...
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- October 2020 (Revised December 2020)
- Case
The What Works Centre: Using Behavioral Science to Improve Social Worker Well-being (A)
By: Ashley V. Whillans and Shibeal O'Flaherty
This case describes the experiences of Michael Sanders—the Chief Executive of the What Works Center for Children’s Social Care—as he led the design and implementation of a program of research aimed at improving the social care system in the United Kingdom (UK) at the...
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- October 2020
- Article
Why Time Poverty Matters for Individuals, Organisations, and Nations
By: Ashley V. Whillans, Laura Giurge and Colin West
Over the last two decades, global wealth has risen. Yet, material affluence has not translated into time affluence. Instead, most people today report feeling persistently “time poor”—like they have too many things to do and not enough time to do them. This is critical...
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- August 2020
- Case
PayPal: The Next Chapter
By: Michael Porter, Mark Kramer and Annelena Lobb
Can a social purpose and stakeholder capitalism confer a powerful competitive advantage in the age of COVID-19? For PayPal, the answer is yes. After spinning off from eBay in a 2015 IPO, the company declared its purpose as "democratizing financial services" by ensuring...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Conflicting Interests and the Effect of Fiduciary Duty—Evidence from Variable Annuities
By: Mark Egan, Shan Ge and Johnny Tang
We examine the drivers of variable annuity sales and the impact of a proposed regulatory change. Variable annuities are popular retirement products with over $2 trillion in assets in the United States. Insurers typically pay brokers a commission for selling variable...
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- August 6, 2020
- Article
It's Okay to Say 'No' to Social Events During COVID
By: Ashley V. Whillans, Annie Wilson and Tobias Schlager
As COVID turns even the most benign of social activities into risky propositions, many of us find ourselves in the uncomfortable position of rejecting our friends’ and family’s invitations to non-socially-distant activities. It can be particularly challenging to...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
The Allocation of Socially Responsible Capital
By: Daniel Green and Benjamin N. Roth
A rapidly increasing share of asset allocation decisions incorporate social values in addition to financial considerations. We argue that the most common strategies for socially motivated investing, which only consider the social value of the firms in an investors'...
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- August 2020
- Article
Lone Wolves in Competitive Equilibria
By: Ravi Jagadeesan, Scott Duke Kominers and Ross Rheingans-Yoo
This paper develops a class of equilibrium-independent predictions of competitive equilibrium with indivisibilities. Specifically, we prove an analogue of the “Lone Wolf Theorem” of classical matching theory, showing that when utility is perfectly transferable, any...
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- August 2020
- Article
Volunteering and Subsequent Health and Well-Being in Older Adults: An Outcome-Wide Longitudinal Approach
By: Eric Kim, A.V. Whillans, Matt Lee, Ying Chen and Tyler VanderWeele
Background: Growing evidence documents strong associations between volunteering and favorable health and well-being outcomes. However, epidemiological studies have not evaluated whether changes in volunteering are associated with subsequent health and well-being...
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