Publications from the Behavioral Lab

Motivated by the Financial Accounting Standards Board’s project on the disaggregation of income statement expenses, we study a Korean rule change that allowed firms to withhold a previously mandated disaggregation of cost of sales (CoS). We find…

In this AMD Guidepost essay, we document outstanding questions regarding how organizations can capture value from AI tools and outline pathways for future exploratory management and organizational research on AI. Specifically, we emphasize the…

Individuals often engage in brokering behaviors intended to influence other people’s interactions and relationships. An open research question in the nascent literature on brokering as a social process concerns its situational antecedents. We…

Purchase decisions typically involve tradeoffs between attributes associated with desirability (e.g., quality) and feasibility (e.g., price). In this paper we examine how the decision context impacts consumers’ preference between a high-…

We examine whether financial reporting quality affects worker wages using employer-employee matched data in the U.S. We find that low financial reporting quality is associated with a compensating wage differential — i.e., a risk premium — even…

Leaders may be seen by their followers as miscalibrating the quantity of their communication — sharing too much or too little. We propose that leaders are more likely to be seen as under-communicating than over-communicating, even though under-…

Using detailed search data from half a million anonymous job seekers, we study the information content of earnings announcements for job seekers. In the spirit of Beaver (1968), we find evidence that job seekers initiate job-search activity in…

Discourse about people seeking refuge from conflict varies considerably. To understand what components of this discourse reach refugees the most, we examined refugees’ perceptions of how their host communities perceive them (i.e., intergroup…

Search engines and e-commerce platforms have substantial difficulty exposing new products to their users on account of an information problem: new products typically do not have enough sales or other user engagement that enables platforms to…

We investigated the effects of Facebook’s and Instagram’s feed algorithms during the 2020 US election. We assigned a sample of consenting users to reverse-chronologically-ordered feeds instead of the default algorithms. Moving users out of…

What environmental factors are associated with individual differences in political ideology, and do such associations change over time? We examine whether reductions in pathogen prevalence in U.S. states over the past 60 years are associated with…

College is regarded as the great equalizer. People with four-year degrees expect to reap the rewards of their education. This paper examines the pivotal transition from college to the labor market. How do candidates fare when they reveal to…

We examine how information about the diversity of a potential employer’s workforce affects individuals’ job-seeking behavior. We embed a field experiment in job recommendation emails from a leading career advice agency in the U.S. The…

How do organizations reconcile the cross-pressures of conformity and differentiation? Existing research predominantly conceptualizes identity as something an organization has by virtue of the products or services it offers. Drawing on…

People often struggle to do what they ideally want because of a conflict between their actual and ideal preferences. ​​​By focusing on maximizing engagement, recommendation algorithms appear to be exacerbating this struggle. However, this need…

Organizational culture is widely seen as an important element in a firm’s success or failure. While there is almost universal agreement that leaders define and shape organizational culture, there is little research exploring how and why they do…

Across the United States, police chiefs, city officials, and community leaders alike have highlighted the need to de-escalate police encounters with the public. This concern about escalation extends from encounters involving use of force to…

Fear can undermine cooperation. It may discourage individuals from collaborating with others because of concerns about potential exploitation; prompt them to engage in defensive aggression by launching a preemptive strike; and propel power-…

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all domains of human life, including the economic and social fabric of societies. One of the central strategies for managing public health throughout the pandemic has been through persuasive messaging and…

This research examines how the effort that consumers exert to earn money affects their risk tolerance. We theorize and find that working harder — that is, more effortful earning — increases perceived ownership and valuation of earnings,…

The way we evaluate an experience can be influenced by contextual factors that are unrelated to the experience at hand. A prominent factor that has been shown to infuse into the evaluation processes is incidental affect. Prior research has…

Evolutionary science has led to many practical applications of genetic evolution but few practical uses of cultural evolution. This is because the entire study of evolution was gene centric for most of the 20th century, relegating the study and…