Strategy

How does framing strategy around competition versus collaboration affect employee idea generation? We conduct a field experiment with 317 employees across 15 ventures in Latin America to assess the causal impact of strategic framing on employee contributions. Employees were randomly assigned to view either a competitively or collaboratively framed version of their firm's strategy statement. Those in the competitive framing condition generate approximately 14% fewer ideas and report lower psychological safety.

It’s natural to expect that humanity’s response to a warming planet will involve sacrifices as we cut down on consumption and give up unsustainable ways of living. Climate action, has another side: however, where there’s room for growth and innovation. Reflecting the mentality he encounters at Columbia Business School, where MBA students are constantly asking, “What can I do over the course of my career? How do I make myself useful?” Wagner emphasizes that decarbonization means investment—in economies, companies, and oneself.

Screening human capital based on signals such as job applications or entrepreneurial pitches is crucial for organizations. Signals are often informative insofar as they require differential knowledge and effort to produce. Generative AI (GAI) complicates screening by lowering the cost of producing impressive signals. We model the informational effects of GAI, showing that applicants' access to GAI can increase—but also decrease—an evaluator's screening mistakes. This result depends on how GAI affects experts' signals compared to non-experts'.

The book gives evidence and advice for leveraging values as a concrete way to improve outcomes in leadership and life.  The first part of the book is about leveraging values as an individual, the second half is about organizational values.  The audience is thoughtful students of business, leaders, and scholars.

Climate-friendly technologies are the best way to stymie rising inflation — and will get better and cheaper over time.

Full text via nature.com [PDF]

Comment sections on social media extend social influence beyond offline networks, allowing  a small, vocal minority of users to reach much larger audiences. We provide causal evidence that  the views expressed in comments below social media posts shape both on-platform engagement  and off-platform attitudes and behavior, and that these effects move in opposite directions. In  collaboration with a leading racial justice organization, we conduct a large-scale field experi ment on Facebook reaching a million U.S.

In evaluative contexts, evaluatees typically seek to present themselves in a favorable light, while evaluators ask penetrating questions to assess these claims. Here we develop a framework to identify curveball questions: ones that are on-topic yet perplexing (i.e., difficult to predict) relative to past discourse. We develop a language-based measure of curveball questions and apply it to a corpus of quarterly earnings calls.

There has been growing interest in applying reinforcement learning (RL) to inventory management, either by optimizing over temporal transitions or by learning directly from full historical demand trajectories. This contrasts sharply with classical data-driven approaches, which first estimate demand distributions from past data and then compute well-structured optimal policies via dynamic programming.