KBSS 2023 Presenter Abstracts

Session 1: Individual Behavior

“Motivation Myopia: The Overestimation of Motivation’s Impact on Performance”

Eliana Polimeni, Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management
One of motivation’s primary function to the determine the intensity of goal pursuit. By allocating
more resources to goal pursuit, motivation can, in turn, elevate task performance. However,
ultimate task performance is determined by multiple factors, such as ability and the broader
environment. While research has documented the important yet constrained impact of motivation
on performance, little is known about people’s lay beliefs about the nature of this relationship.
This paper argues that people systematically overestimate the impact of motivation for
performance. We find evidence for this claim across three different types of tasks (Study 1).
We find that this misprediction occurs when making predictions about the self as well as for
others (Study 2) and even for tasks where motivation should have a minimal impact on
performance (Study 3). We find evidence for our mechanism that people overvalue internal
states when predicting future behavior and fail to consider external factors. Specifically, we find
that people make accurate predictions about motivation’s impact of task selection, for which
motivation is the primary driver (Study 4). Finally, we replicate our findings using an archival
dataset and find that fantasy football players overestimate the performance of players they
believe to be highly motivated and underestimate the performance of players they believe to be
less motivated (Study 5).

Warning rather than Punishing: Effective Prevention of Low-Stakes Opportunism

Yingkang Xie, Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management
Punishment is commonly used as a threat to prevent fraud and opportunistic behavior (e.g., tax
avoidance, disintermediation). However, its true effectiveness on cheaters is not well understood
because cheaters could strategically hide their traces from fraud detection. Using a field
experiment on an Uber-like platform, we investigate how likely different types of drivers are to
re-engage in fraud after being caught and informed about their violation (e.g., side-deals with
customers). In comparison with banning drivers temporarily from getting new jobs, we find that
a simple warning can reduce a similar amount of fraud by triggering less drivers' counterplots,
like turning off GPS, to keep detecting future frauds. The effectiveness of warning and
punishment is moderated by the drivers' stakes (i.e., payoffs from cheating) in a transaction and
the driver's rapport (i.e., tenure and income) with the platform. Our results provide managerial
implications for platform businesses on whom to target and what to communicate when they are
caught cheating.

The Effect of Group Membership on Perceived Category Typicality

Anjana Lakshmi, The University of Chicago
When we think of a typical Black (or White) face, do we think of an average Black (or White)
person’s face, or a face in which essential category features are pronounced? In this project we
investigate what people judge to be a typical group face. Such ideas of typicality can have
significant consequences (Blair, Judd, & Chapleau, 2004; Eberhardt, Davies, Purdie-Vaughns, &
Johnson, 2006). Yet, what makes a face appear typical?
To investigate determinants of face typicality for own-race and cross-race faces, we tested two
alternative conceptualizations of category typicality: the family resemblance model (Rosch &
Mervis, 1975; Rosch, Simpson, & Miller, 1976) and the ideal model (Barsalou, 1985).
Specifically, we asked whether social category typicality is perceived as highest for average
category exemplars or for ideal representatives of the category with accentuated essential group-
specific attributes. Results indicate that, for own-race faces, participants rated faces located near
the group average as most typical. In contrast, for other-race faces, participants rated more
caricatured versions of the target face as most typical. That is, ratings for own-race faces
followed predictions by the family resemblance model whereas those for other-race faces were in
line with the ideal model of category representation.

Session 2: Firms and Organizations

Soft Power Strikes: Global Firms and Local Assimilation 
Shinan Wang, Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management
This article explores the role of a country’s soft power in doing business overseas. When a
country has higher soft power, its multi-national corporations in foreign countries will conform
less to local expectations. We test this theory by analyzing over 60 million job postings in the 28
European Union countries, including 2 million postings made by foreign subsidiaries. Using a
word embedding model, we measure the level of local conformity for each job posting made by a
foreign subsidiary. We then show that jobs posted by foreign firms from countries with higher
soft power conform less to local norms than those posted by firms from lower soft power
countries. To account for endogeneity, we measure soft power at the country-to-country dyadic
level, so that our models include fixed effects on the job, host country, and firm. Our findings
underscore the importance of countries’ soft power in shaping organizational behavior. 

A Metacognitive Model to Investigate Decision Making in State-led Political and Economic

Reforms in East and Southeast Asia
Eugene Yu Ji, The University of Chicago
Recent studies in political science and political sociology propose that one most frequent
economic or political reform path in East and Southeast Asia is likely to be a top-down, state-led
process (e.g., Riedl et al. 2020; Slater and Wong 2022). This important theory of state reform
strongly relies on a behavioral assumption about the state leader or leadership’s decision-making
psychology, which is nonetheless far from sufficiently investigated. Using the dynamical-
systems approach, my paper proposes a metacognitive model of decision-making for the state-
led reform. I assume uncertainty in risk assessment (URA) and uncertainty in expected utility
(UEU) are the two basic variables, and four types of metacognitive feedback or self-feedback
mechanisms among these two variables are the basic components of the model. Current
modeling work predicts different paths of “prospect trajectories”, rather than final equilibria
alone, determine different decision-making outcomes. Current testing examines six historical and
contemporary cases of major, minor, or no reform in countries or regions in East and Southeast
Asia, and results demonstrate the effectiveness and potential of this new approach.

Responsible for What? Theorizations of Corporate Social Responsibility

Molly Weinstein, Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management
In this article, we suggest that theorization may not only stimulate a change in institutional order
but may also undergird heterogeneity within an ambiguous domain. We focus on Corporate
Social Responsibility (CSR), a contested and underspecified corporate function. Our inquiry
aims to address why alternative models of CSR persist, despite the clear global mandate for firms
to do CSR. Through interviews with CSR officers, we find that in the absence of a communal
meaning system and model of practice, practitioners come to operate within theorized accounts
of practice. Officers rely on one of four distinct theoretical models to understand and actualize
CSR: ‘Integrated CSR’; ‘Calculated CSR’; ‘Siloed CSR’; and ‘Idiosyncratic CSR.’ These
models are not simply versions of the same institution enacted to varying degrees of fidelity.
Rather, they constitute fundamentally different understandings of why and how CSR is
conducted. Each model is associated with internal organizational differences in the formalization
and the discretion of the CSR function. These organizational differences serve as both a product
and a cause of field-level heterogeneity.

Session 3: Marketing
Word-of-Mouth Marketing Can Be Suboptimal for Luxury Products: Diminished Feelings
of Uniqueness Lower Luxury Product Attitudes
Seo Young Myaeng, Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management
Our research investigates how introducing a luxury product to consumers through a WOM
recommendation will dampen its feelings of uniqueness, consequently leading to a weakened
positive effect of WOM toward the item. Past research suggests the positive effect of WOM on
consumer attitudes is in part explained by WOM providing assurance of product quality.
However, as quality is generally assured for luxury products, WOM’s signal on uniqueness
would be more salient instead. More specifically, WOM is expected to reduce the uniqueness of
both luxury and non-luxury products by signaling that the products are used by other consumers
and by restricting consumer’s autonomy in choice. However, as uniqueness is one of the
consumption goals for luxury products, the reduced feelings of uniqueness would matter more
for luxury (vs. non-luxury) products, thus attenuating the positive effect of WOM of the items.
Across a pilot study and nine studies (N = 4,792), we demonstrate our proposed effect in
different product categories and sources and channels of WOM, and also identify real-world
boundary conditions.

Coarse Personalization
Walter Zhang, The University of Chicago Booth School of Business
Advances in estimating heterogeneous treatment effects enable firms to personalize marketing
mix elements and target individuals at an unmatched level of granularity, but feasibility
constraints limit such personalization. In practice, firms choose which unique treatments to offer
and which individuals to offer these treatments with the goal of maximizing profits: we call this
the coarse personalization problem. We propose a two-step solution that makes segmentation and
targeting decisions in concert. First, the firm personalizes by estimating conditional average
treatment effects. Second, the firm discretizes by utilizing treatment effects to choose which
unique treatments to offer and who to assign to these treatments. We show that a combination of
available machine learning tools for estimating heterogeneous treatment effects and a novel
application of optimal transport methods provides a viable and efficient solution. With data from
a large-scale field experiment for promotions management, we find that our methodology
outperforms extant approaches that segment on consumer characteristics or preferences and
those that only search over a prespecified grid. Using our procedure, the firm recoups over
99.5% of its expected incremental profits under fully granular personalization while offering
only five unique treatments. We conclude by discussing how coarse personalization arises in
other domains.

“You Had to Work Harder than Me”: Self-Other Discrepancy in the Attribution and
Communication of Skill
Julia Jeong, Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management
This research documents the “hard-work bias,” whereby people attribute others’ (vs. their own)
skill more to effort than to innate ability. Across various skill domains (e.g., baking, games,
languages) we find that this bias occurs because such attributions provide a boost to the self-
concept. Accordingly, the bias is reversed in domains where people’s skill level is low (vs. high).
Furthermore, we show that the hard-work bias creates a mismatch between how people
communicate about their own skill and how they respond to communications about others’ skill.
When communicating about their own skill, people prefer to highlight their innate ability (vs.
effort) to an audience, but as audience members, they prefer and advise a communicator to
emphasize the role of effort (vs. innate ability) in the communicator’s skill. Our findings have
implications for research on attribution and self-other discrepancies, and for best practices in
communicating skill (e.g., advertising, job applications).

Session 4: Judgment and Decision Making

Framing Effects in Valuing and Saving Human Lives of Different Ages
Jovie Cao, The University of Chicago
How do we value human lives? Generally, most would agree that every individual has an equal
opportunity to make the most of their life. However, there are situations in which people must
make the difficult decision to choose one life over another. As important as such decisions,
choices may be context dependent. The current two studies investigate whether framing the
question as personal vs. general policy decisions and highlighting different aspect of the situation
(saving vs. giving up) affect people’s preferences for some over others. Results showed a
significant higher chance of saving the 5-year-olds in the saving condition than not giving them
up in the giving up condition. Females under 20 years old were more likely to be saved in the
personal decision condition than in the general policy condition. These results suggest that
individuals may have different moral considerations under various contexts. Principles based on
utility values, such as maximizing the reproductive success and human capital, may be more
important in personal and saving decisions while people may solely rely on the intrinsic value of
human life and refer to simple principles such as “youngest first” under
the general policy and giving up conditions.

Dynamic Heuristics
Benedict Guttman-Kenney, The University of Chicago Booth School of Business
I study the elasticity of consumer heuristics to prices. I find one third of pay-at-pump gas
transactions on UK credit cards use a heuristic of round numbered expenditure amount (e.g. PQ
= £20). Asymmetric distributions of transactions around these amounts indicate consumers are
exerting effort to achieve these. Consumer use of this heuristic responds to price changes:
decreasing from approximately 35% to 15% when prices increase. When prices double,
consumers make 50% more trips to the gas station. This indicates consumers (potentially
mistakenly) make consumption decisions on the expenditure amount per visit rather than the
quantity of gas required.

Solving Problems with an Aha! Increases Risk Propensity

Yuhua Yu, Northwestern University
Solving problems with insight culminates in an “Aha! moment”: a feeling of surprise and
pleasure. In daily life, insights are often followed by important decisions, such as deciding what
to do with a new idea. Here, we investigated how the manner of solving a problem affects
subsequent decision-making. Because insights tend to elicit a pleasurable Aha! experience and
positive arousal is generally associated with increased risk-taking tendency, we hypothesized that
people would favor a monetary payout with more upside despite greater uncertainty after solving
a problem with insight. Participants were asked to solve verbal puzzles and report whether they
solved them with insight or without insight. After each puzzle, they chose between two bonus
options: a fixed payout or a risk payout with an equal chance of receiving a high or a low payout.
As predicted, participants were more likely to choose the risk payout after they solved with
insight compared to without insight, demonstrating temporarily higher risk propensity. This
carryover effect – the impact of an Aha! moment on the subsequent risk choice – has
implications in everyday decision-making.