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Research

  • Do Nudges Help Americans Save for Retirement? Not as Much as We Thought.

    Two decades ago, Prof. James Choi’s research suggested that automatic enrollment and escalation and could have a sizeable impact on savings. Now he and his co-authors have looked at these programs again and found that under real-world conditions, the effect on savings is much smaller than expected.

    An illustration of a piggy bank-shaped hot air balloon that can't get off the ground
  • When Do Ads Become Too Deceptive?

    Yale SOM’s Deborah Small and her co-authors examine how people judge the ethical acceptability of ads for charities, and find that they are much more bothered by artificiality than objectification or exaggeration—a finding with implications for advertisers of all kinds.

    An illustration of a camera crew shooting an ad with a cardboard cutout
  • Seeing Peer Ratings Pushes Professionals to Align Their Evaluations

    New research from Yale SOM’s Tristan Botelho reveals that even savvy professionals tend to defer to the ratings given by their peers who evaluated before them.

    An illustration of people lined up to select a star rating
  • Firms Aren’t Living Up to Their Diversity Claims

    A new paper co-authored by Professor Edward Watts finds that for many companies, actual diversity efforts bear little resemblance to the claims made in public disclosures. What’s more, funds from socially conscious investors flow more to firms that engage in this “diversity washing.”

    An illustration of a banner covered in colorful charts being hoisted in front of a corporate building
  • A Loan Program Can Help Close the Green-Building Gap

    In a new study, Prof. Cameron LaPoint and his co-authors weigh the positives and negatives of a lending program that puts climate resiliency upgrades within reach of financially constrained homeowners.

    Punta Gorda, Florida, on September 28, 2022, during Hurricane Ian
  • The Perils of Personalized Pricing

    Increasingly, companies have the ability to target each of us with individual prices based on what they think we will pay. A new study co-authored by Yale SOM’s Jidong Zhou investigates whether the result is higher or lower costs for consumers.

    An illustration of four people with TVs in shopping carts, all with different prices
  • Doing What You Love Doesn’t Always Pay for Women

    New research from Yale SOM’s Adriana Germano shows how the seemingly gender-neutral advice to “follow your passion” helps explain the gender gap in lucrative STEM fields.

    A woman following a sign pointing to "passion" at a fork in the road
  • Using Operations Research to Improve the Refugee Resettlement Process

    In a new study, Yale SOM’s Vahideh Manshadi and Soonbong Lee and their co-authors propose an algorithm that can yield better employment outcomes for refugees while also reducing caseloads of service providers.

    An Afghani couple in Charlestown, Massachusetts, where they settled in 2022 after the fall of Kabul. 
  • Can Reflection Dislodge a Faulty Intuition?

    Sometimes our gut is right. But a new study co-authored by Yale SOM’s Shane Frederick shows that when it’s not, the erroneous intuition can be difficult to overrid.

    An illustration of two women looking at a bat and ball, one with a lightbulb over her head and the other reflecting carefully on math
  • What We Get Wrong about the Effects of Population Growth

    New research co-authored by Professor Jason Dana finds that people over-focus on increased consumption without considering the positive effects of increased productivity.

    An illustration of bunches of grapes in which each grape is a human face