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PATH I: Building a Direct Sales Force
In late 2006, the PATH Safe Water Project received a $17 million grant from the global development unit of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Its purpose was to evaluate how market-based approaches could help accelerate the widespread…
PATH II: Demonstrating Products in Rural Areas
In late 2006, the PATH Safe Water Project received a $17 million grant from the global development unit of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Its purpose was to evaluate how market-based approaches could help accelerate the widespread…
Phoenix I: Generating Preliminary Sales
Phoenix Medical Systems was founded to manufacture an incubator designed specifically to address the needs of low-resource healthcare providers in India. Initially its founder, who also designed the device, tried selling his incubator through the…
PlayPumps International: Gaining User Buy-In
Trevor Field, a retired British businessman and outdoor advertising executive, was deeply moved when he observed women and girls in rural villages of South Africa shouldering the daily burden of collecting water. When he became aware of a…
Psychological Aspects of Social Communities
Social Network Analysis has often focused on the structure of the network without taking into account the characteristics of the individual involved. In this work, we aim at identifying how individual differences in psychological traits affect…
Ranking Friends
We investigate the scope for cooperation within a community engaged in repeated reciprocal interactions. Players seek the help of others and approach them sequentially according to some fixed order, that is, a ranking profile. We study the…
Reforming the Tax Preference for Employer Health Insurance
The tax preference for employer-sponsored health insurance contributes to the very high level of health spending in the United States. In this paper, we consider the consequences for spending of one approach to reducing this preference: giving…
Reshaping Institutions: Evidence on Aid Impacts Using a Pre-Analysis Plan
Despite their importance, there is limited evidence on how institutions can be strengthened. Evaluating the effects of specific reforms is complicated by the lack of exogenous variation in institutions, the difficulty of measuring institutional…
Restoring Trust in Organizations and Leaders: Enduring Questions, Emerging Answers
The sinking public trust in contemporary institutions is a multifaceted phenomenon with political, sociological, economic, and psychological antecedents and consequences. Restoring Trust in Organizations and Leaders is the first…
Risk Topography
The aim of this paper is to conceptualize and design a risk topography that outlines a data acquisition and dissemination process that informs policymakers, researchers and market participants about systemic risk. Our approach emphasizes that…
Sharing the Future: Financial Innovation and Innovators in Solving the Political Economy Challenges of Development
The failure to align the incentives of self-interested groups in favor of beneficial reform is often considered a major cause of persistent underdevelopment around the world. However, much less is known about strategies that have been successful…
Social Movements and Markets, Industries, and Firms
This essay reviews research at the nexus of organizational and social movement studies. It begins by surveying research drawing on social movement theories to explain some organizational process, then surveys research drawing on organizational…
Some Key Differences between a Happy Life and a Meaningful Life
Being happy and finding life meaningful overlap, but there are important differences. A large survey revealed multiple differing predictors of happiness (controlling for meaning) and meaningfulness (controlling for happiness). Satisfying ones…
Steptacular: an incentive mechanism for promoting wellness
The paper describes Steptacular, an online interactive incentive system for encouraging people to walk more. A trial offering Steptacular to the employees of Accenture-USA was conducted over a 6 month period. Over 5,000 employees…
Strategic Dynamics: Three Key Themes
We study the evolution of industries in terms of three interrelated key themes that together form an analytical lens. The first-theme strategy and strategic dynamics raises the question of how companies can gain, sustain, or regain profitable…
Targeting Organizations: Private and Contentious Politics
At the nexus of social movement and organizational studies is the question of how social movements matter to organizational processes, such as how anticorporate activism impacts corporations, markets, and industries. This chapter presents a…
Testing Theories of Congressional—Presidential Interaction with Veto Override Rates
The ability to veto legislation is the most important formal power of the presidency in the legislative process, and presidents’ veto behavior has thus attracted a great deal of theoretical interest. Game-theoretic models of congressional—…
The Association of Religiosity and Political Conservatism and Pro-Social Orientation: The Role of Political Engagement
This research examines the hypothesis that religiosity has two competing psychological influences on the social welfare attitudes of contemporary Americans. On the one hand, religiosity promotes a culturally based conservative identity,…
The East Meets West Foundation: Expanding Organizational Capacity
The East Meets West Foundation (EMW) is an international development agency with the mission to transform the health, education, and communities of disadvantaged people in Asia. Through its Breath of Life (BOL) program, EMW provides a complete…
The Economic Evaluation of Time: Organizational Causes and Individual Consequences
People acquire ways of thinking about time partly in and from work organizations, where the control and measurement of time use is a prominent feature of modern management an inevitable consequence of employees selling their time for money. In…