Negotiation, Organizations & Markets

Negotiation, Organizations & Markets

Overview Faculty Curriculum Seminars & Conferences Awards & Honors Doctoral Students
    • January 2026
    • Case

    Negotiating for Inclusion (A)

    By: Alex Chan, Christine Exley and Rebecca Wilcox

    • January 2026
    • Case

    Negotiating for Inclusion (A)

    By: Alex Chan, Christine Exley and Rebecca Wilcox

    • January 22, 2026
    • Article

    How Malicious AI Swarms Can Threaten Democracy: The Fusion of Agentic AI and LLMs Marks a New Frontier in Information Warfare

    By: Daniel Thilo Schroeder, Meeyoung Cha, Andrea Baronchelli, Nick Bostrom, Nicholas A. Christakis, David Garcia, Amit Goldenberg, Yara Kyrychenko, Kevin Leyton-Brown, Nina Lutz, Gary Marcus, Filippo Menczer, Gordon Pennycook, David G. Rand, Maria Ressa, Frank Schweitzer, Dawn Song, Christopher Summerfield, Audrey Tang, Jay J. Van Bavel, Sander van der Linden and Jonas R. Kunst

    Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) offer the prospect of manipulating beliefs and behaviors on a population-wide level. Large language models (LLMs) and autonomous agents let influence campaigns reach unprecedented scale and precision. Generative tools can expand propaganda output without sacrificing credibility and inexpensively create falsehoods that are rated as more human-like than those written by humans. Techniques meant to refine AI reasoning, such as chain-of-thought prompting, can be used to generate more convincing falsehoods. Enabled by these capabilities, a disruptive threat is emerging: swarms of collaborative, malicious AI agents. Fusing LLM reasoning with multiagent architectures, these systems are capable of coordinating autonomously, infiltrating communities, and fabricating consensus efficiently. By adaptively mimicking human social dynamics, they threaten democracy. Because the resulting harms stem from design, commercial incentives, and governance, we prioritize interventions at multiple leverage points, focusing on pragmatic mechanisms over voluntary compliance.

    • January 22, 2026
    • Article

    How Malicious AI Swarms Can Threaten Democracy: The Fusion of Agentic AI and LLMs Marks a New Frontier in Information Warfare

    By: Daniel Thilo Schroeder, Meeyoung Cha, Andrea Baronchelli, Nick Bostrom, Nicholas A. Christakis, David Garcia, Amit Goldenberg, Yara Kyrychenko, Kevin Leyton-Brown, Nina Lutz, Gary Marcus, Filippo Menczer, Gordon Pennycook, David G. Rand, Maria Ressa, Frank Schweitzer, Dawn Song, Christopher Summerfield, Audrey Tang, Jay J. Van Bavel, Sander van der Linden and Jonas R. Kunst

    Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) offer the prospect of manipulating beliefs and behaviors on a population-wide level. Large language models (LLMs) and autonomous agents let influence campaigns reach unprecedented scale and precision. Generative tools can expand propaganda output without sacrificing credibility and inexpensively create...

    • 2026
    • Working Paper

    Hitting Rock Bottom: Economic Hardship and Cheating

    By: Livia Alfonsi, Michal Bauer, Julie Chytilová and Edward Miguel

    This paper investigates whether economic hardship undermines preferences for honesty. We use controlled, high-stake measures of cheating for private benefit in a large sample of 5,664 Kenyans, exploiting three complementary sources of variation: experimentally manipulated monetary incentives to cheat, a randomized increase in the salience of one’s own financial situation, and the Covid-19 income shock (exploiting randomized survey timing, with respondents interviewed before vs. during the crisis). We find that cheating behavior is highly responsive to financial incentives in the experiment. Covid-19 economic hardship—marked by a 51% drop in monthly earnings—leads to a sharp increase in the prevalence of cheating, and the effect increases gradually with prolonged hardship. The effects are largest among the most economically impacted and are amplified when the salience of one’s own financial situation is experimentally increased. The results demonstrate that while most individuals exhibit a strong preference against cheating under normal conditions (in line with the existing body of work), economic forces can account for a substantial share of variation in dishonesty: the estimated cheating rate rises from 29% under low stakes in normal times to 86% under high stakes during the crisis.

    • 2026
    • Working Paper

    Hitting Rock Bottom: Economic Hardship and Cheating

    By: Livia Alfonsi, Michal Bauer, Julie Chytilová and Edward Miguel

    This paper investigates whether economic hardship undermines preferences for honesty. We use controlled, high-stake measures of cheating for private benefit in a large sample of 5,664 Kenyans, exploiting three complementary sources of variation: experimentally manipulated monetary incentives to cheat, a randomized increase in the salience of one’s...

About the Unit

The NOM Unit seeks to understand and improve the design and management of systems in which people make decisions: that is, design and management of negotiations, organizations, and markets. In addition, members of the group share an abiding interest in the micro foundations of these phenomena.

Our work is grounded in the power of strategic interaction to encourage individuals and organizations to create and sustain value (in negotiations, in organizations, and in markets). We explore these interactions through diverse approaches: Although many of us have training in economics, we also have members with backgrounds in social psychology, sociology, and law.

NOM seeks to apply rigorous scientific methods to real-world problems -- producing research and pedagogy that is compelling to both the academy and practitioners.

Recent Publications

Negotiating for Inclusion (C)

By: Alex Chan, Christine Exley and Rebecca Wilcox
  • January 2026 |
  • Supplement |
  • Faculty Research
Related

Negotiating for Inclusion (B)

By: Alex Chan, Christine Exley and Rebecca Wilcox
  • January 2026 |
  • Supplement |
  • Faculty Research
Related

Negotiating for Inclusion (A)

By: Alex Chan, Christine Exley and Rebecca Wilcox
  • January 2026 |
  • Case |
  • Faculty Research
Related

How Malicious AI Swarms Can Threaten Democracy: The Fusion of Agentic AI and LLMs Marks a New Frontier in Information Warfare

By: Daniel Thilo Schroeder, Meeyoung Cha, Andrea Baronchelli, Nick Bostrom, Nicholas A. Christakis, David Garcia, Amit Goldenberg, Yara Kyrychenko, Kevin Leyton-Brown, Nina Lutz, Gary Marcus, Filippo Menczer, Gordon Pennycook, David G. Rand, Maria Ressa, Frank Schweitzer, Dawn Song, Christopher Summerfield, Audrey Tang, Jay J. Van Bavel, Sander van der Linden and Jonas R. Kunst
  • January 22, 2026 |
  • Article |
  • Science
Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) offer the prospect of manipulating beliefs and behaviors on a population-wide level. Large language models (LLMs) and autonomous agents let influence campaigns reach unprecedented scale and precision. Generative tools can expand propaganda output without sacrificing credibility and inexpensively create falsehoods that are rated as more human-like than those written by humans. Techniques meant to refine AI reasoning, such as chain-of-thought prompting, can be used to generate more convincing falsehoods. Enabled by these capabilities, a disruptive threat is emerging: swarms of collaborative, malicious AI agents. Fusing LLM reasoning with multiagent architectures, these systems are capable of coordinating autonomously, infiltrating communities, and fabricating consensus efficiently. By adaptively mimicking human social dynamics, they threaten democracy. Because the resulting harms stem from design, commercial incentives, and governance, we prioritize interventions at multiple leverage points, focusing on pragmatic mechanisms over voluntary compliance.
Keywords: AI and Machine Learning; Power and Influence; Behavior; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms
Related

Hitting Rock Bottom: Economic Hardship and Cheating

By: Livia Alfonsi, Michal Bauer, Julie Chytilová and Edward Miguel
  • 2026 |
  • Working Paper |
  • Faculty Research
This paper investigates whether economic hardship undermines preferences for honesty. We use controlled, high-stake measures of cheating for private benefit in a large sample of 5,664 Kenyans, exploiting three complementary sources of variation: experimentally manipulated monetary incentives to cheat, a randomized increase in the salience of one’s own financial situation, and the Covid-19 income shock (exploiting randomized survey timing, with respondents interviewed before vs. during the crisis). We find that cheating behavior is highly responsive to financial incentives in the experiment. Covid-19 economic hardship—marked by a 51% drop in monthly earnings—leads to a sharp increase in the prevalence of cheating, and the effect increases gradually with prolonged hardship. The effects are largest among the most economically impacted and are amplified when the salience of one’s own financial situation is experimentally increased. The results demonstrate that while most individuals exhibit a strong preference against cheating under normal conditions (in line with the existing body of work), economic forces can account for a substantial share of variation in dishonesty: the estimated cheating rate rises from 29% under low stakes in normal times to 86% under high stakes during the crisis.
Keywords: Economic Hardship; Honesty; Cheating Behavior; Field Experiment; Trust; Motivation and Incentives; Kenya
Related

Diversity Incentives Can Increase Women’s Aspirations to Lead

By: Erika L. Kirgios and Edward H. Chang
  • December 2025 |
  • Article |
  • Academy of Management Journal
To boost diversity, organizations are increasingly using “diversity incentives,” or payouts for managers or executives dependent on progress toward a specific diversity goal. Diversity incentives can affect both actors—managers incentivized to meet the goal—and targets—marginalized group members who are the focus of the incentivized goal. Whereas the effects of incentives on actors are well documented, it is unclear how targets will be affected. We examine how gender diversity incentives affect women’s aspirations to lead. On one hand, diversity incentives may generate identity threat and concerns about backlash among women; on the other, they may be viewed as costly signals of organizational support for women’s leadership aspirations. A preregistered field experiment (n = 2,035) shows that communicating the existence of organizational diversity incentives increases women’s aspirations to lead by 11.3% relative to sharing a goal-free diversity statement and by 11.7% relative to communicating diversity goals alone. We replicate these findings across three preregistered experiments (total n = 2,495) and provide evidence that diversity incentives increase women’s expectations of receiving sponsorship from their managers, thereby increasing their willingness to state leadership aspirations. Our findings contribute to our understanding of the drivers of female leadership aspirations.
Keywords: Diversity; Motivation and Incentives; Goals and Objectives; Gender; Identity; Leadership Development
Related

The Universal Pursuit of Safety and the Demand for (Lethal, Non-Lethal or No) Guns

By: Marcella Alsan, Joshua Schwartzstein and Stefanie Stantcheva
  • 2025 |
  • Working Paper |
  • Faculty Research
Personal lethal firearm ownership has for several decades been a hot button political issue in the United States. This article aims to explore the motivations and beliefs underlying sharply different views on the subject through an original large-scale survey of lethal firearm owners (LFAO) and non-owners and experimental information interventions. We start by documenting several facts: First, LFAO and nonowners appear to be driven by a common objective–to be safe. Both groups list protection of family or self as the top rationale for owning or potentially acquiring a lethal firearm (LFA). Second, among non-owners, there are those who are interested in purchasing a lethal firearm (NO-I) and those who are not (NO-U). NO-I feel the least safe in their daily lives. Third, there are differences in emotional responses to possession of an LFA. LFAO report feeling unsafe and less confident if they did not own the product whereas NO-U report similar feelings if they did own it. Fourth, LFAO are much less concerned about the possibility of personal and social costs associated with lethal firearm possession, a finding heightened across partisan lines. Taken together, these facts motivate three experimental treatments that randomly provide respondents with information on either (1) the personal legal and medical risks of ownership or (2) a non-lethal firearm (NLFA), provided with or without a conservative pundit’s endorsement. The first treatment increases concerns about harms associated with lethal firearm ownership among all respondents, but these results are generally short-lived and do not affect policy views. The second treatment, however, increases respondents’ willingness to pay for a NLFA and their self-reported preference for firearms that incapacitate but do not kill. Moreover, these treatment effects are more persistent than those of the cost treatment, especially when coupled with an endorsement, and affect the support of policies aimed at encouraging NLFAs. Importantly, we do not find that exposure to information on NLFAs makes current owners want to give up their (lethal) guns. We interpret these findings through an organizing framework in which every household has a demand for safety but differs in how they use firearms or other tools to produce it, due to different perceptions of the safety possibilities frontier (SPF, views about the least harmful ways to achieve protection benefits) or different preferences and incentives influencing the tradeoff over protective benefits vs. harms. Our results suggest that a substantial share of LFAO perceive the SPF differently than non-owners, and that there is a potential demand for less-lethal tools to be and feel safe.
Keywords: Social Issues; Government and Politics; Motivation and Incentives; Policy; Safety
Related

Funeral Expense Reimbursement as a Strategy to Enhance Organ Donation and Transplantation Access

By: Alex Chan and Kurt Sweat
  • October 29, 2025 |
  • Article |
  • npj Health Systems
We propose amending the National Organ Transplant Act to permit reimbursement of funeral expenses for deceased organ donors, analogous to current practices for whole-body donors. This ethically consistent policy could increase organ donation rates by 9–35%, saving 105,000–419,000 life-years and generating $200–800 million annually in Medicare savings—without commodifying human organs, compromising altruism, or undermining established ethical standards governing organ donation.
Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Policy; Ethics; Government Legislation
Related
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Seminars & Conferences

  • 11 Feb 2026

Aislinn Bohren, University of Pennsylvania

Negotiation, Organizations & Markets (NOM) Seminar
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Contact Information

Negotiation, Organizations & Markets Unit
Harvard Business School
Baker Library | Bloomberg Center
Soldiers Field
Boston, MA 02163
NOM@hbs.edu