Knowledge Hub
Emotional Manipulation By AI Companions
Julian De Freitas, Zeliha Oğuz-Uğuralp, Ahmet Kaan-Uğuralp
HBS Working Paper, 2025
AI-companion apps such as Replika, Chai, and Character.ai promise relational benefits—yet many boast session lengths that rival gaming platforms while suffering high long-run churn.
A New Framework For Reducing Healthcare Disparities
Susanna Gallani, Mary Witkowski, Lidia Moura, Katie Sonnefeldt
Article, 2025
Despite decades of initiatives to address healthcare inequities in the U.S., disparities across race, gender, geography, and income remain stubbornly persistent.
Gender Disparities In Compensation Of Practicing Cardiothoracic Surgeons: Analyzing The Society Of Thoracic Surgeons Compensation Survey
Cherie Erkmen, Anastasiia Tompkins, Shanda Blackmon, Larry Kaiser, Susanna Gallani, Jennifer Romano, Thomas MacGillivray, Michael Mack
Article, 2025
BACKGROUND: Gender-based pay disparity in compensation is widespread.
Employee Stress Is A Business Risk—Not An HR Problem
Marion Chomse, Lydia Roos, Reeva Misra, Ashley Whillans
Editorial, 2025
Workplace stress, on the rise for decades, has been treated by many organizations as a personal issue instead of a business-critical risk that merits executive oversight.
Eliciting Advice Instead Of Feedback Improves Developmental Input
Hayley Blunden, Ariella Kristal, Ashley Whillans, Jaewon Yoon, Hannah Burd, Georgina Bremner, Michael Yeomans
Article, 2025
Most organizations encourage employees to provide feedback to one another to support learning, personal growth, and career advancement.
Unregulated Emotional Risks Of AI Wellness Apps
Julian De Freitas, Glenn Cohen
Article, 2025
We propose that AI-driven wellness apps powered by large language models can foster extreme emotional attachments and dependencies akin to human relationships—posing risks like ambiguous loss and dysfunctional dependence—that challenge current regulatory frameworks and necessitate safeguards and informed interventions within these platforms.
Don’t Let An AI Failure Harm Your Brand
Julian De Freitas
Article, 2025
How companies market their AI systems affects the repercussions they face when their products fail. Marketers must promote their AI products with potential failure in mind.
Balancing Engagement And Polarization: Multi-Objective Alignment Of News Content Using LLMs
Mengjie Cheng, Elie Ofek, Hema Yoganarasimhan
HBS Working Paper, 2025
We study how media firms can use LLMs to generate news content that aligns with multiple objectives—making content more engaging while maintaining a preferred level of polarization/slant consistent with the firm’s editorial policy.
Ideation With Generative AI—In Consumer Research And Beyond
Julian De Freitas, Gideon Nave, Stefano Puntoni
Article, 2025
The use of large language models (LLMs) in consumer research is rapidly evolving, with applications including synthetic data generation, data analysis, and more.
Why People Resist Embracing AI
Julian De Freitas
Article, 2025
The success of AI depends not only on its capabilities, which are becoming more advanced each day, but on people’s willingness to harness them.
Disclosure, Humanizing, And Contextual Vulnerability Of Generative AI Chatbots
Julian De Freitas, I. Glenn Cohen
Article, 2025
In the wake of recent advancements in generative AI, regulatory bodies are trying to keep pace.
Overcoming Barriers To Employee Ownership: Insights From Small And Medium-Sized Businesses
John Guzek, Ashley Whillans
Article, 2025
This research investigates the limited adoption of employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) among small-to-medium sized businesses (SMBs) in the U.S.
Reducing Prejudice With Counter-Stereotypical AI
Erik Hermann, Julian De Freitas, Stefano Puntoni
Article, 2025
Based on a review of relevant literature, we propose that the proliferation of AI with human-like and social features presents an unprecedented opportunity to address the underlying cognitive and affective drivers of prejudice.
AI Companions Reduce Loneliness
Julian De Freitas, Zeliha Oğuz-Uğuralp, Ahmet Uğuralp, Stefano Puntoni
Article, 2025
Chatbots are now able to engage in sophisticated conversations with consumers in the domain of relationships, providing a potential coping solution to widescale societal loneliness.
How Firms Respond To Worker Activism: Evidence From Global Supply Chains
Yanhua Bird, Jodi Short, Michael Toffel
HBS Working Paper, 2025
Social movement pressures can lead organizations to concede and improve social performance to avoid disruption costs, but we theorize that such responses evoke concession costs that prompt organizations to shift resources and attention from other social domains whose performance suffers.
An Empirical Examination Of Business Climate Alliances: Effective And/Or Harmful?
Matteo Gasparini, Peter Tufano
HBS Working Paper, 2025
This research studies business alliances that seek to address climate change, offering empirical evidence to address claims advanced by alliance supporters and critics.
Data-Driven Technologies And Local Information Advantages In Small Business Lending
Wilbur Chen, Jung Koo Kang, Aditya Mohan
HBS Working Paper, 2025
We investigate whether banks' adoption of data-driven technologies influences competitive dynamics in local small business lending by diminishing the information advantages traditionally held by local banks.
What Board-Level Control Mechanisms Changed In Banks Following The 2008 Financial Crisis? A Descriptive Study
Shelly Li, Shivram Rajgopal, Suraj Srinivasan, Yu Ting Wong
Article, 2025
Following the 2008 financial crisis, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) identified major shortcomings in bank board governance, contributing to systemic risk management failures.
With A Little Help From My Family: Informal Startup Financing
Brian Baik, Johan Ludvig Karlsen, Katja Kisseleva
HBS Working Paper, 2025
Using Norwegian administrative data, we identify family equity investments in startups and examine their effects on investor returns and firm behavior.
Training Within Firms
Brayan Diaz, Andrea Neyra-Nazarrett, Julian Ramirez, Raffaella Sadun, Jorge Tamayo
HBS Working Paper, 2025
Training investments are essential for improving worker and firm productivity, yet their implementation is often hindered by low participation rates and insufficient worker engagement.
Want Your Company To Get Better At Experimentation?
Iavor Bojinov, David Holtz, Ramesh Johari, Sven Schmit, Martin Tingley
Article, 2025
For years, online experimentation has fueled the innovations of leading tech companies, enabling them to rapidly test and refine new ideas, optimize product features, personalize user experiences, and maintain a competitive edge.
Do Public Financial Statements Influence Private Equity And Venture Capital Financing?
Brian Baik, Natalie Berfeld, Rodrigo Verdi
Article, 2025
We study whether the availability of public audited financial statements influences the probability of private firms receiving private firm equity financing.
Narrative AI And The Human-AI Oversight Paradox In Evaluating Early-Stage Innovations
Jacqueline Lane, Léonard Boussioux, Charles Ayoubi, Ying Hao Chen, Camila Lin, Rebecca Spens, Pooja Wagh, Pei-Hsin Wang
HBS Working Paper, 2025
Do AI-generated narrative explanations enhance human oversight or diminish it? We investigate this question through a field experiment with 228 evaluators screening 48 early-stage innovations under three conditions: human-only, black-box AI recommendations without explanations, and narrative AI with explanatory rationales.
Advancing Personalization: How To Experiment, Learn & Optimize
Aurelie Lemmens, Jason Roos, Sebastian Gabel, Eva Ascarza, Hernan Bruno, Elea Feit, Brett Gordon, Ayelet Israeli, Carl Mela, Oded Netzer
Not in a Series, 2025
Personalization has become the heartbeat of modern marketing.
Novice Risk Work: How Juniors Coaching Seniors On Emerging Technologies Such As Generative AI Can Lead To Learning Failures
Katherine Kellogg, Hila Lifshitz-Assaf, Steven Randazzo, Ethan Mollick, Fabrizio Dell'Acqua, Edward McFowland III, François Candelon, Karim Lakhani
Article, 2025
The literature on communities of practice demonstrates that a proven way for senior professionals to upskill themselves in the use of new technologies that undermine existing expertise is to learn from junior professionals.
Greenlighting Innovative Projects: How Evaluation Format Shapes The Perceived Feasibility Of Early-Stage Ideas
Jacqueline Lane, Simon Friis, Tianxi Cai, Michael Menietti, Griffin Weber, Eva Guinan
HBS Working Paper, 2025
The evaluation of innovative early-stage projects is essential for allocating limited resources.
Managing Remote Work Quality: Evidence From Auditing Management Systems Standards
Ashley Palmarozzo, Michael Toffel, Melissa Ouellet
HBS Working Paper, 2025
Remote work has become more common, providing operational flexibility and productivity benefits, but questions remain about whether and how it affects work quality.
Communication Within Firms: Evidence From CEO Turnovers
Stephen Impink, Andrea Prat, Raffaella Sadun
Article, 2025
This paper uses novel, firm-level communication measures derived from communications metadata several months before and after a CEO transition for 102 firms to study whether and how this organizational event is reflected in employees’ communication flows.
The Cybernetic Teammate: A Field Experiment On Generative AI Reshaping Teamwork And Expertise
Fabrizio Dell'Acqua,Charles Ayoubi,Hila Lifshitz-Assaf,Raffaella Sadun,Ethan Mollick,Lilach Mollick,Yi Han,Jeff Goldman,Hari Nair,Stewart Taub,Karim Lakhani
HBS Working Paper, 2025
We examine how artificial intelligence transforms the core pillars of collaboration— performance, expertise sharing, and social engagement—through a pre-registered field experiment with 776 professionals at Procter & Gamble, a global consumer packaged goods company.
Strategy In An Era Of Abundant Expertise: How To Thrive When AI Makes Knowledge And Know-How Cheaper And Easier To Access
Bobby Yerramilli-Rao, John Corwin, Yang Li, Karim R. Lakhani
Editorial, 2025
AI is changing the cost and availability of expertise, and this will fundamentally alter how businesses organize and compete.
Prices And Concentration: A U-Shape? Theory And Evidence From Renewables
Michele Fioretti, Junnan He, Jorge Tamayo
HBS Working Paper, 2025
We show that when firms compete via supply functions, transferring high-cost capacity to the largest, most efficient firm—thereby diversifying its production technologies while increasing concentration—can lower prices by prompting the leader to expand output and competitors to aggressively defend market shares.
Corporate Ownership And ESG Performance
Belen Villalonga, Peter Tufano, Boya Wang
Article, 2025
Using a sample of 3083 firms from 62 countries over 18 years, we analyze how the structure and identity of firms' material owners influence their Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) performance.
Transaction Cost Economics In The Digital Economy: A Research Agenda
Frank Nagle, Robert Seamans, Steve Tadelis
Article, 2025
Transaction cost economics theory explains when it is more efficient for a transaction between two parties to occur across the market or within an organization.
Collusion In Brokered Markets
John William Hatfield, Scott Duke Kominers, Richard Lowery
Article, 2025
High commissions in the U.S.
The Role Of Top Managers In The Public Sector: Evidence From The English NHS
Katharina Janke, Carol Propper, Raffaella Sadun
2025
Governments have reformed public services by adopting private sector gover- nance models that grant top directors greater autonomy, responsibility for meeting key targets, and performance-based rewards.
Management And Firm Dynamism
Nicholas Bloom, Jonathan Hartley, Raffaella Sadun, Rachel Schuh, John Van Reenen
HBS Working Paper, 2025
We show better-managed firms are more dynamic in plant acquisitions, disposals, openings and closings in U.S.
Learning to Cover: Online Learning And Optimization with Irreversible Decisions
Alexander Jacquillat, Michael Lingzhi Li
Not in a Series, 2024
We define an online learning and optimization problem with discrete and irreversible decisions contributing toward a coverage target.
Public Attitudes On Performance For Algorithmic And Human Decision-Makers
Kirk Bansak, Elisabeth Paulson
Article, 2024
This study explores public preferences for algorithmic and human decision-makers (DMs) in high-stakes contexts, how these preferences are shaped by performance metrics, and whether public evaluations of performance differ depending on the type of DM.
The Human Side Of The Future Of Work: Understanding The Role People Play In Shaping A Changing World
Jochen Menges, Lauren Howe, Erika Hall, Jon Jachimowicz, Sharon Parker, Riki Takeuchi, Abhijeet Vadera, Ashley Whillans, Susan Cohen
Article, 2024
For as long as there has been work, there has been a “future of work,” through humans’ ingenuity and drive to get things done easier, faster, and better.