Publications

The debate about the best way to lead has been raging for years: Should you empower your people and get out of their way, or take charge and push them to do great work? The answer, say the authors, is to do both. Their research shows…

To what extent can the values of nations be reshaped by heroes? We measure how an exogenous network of heroic individuals helped undermine democratic values and diffused support for…

How do artists respond to status-shifting awards? In examining this question, we focus on the consequences of winning a major Grammy, a high-profile honor in the music recording industry. Using a neural learning approach,…

The use of AI-based technologies in logistics has the potential to reduce operating costs, increase efficiency and service levels, and improve quality of life for some. Yet many hurdles to adopting such technologies, both technical and otherwise…

A large majority of Americans — 81 percent — feel a lack of control over their personal data and indicate they are concerned that the risks posed by corporate data collection outweigh any benefits. Governments and regulators are responding to…

The 2022 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel was awarded to Ben S. Bernanke, Douglas W. Diamond, and Philip H. Dybvig “for research on banks and financial crises”. This article surveys the contributions of the…

This report describes insights gleaned from the Data Fellows collaboration among PayPal, Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, the Golub Capital Social Impact Lab at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, and…

How do the transaction costs of office holding affect congressional careers? These costs may influence the kinds of people who select into public office and therefore the representativeness of democratic institutions. Gaining causal leverage on…

Most companies have digital platforms that support specific functions, such as supply chain management, product design, or operations, and they tightly regulate who may join the platform. The Chinese appliance manufacturer Haier has taken a…

web3 has created a new laboratory for democratic governance that interweaves civic and corporate governance traditions in a way previously impossible. Public and private incentives are entwined. Projects are open source and for-profit. Public…

Entrepreneurial support organizations called pacers are helping businesses in emerging markets achieve their goals by providing services for them in the long run. A blueprint for shifting to a pacer model shows how organizations can support…

As online platforms have become dominant, many have leveraged their power by raising fees and changing rules. In the short run, this hurts the producers they work with — software developers, small retailers, game designers, content creators. In…

Digital technologies are transforming the economy and society. The dimensionality and scope of the impacts are bewildering and too numerous to cover in a single essay. But of all the concerns around digital technology (and there are many),…

In 1950, Alan Turing proposed a test of whether a machine was intelligent: could a machine imitate a human so well that its answers to questions were indistinguishable from a human’s? Ever since, creating intelligence that matches human…

Despite the complexity of memory and its diverse manifestations in our daily lives, certain mnemonic effects appear to hold across a wide range of conditions. We identify the effects of recency, contiguity, similarity, primacy, and repetition as…

As the world’s overall population skews older, the workforce is aging as well, with more older adults working well beyond what used to be considered the typical retirement age. Older adults are the fastest-growing segment of the American…

DAOs can reshape society by bringing democratic control to important economic and social activities previously governed through more hierarchical means. But as many people have pointed out, DAOs have not yet achieved their goal of true…

Traditional odd lot trades (i.e., trades involving fewer than 100 shares) now comprise over half of all equity trades on U.S. exchanges. Under Regulation National Market System, however, these trades are excluded from a market center’s trade…

It has become increasingly common for data to be collected adaptively, for example using contextual bandits. Historical data of this type can be used to evaluate other treatment assignment policies to guide future innovation or experiments.…

Semantic satiation, a term coined by Leon Jakobovits in 1962, means that incessant repetition of a word leads to a loss of meaning for the listener. The language of management has several such words. One prime example is “accountability.” The…