Who do the professor's collaborate with from this department?

Behavioral Science (Chicago Booth)

Management Science / Operations Management (Chicago Booth)

Operations, Information & Technology (Stanford GSB)

Management & Organizations (Northwestern Kellogg)

Operations Management (Northwestern Kellogg)

Managerial Economics and Strategy (Northwestern Kellogg)

Management of Organizations (Berkeley Haas)

Decision Sciences (Duke Fuqua)

Management and Organizations (Duke Fuqua)

Operations Management (Duke Fuqua)

Operations (Yale)

Organizations and Management (Yale)

Management (NYU Stern)

Operations Research (CMU Tepper)

Behavioral Decision Making (Anderson UCLA)

Operations, Technology, & Organizational Management (Cornell Johnson)

GSB

Johnson (Columbia)

integrating psychological biases into economic policy analysis.

Professor Allon has been studying models of information sharing among firms and customers both in service and retail settings, as well as competition models in the service industry

A pioneer in the systematic study of the transformational impacts of information on the strategy and practice of business, his research and teaching interests include strategic uses of information systems, information economics, and the changes enabled by information technology.

I study expert judgment and decision making using field data. More information can be found at my personal website, etangreen.com.

My central research area is on the relationship between information technology and productivity and the factors that affect the value of IT investments.

Kartik’s research work focuses on the digital economy, in particular the impact of analytics and algorithms on consumers and society, Internet media, Internet marketing and e-commerce.

co-director of the Wharton Risk Management and Decision Processes Center. He has a long-standing interest in ways that society can better manage low-probability, high-consequence events related to technological and natural hazards.

Her research uses insights from economics and psychology to study how consequential behaviors (e.g., saving, exercising, medication adherence, discrimination) can be changed for good.

Alice’s research focuses on topics in judgment and decision making. In particular, her work aims to: (a) understand consumer preferences, (b) encourage prosocial behavior, and (c) increase consumer satisfaction.

She uses social psychology and organizational behavior theory to understand the factors that promote and impede positive employee outcomes such as job performance, leadership, and effective decision-making. She is particularly interested in how these outcomes relate to self-conscious emotions (e.g., guilt), moral character, and self-reliance/autonomy.

His research focuses on emotions and the negotiation process.

The first explores the psychology of judgment and decision-making, with an emphasis on understanding and fixing the errors and biases that plague people’s judgments, predictions, and choices. The second area focuses on identifying and promoting easy-to-adopt research practices that improve the integrity of published findings

His research is focused on innovation, entrepreneurship, and product development.

She is interested in studying how emerging information technologies, such as enterprise social media and big data analytics, impact innovation and productivity in organizations.

Christian's main areas of interest are the economics of digitization, entrepreneurship, and science. His research focuses on blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies, the economics of equity crowdfunding and startup growth, and the economics of scientific collaboration.

Danielle Li is an Assistant Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Her research interests are in the economics of innovation, productivity, and organizational economics.

Her work focuses on 1) understanding how organizations weigh expert advice and quantitative data when making investment decisions and 2) assessing the value of such investments on innovation in the life sciences in particular

Murray is an international expert on the transformation of investments in scientific and technical innovation into innovation-based entrepreneurship that drives jobs, wealth creation, and regional prosperity. She has a special interest in the commercialization of science from idea to impact and the mechanisms that can be effectively used to link universities with entrepreneurs, large corporations, and philanthropists in that process.

He is an expert in advanced technology management and entrepreneurship, a serial high-tech entrepreneur, and a leading angel investor.

Hazhir's research applies dynamic modeling to complex organizational problems. He has analyzed how organizations learn in the presence of delays between taking action and observing the results, and has shown through empirical data and simulations the resulting learning challenges

His early work focused on understanding the inability of organizations to leverage well-established tools and practices.

Nelson now focuses on developing the theory and practice of Dynamic Work Design—a new approach to designing work that is both effective and engaging—and Dynamic Management Systems, a method for insuring that day-to-day work is tightly linked to the strategic objectives of the firm.

Sterman’s research centers on improving decision-making in complex systems, including corporate strategy and operations, energy policy, public health, environmental sustainability, and climate change. His work ranges from the dynamics of organizational change and the implementation of sustainable improvement programs to climate change and the implementation of policies to promote a sustainable world. Sterman pioneered the development of “management flight simulators” of corporate and economic systems which are now used by corporations, universities, and governments around the world.

A solution to the single-question crowd wisdom problem

William Barnett studies competition among organizations and how organizations and industries evolve globally. He is conducting a large-scale project that seeks to explain why and how some firms grow rapidly in globalizing markets.

His most recent project studies socially constructed authenticity – how consumers and others value authenticity, how consumers search for authenticity in products and services, and how consumers interpret organizational behavior and structure as reflecting authenticity.

Aruna's research investigates how low-income occupations in developing countries are governed, organized, seek meaning through their work and navigate the market. Through her research, Aruna strives to advance our theoretical understanding of work, while informing the design of labor-market institutions and policy for the developing world.

Professor Rao studies collective action within organizations and in markets. His research and by implication, his teaching, revolves around scaling up mobilization, innovation, and talent in organizations.

Sarah A. Soule's research examines state and organizational-level policy change and diffusion, and the role social movements have on these processes. She has recently published papers on how protest impacts multi-national firm-level decisions regarding divestment in Burma, and on how advocacy organizations learn new strategies and tactics from those with which they collaborate.

Adina D. Sterling investigates the ways organizations attract, manage, and retain high-value human capital in technology and business, the effect this has on the performance of employees and organizations, and the broader impact of these practices on inequality.

Jesper B. Sørensen specializes in the dynamics of organizational and strategic change, and their implications for individuals and their careers. His research on firm outcomes has focused on the impact of organizational structure and culture on organizational learning, performance and innovation.

In essence, he studies how to successfully develop, evaluate, and implement creative ideas in and outside organizations.

Lindred Greer’s research focuses on teams and small groups. In her primary line of research, she examines how team power structures and power dynamics impact team performance, particularly in early stage start-ups.

Deborah H Gruenfeld is a social psychologist whose research and teaching examine how people are transformed by the organizations and social structures in which they work

My research is in three main areas: conflict and cooperation, interactive decision making, and hierarchy in groups and organizations. I investigate how individuals and teams make decisions, manage conflicts, and cooperate to achieve joint goals.

Chip Heath’s research focuses on two general areas: What makes ideas succeed in the social marketplace of ideas, and how can people design messages to make them stick? How do individuals, groups, and organizations make important decisions and what mistakes do they make?

mechanisms linking psychological traits (such as personality) with a broad range of organizational and social outcomes, including job performance, person-job fit, consumer preferences, and ideology, as well as the expression and recognition of psychological traits from behavioral residues, language, and facial features. Kosinski conducts his research using a range of computational methods, including machine learning, data mining, and observational studies involving millions of participants.

Professor Kramer’s research explores a variety of topics, approached largely from the standpoint of psychological research on human judgment and decision making. His most recent empirical research explores the foundations of happiness and meaning, creativity, trust and distrust within organizations, organizational and social paranoia, as well as the determinants of cooperation and conflict in social systems.

Professor Lowery's research seeks to extend knowledge of individuals' experience of inequality and fairness.

Professor Dale Miller's research interests include the impact of social norms on behavior, the role that justice considerations play in individual and organizational decisions, and the conditions under which individuals and organizations can be induced to change course.

Professor Monin's research investigates the interplay between self-image and morality. He seeks to understand for instance when individuals behave unethically, and how they live with it; the consequences of high or low moral self-confidence; the meaning and role of morality in everyday life; and what empirical psychology can contribute to ethics.

Margaret Neale’s research focuses primarily on negotiation and team performance. Her work has extended judgment and decision-making research from cognitive psychology to the field of negotiation.

Professor O’Reilly’s research spans studies of leadership, organizational demography and diversity, culture, executive compensation and organizational innovation and change.

His current research focuses on the relationship between time and money, power and leadership in organizations, economics language and assumptions and their effects on management practice, how social science theories become self-fulfilling, barriers to turning knowledge into action and how to overcome them, and evidence-based management and what it is, barriers to its use, and how to implement it.

What do sociologists mean when they describe culture as founded on “shared understandings”? Sharing an understanding does not necessarily imply having the same opinions but rather agreeing on the structures of relevance and opposition that make symbols and actions meaningful. Because meaning is contextual, different people might interpret the same reality in different ways. Yet standard quantitative sociological methods are not designed to take such heterogeneity into account. In this article, I introduce a new method—relational class analysis—that uses attitudinal data to identify groups of individuals that share distinctive ways of understanding the same domain of social activity. To demonstrate its utility I use it to reexamine the cultural omnivore thesis. I find that Americans' understandings of the social symbolism of musical taste are shaped by three competing logics of cultural distinction, in a manner that complicates contemporary sociological accounts of artistic taste.

The rise of big data—data that are not only large and massively multivariate but concern a dizzying array of phenomena—represents a watershed moment for the social sciences. These data have created demand for new methods that reduce/simplify the dimensionality of data, identify novel patterns and relations, and predict outcomes, from computational ethnography and computational linguistics to network science, machine learning, and in situ experiments. Such developments have led scholars to begin new lines of social inquiry. Company engineers, computer scientists, and social scientists have all converged on big data, creating the possibility of a vibrant “trading zone” for collaboration. However, strong differences in research frameworks help explain why big data may not be an egalitarian trading zone across fields, but rather—at least in the short term—a moment when engineering colonizes sociology more than vice versa. In the long term, however, we suggest there may be the possibility of a constructive synthesis across paradigms in what we term ‘forensic social science.’

How do people adapt to organizational culture, and what are the consequences for their outcomes in the organization? These fundamental questions about culture have previously been examined using self-report measures, which are subject to reporting bias, rely on coarse cultural categories defined by researchers, and provide only static snapshots of cultural fit. By contrast, we develop an interactional language use model that overcomes these limitations and opens new avenues for theoretical development about the dynamics of organizational culture. We trace the enculturation trajectories of employees in a midsized technology firm based on analyses of 10.24 million internal emails. Our language-based model of changing cultural fit (1) predicts individual attainment; (2) reveals distinct patterns of adaptation for employees who exit voluntarily, exit involuntarily, and remain employed; (3) demonstrates that rapid …

Network models of diffusion predominantly think about cultural variation as a product of social contagion. But culture does not spread like a virus. In this paper, we propose an alternative explanation which we refer to as associative diffusion. Drawing on two insights from research in cognition—that meaning inheres in cognitive associations between concepts, and that such perceived associations constrain people’s actions—we propose a model wherein, rather than beliefs or behaviors per-se, the things being transmitted between individuals are perceptions about what beliefs or behaviors are compatible with one another. Conventional contagion models require an assumption of network segregation to explain cultural variation. In contrast, we demonstrate that the endogenous emergence of cultural differentiation can be entirely attributable to social cognition and does not necessitate a clustered social network or a preexisting division into groups. Moreover, we show that prevailing assumptions about the effects of network topology do not hold when diffusion is associative.

as I read through this, it seems like simple TVC statistics without something particularly methodologically deep

Moral Self-Licensing

Google Scholar (many PDFs)

What motivates individual self-sacrificial behavior in intergroup conflicts? Is it the altruistic desire to help the in-group or the aggressive drive to hurt the out-group? This article introduces a new game paradigm, the intergroup prisoner's dilemma-maximizing difference (IPD-MD) game, designed specifically to distinguish between these two motives. The game involves two groups. Each group member is given a monetary endowment and can decide how much of it to contribute. Contribution can be made to either of two pools, one that benefits the in-group at a personal cost and another that, in addition, harms the out-group. An experiment demonstrated that contributions in the IPD-MD game are made almost exclusively to the cooperative, within-group pool. Moreover, preplay intragroup communication increases intragroup cooperation, but not intergroup competition. These results are compared with those observed in …

Building on the contributions of diverse theoretical approaches, the authors present a multidimensional model of group identification. Integrating conceptions from the social identity perspective with those from research on individualism—collectivism, nationalism— patriotism, and identification with organizations, we propose four conceptually distinct modes of identification: importance (how much I view the group as part of who I am), commitment (how much I want to benefit the group), superiority (how much I view my group as superior to other groups), and deference (how much I honor, revere, and submit to the group's norms, symbols, and leaders). We present an instrument for assessing the four modes of identification and review initial empirical findings that validate the proposed model and show its utility in understanding antecedents and consequences of identification.

While creative ideas are defined as both novel and useful, novelty and usefulness often diverge, making it difficult to develop ideas that are high in both. To explain this tradeoff between novelty and usefulness and how it can be overcome, this paper introduces the concept of the “primal mark”—i.e., the first bit of content employees start with as they generate ideas, which anchors the trajectory of novelty and usefulness. In four experiments, participants started with primal marks that contained varying degrees of novelty. Results suggest that familiar primal marks foster usefulness at the expense of novelty, while new primal marks foster novelty at the expense of usefulness. However, the results also suggest a solution to this tradeoff: integrative primal marks that combine new and familiar content, fostering an optimal balance of novelty and usefulness. Implications for theory and research on creativity in organizations are …

This paper examines the effect of uncertainty about the future on whether individuals select want options (e.g., junk foods, lowbrow films) or instead exert self-control and select should options (e.g., healthy foods, highbrow films). Consistent with the ego-depletion literature, which suggests that self-control resembles an exhaustible muscle, coping with uncertainty about what the future may bring reduces self-control resources and increases individuals’ tendency to favor want options over should options. These results persist when real uncertainty is induced, when the salience of naturally-arising uncertainty is heightened and when individuals are able to make choices contingent upon the outcomes of uncertain events. Overall, this work suggests that reducing uncertainty in a decision maker’s environment may have important spillover effects, leading to less impulsive choices.

We study the effect of small windfalls on consumer spending decisions by comparing the purchases online grocery customers make when redeeming $10-off coupons with the purchases they make without coupons. Controlling for customer fixed effects and other variables, we find that grocery spending increases by $1.59 when a $10-off coupon is redeemed. The extra spending associated with coupon redemption is focused on groceries that a customer does not typically buy. These results are consistent with the theory of mental accounting but are not consistent with the standard permanent income or lifecycle theory of consumption. While the hypotheses we test are motivated by mental accounting, we also discuss some alternative psychological explanations for our findings.

Why are certain pieces of online content (e.g., advertisements, videos, news articles) more viral than others? This article takes a psychological approach to understanding diffusion. Using a unique data set of all the New York Times articles published over a three-month period, the authors examine how emotion shapes virality. The results indicate that positive content is more viral than negative content, but the relationship between emotion and social transmission is more complex than valence alone. Virality is partially driven by physiological arousal. Content that evokes high-arousal positive (awe) or negative (anger or anxiety) emotions is more viral. Content that evokes low-arousal, or deactivating, emotions (e.g., sadness) is less viral. These results hold even when the authors control for how surprising, interesting, or practically useful content is (all of which are positively linked to virality), as well as external drivers …

In a wide variety of settings, organizations generate a number of possible solutions to a problem—ideas—and then select a few for further development. We examine the effectiveness of two group structures for such tasks—the team structure, in which the group works together in time and space, and the hybrid structure, in which individuals first work independently and then work together. We define the performance of a group as the quality of the best ideas identified. Prior research has defined performance as the average quality of ideas or the number of ideas generated, ignoring what most organizations seek, a few great ideas. We build a theory that relates organizational phenomena to four different variables that govern the quality of the best ideas identified: (1) the average quality of ideas generated, (2) the number of ideas generated, (3) the variance in the quality of ideas generated, and (4) the ability of the …

Managers, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists all seek to maximize the financial returns from innovation, and profits are driven largely by the quality of the opportunities they pursue. Based on a structured and process-driven approach this book demonstrates how to systematically identify exceptional opportunities for innovation. An innovation tournament, just like its counterpart in sports, starts with a large number of candidates, with opportunities as the players. These opportunities are pitted against each other until only the exceptional survive. This book provides a principled approach for the effective management of innovation tournaments-identifying a wealth of promising opportunities and then evaluating and filtering them intelligently for greatest profitability. With a set of practical tools for creating and identifying new opportunities, it guides the reader in evaluating and screening opportunities. The book demonstrates how to construct an innovation portfolio and how to align the innovation process with an organization's competitive strategy. Innovation Tournaments employs quirky, fresh examples ranging from movies to medical devices. The authors' tool kit is built on their extensive research, their entrepreneurial backgrounds, and their teaching and consulting work with many highly innovative organizations.

Evaluators with expertise in a particular field may have an informational advantage in separating good projects from bad. At the same time, they may also have personal preferences that impact their objectivity. This paper examines these issues in the context of peer review at the US National Institutes of Health. I show that evaluators are both better informed and more biased about the quality of projects in their own area. On net, the benefits of expertise weakly dominate the costs of bias. As such, policies designed to limit bias by seeking impartial evaluators may reduce the quality of funding decisions. (JEL D82, H51, I10, I23, O38)

The move toward increased school accountability may substantially affect the career risks that school leaders face without providing commensurate changes in pay. Since effective school leaders likely have significant scope in choosing where to work, these uncompensated risks may undermine the efficacy of accountability reforms by limiting the ability of low-performing schools to attract and retain effective leaders. This paper empirically evaluates the economic importance of principal mobility in response to accountability by analyzing how the implementation of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in North Carolina affected principal mobility across North Carolina schools and how it reshaped the distribution of high-performing principals across lowand high-performing schools. Using value-added measures of principal performance and variation in pre-period student demographics to identify schools that are likely to miss performance targets, I show that NCLB decreases average principal quality at schools serving disadvantaged students by inducing more able principals to move to schools less likely to face NCLB sanctions. These results are consistent with a model of principal-school matching in which school districts are unable to compensate principals for the increased likelihood of sanctions at schools with historically low-performing students.

While it is widely recognized that firms in an era of technological ferment exist under conditions of significant uncertainty and ambiguity, little is known about the exact processes through which firms explore their ideas and resolve uncertainty. Arguing that our understanding of the era of ferment is much less developed than other aspects of the technology life cycle, we examine the micro-dynamics of technology-based entrepreneurial firms during this period. We focus on the role of purposeful experimentation as a key form of learning for start-ups firms in the era of ferment. Our approach contrasts with the prevailing view in the literature in which the era of ferment is characterized by extensive experimentation across firms, with each firm representing a single data point in an industry-level experiment. It also extends the learning literature by focusing on start-ups and taking the perspective that learning can encompass purposeful experimentation as well as local search and chaotic adaptation in the era of ferment. Building on the literature on experimental design, we propose a definition and taxonomy of purposeful experimentation. The taxonomy defines the experimental landscape as having three domains – technological, product and business model; and two dimensions – degree of simultaneity and degree of parameter manipulation. We examine this framework using data from a technology-based start-up and find evidence for purposeful experimentation as a key element of the firm’s learning strategy. We also highlight the organizational constraints and challenges that are associated with experimentation. Our findings emphasize the importance of entrepreneurial action, choice and internal experimentation processes.

Although many scholars suggest that IPR has a positive effect on cumulative innovation, a growing “anti-commons” perspective highlights the negative role of IPR over scientific knowledge. At its core, this debate is centered on how intellectual property rights over a given piece of knowledge affect the propensity of future researchers to build upon that knowledge in their own scientific research activities. This article frames this issue around the concept of dual knowledge, in which a single discovery may contribute to both scientific research and useful commercial applications, and finds evidence for a modest anti-commons effect. A key implication of dual knowledge is that it may be simultaneously instantiated as a scientific research article and as a patent. Such patent-paper pairs are at the heart of our empirical strategy. We exploit the fact that patents are granted with a substantial lag, often many years after the …

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been extraordinarily successful in the task of knowledge synthesis and risk assessment. However, the strong scientific consensus on the detection, attribution, and risks of climate change stands in stark contrast to widespread confusion, complacency and denial among policymakers and the public. Risk communication is now a major bottleneck preventing science from playing an appropriate role in climate policy. Here I argue that the ability of the IPCC to fulfill its mission can be enhanced through better understanding of the mental models of the audiences it seeks to reach, then altering the presentation and communication of results accordingly. Few policymakers are trained in science, and public understanding of basic facts about climate change is poor. But the problem is deeper. Our mental models lead to persistent errors and biases in …

Thoughtful leaders increasingly recognize that we are not only failing to solve the persistent problems we face, but are in fact causing them. System dynamics is designed to help avoid such policy resistance and identify high‐leverage policies for sustained improvement. What does it take to be an effective systems thinker, and to teach system dynamics fruitfully? Understanding complex systems requires mastery of concepts such as feedback, stocks and flows, time delays, and nonlinearity. Research shows that these concepts are highly counterintuitive and poorly understood. It also shows how they can be taught and learned. Doing so requires the use of formal models and simulations to test our mental models and develop our intuition about complex systems. Yet, though essential, these concepts and tools are not sufficient. Becoming an effective systems thinker also requires the rigorous and disciplined use of …

How to Save a Leaky Ship:
Capability Traps and the Failure of Win-Win Investments in
Sustainability and Social Responsibility

Operational and Behavioral Causes of Supply Chain Instability

Google Scholar

Effect of Delays on Complexity of Organizational Learning

Heterogeneity and Network Structure in the Dynamics of diffusion: comparing Agent-based and differential equation models

Student: James Houghton (reach out)

Context-Aware Recommender Systems

Kristen Solsulski