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- 2022
- Working Paper
Confidence, Self-Selection and Bias in the Aggregate
By: Benjamin Enke, Thomas Graeber and Ryan Oprea
The influence of behavioral biases on aggregate outcomes like prices and allocations depends in part on self-selection: whether rational people opt more strongly into aggregate interactions than biased individuals. We conduct a series of betting market, auction and...
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- June 2022
- Article
The Use and Misuse of Patent Data: Issues for Finance and Beyond
By: Josh Lerner and Amit Seru
Patents and citations are powerful tools for understanding innovation increasingly used in financial economics (and management research more broadly). Biases may result, however, from the interactions between the truncation of patents and citations and the changing...
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- May 2022 (Revised August 2022)
- Case
LOOP: Driving Change in Auto Insurance Pricing
By: Elie Ofek and Alicia Dadlani
John Henry and Carey Anne Nadeau, co-founders and co-CEOs of LOOP, an insurtech startup based in Austin, Texas, were on a mission to modernize the archaic $250 billion automobile insurance market. They sought to create equitably priced insurance by eliminating pricing...
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- Article
How Much Should We Trust Staggered Difference-In-Differences Estimates?
By: Andrew C. Baker, David F. Larcker and Charles C.Y. Wang
Difference-in-differences analysis with staggered treatment timing is frequently used to assess the impact of policy changes on corporate outcomes in academic research. However, recent advances in econometric theory show that such designs are likely to be biased in the...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
What Drives Variation in Investor Portfolios? Evidence from Retirement Plans
We study empirical patterns in investment behavior using a comprehensive data set of defined contribution plans. Using plan-level portfolio allocation data for the near universe of 401(k) plans over the period 2009–2019, we document substantial differences in...
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- Article
Fighting Bias on the Front Lines
By: Alexandra C. Feldberg and Tami Kim
Most companies aim for exceptional customer service, but too few are attentive to the subtle discrimination by frontline employees that can alienate customers, lead to lawsuits, or even cause lasting brand damage by going viral.
This article presents research... View Details
This article presents research... View Details
- October 2021
- Article
Changing Gambling Behavior through Experiential Learning
By: Shawn A. Cole, Martin Abel and Bilal Zia
This paper tests experiential learning as a debiasing tool to reduce gambling in South Africa, through a randomized field experiment. The study implements a simple, interactive game that simulates the odds of winning the national lottery through dice rolling....
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- September 2021
- Article
Gender Stereotypes in Deliberation and Team Decisions
By: Katherine B. Coffman, Clio Bryant Flikkema and Olga Shurchkov
We explore how groups deliberate and decide on ideas in an experiment with communication. We find that gender biases play a significant role in which group members are chosen to answer on behalf of the group. Conditional on the quality of their ideas, individuals are...
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- Summer 2021
- Article
Predictable Country-level Bias in the Reporting of COVID-19 Deaths
We examine whether a country’s management of the COVID-19 pandemic relate to the downward biasing of the number of reported deaths from COVID-19. Using deviations from historical averages of the total number of monthly deaths within a country, we find that the...
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- June 2021
- Case
Bozoma Saint John: Leading with Authenticity and Urgency
By: Francesca Gino and Frances X. Frei
In this multimedia case, Bozoma Saint John recounts numerous defining moments from her childhood and work experiences. We learn what empowered and inspired her to be her authentic self, to be vulnerable and open to new experiences, to find commonality with others, to...
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- May 2021
- Article
Ideology and Composition Among an Online Crowd: Evidence From Wikipedians
By: Shane Greenstein, Grace Gu and Feng Zhu
Online communities bring together participants from diverse backgrounds and often face challenges in aggregating their opinions. We infer lessons from the experience of individual contributors to Wikipedia articles about U.S. politics. We identify two factors that...
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- Article
Missing the Near Miss: Recognizing Valuable Learning Opportunities in Radiation Oncology
By: Palak Kundu, Olivia Jung, Luca F. Valle, Amy C. Edmondson, Nzhde Agazaryan, John Hegde, Michael Steinberg and Ann Raldow
“Near miss” events are valuable low-cost learning opportunities in radiation oncology as they do not result in patient harm and are more pervasive than adverse events that do. Near misses vary depending on the presence of a latent error of behavior or process, and the...
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- 2022
- Working Paper
Gender Inequality and the Direction of Ideas: Evidence from #MeToo
By: Hong Luo and Laurina Zhang
Does the #MeToo movement affect the gender orientation of ideas and who develops which types of ideas? We examine these questions in the context of Hollywood. Since #MeToo affected the entire industry, we use variation in whether producers had past collaborations with...
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- 2021
- Article
Does Fair Ranking Improve Minority Outcomes? Understanding the Interplay of Human and Algorithmic Biases in Online Hiring
By: Tom Sühr, Sophie Hilgard and Himabindu Lakkaraju
Ranking algorithms are being widely employed in various online hiring platforms including LinkedIn, TaskRabbit, and Fiverr. Prior research has demonstrated that ranking algorithms employed by these platforms are prone to a variety of undesirable biases, leading to the...
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- 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...
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- March 2021
- Teaching Plan
The Black New Venture Competition
Black entrepreneurs encounter many unique obstacles when raising capital to start and grow a business, some stemming from deep systemic discrimination. During their second year at Harvard Business School (HBS), MBA students Kimberly Foster and Tyler Simpson decided to...
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Keywords:
Analytics;
Startup;
Start-up;
Startup Financing;
Financing;
Startups;
Start-ups;
Business And Community;
Business And Society;
Business Growth;
Discrimination;
Women;
Women-owned Businesses;
African Americans;
African-american Entrepreneurs;
African-american Investors;
African-American Protagonist;
African-American Women;
Early Stage Funding;
Early Stage;
Innovation ＆ Entrepreneurship;
Innovation Competitions;
Entrepreneurial Financing;
Business Plan;
Business Startups;
Diversity;
Gender;
Race;
Entrepreneurship;
Venture Capital;
Small Business;
Leadership;
Information Technology;
Competition
- March 2021 (Revised September 2021)
- Case
Applied: Using Behavioral Science to Debias Hiring
By: Ashley Whillans and Jeff Polzer
The UK government’s Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) needed to hire a new associate and were trying to increase the diversity of their job candidates. This decision was based on academic research showing that recruiters and managers often fell into common traps like...
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- March 2021
- Article
Bayesian Signatures of Confidence and Central Tendency in Perceptual Judgment
By: Yang Xiang, Thomas Graeber, Benjamin Enke and Samuel Gershman
This paper theoretically and empirically investigates the role of Bayesian noisy cognition in perceptual judgment, focusing on the central tendency effect: the well-known empirical regularity that perceptual judgments are biased towards the center of the...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
How Much Should We Trust Staggered Difference-In-Differences Estimates?
By: Andrew C. Baker, David F. Larcker and Charles C.Y. Wang
Difference-in-differences analysis with staggered treatment timing is frequently used to assess the impact of policy changes on corporate outcomes in academic research. However, recent advances in econometric theory show that such designs are likely to be biased in the...
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- 2021
- Chapter
Renewing the Relevance of IB: Can Some History Help?
By: Geoffrey Jones
International business (IB) as a discipline has given limited attention to contemporary grand challenges of inequality, global warming, aging populations, endemic health crises, and de-globalization, in all of which multinationals are either central to the problem or...
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