Max H. Bazerman
There are 38 articles for this faculty member.
About Faculty in this Article:
Max Bazerman is the Jesse Isidor Straus Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.
A Decision-Making Perspective to Negotiation: A Review of the Past and a Look into the Future
| Authors: | Chia-Jung Tsay and Max H. Bazerman |
|---|---|
| Published: | August 20, 2009 |
| Paper Release Date: | July 2009 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
The art and science of negotiation has evolved greatly over the past three decades, thanks to advances in the social sciences in collaboration with other disciplines and in tandem with the practical application of new ideas. In this paper, HBS doctoral student Chia-Jung Tsay and professor Max H. Bazerman review the recent past and highlight promising trends for the future of negotiation research. In the early 1980s, Cambridge, Massachusetts, was a hot spot on the negotiations front, as scholars from different disciplines began interacting in the exploration of exciting new concepts. The field took a big leap forward with the creation of the Program on Negotiation, an interdisciplinary, multicollege research center based at Harvard University. At the same time, Roger Fisher and William Ury's popular book Getting to Yes (1981) had a pronounced impact on how practitioners think about negotiations. On a more scholarly front, a related, yet profoundly different change began with the publication of HBS professor emeritus Howard Raiffa's book The Art and Science of Negotiation (1982), which for years to come transformed how researchers would think about and conduct empirical research.
In Favor of Clear Thinking: Incorporating Moral Rules into a Wise Cost-Benefit Analysis
| Authors: | Max H. Bazerman and Joshua D. Greene |
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| Published: | August 13, 2009 |
| Paper Release Date: | July 2009 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
Policy decisions may be the most important set of decisions we make as a society. In this realm, moral rules often play an active and dysfunctional role. The typical way in which we make decisions—by weighing them individually—leads us to overuse moral rules in a manner that is inconsistent with the more reflective set of preferences we would identify through joint consideration of options. In their response to a companion article in Perspectives on Psychological Science, Max Bazerman, of HBS, and Joshua D. Greene, of Harvard University, argue that cost-benefit analysis (CBA) is unfairly stereotyped. The critique of CBA in the companion article could be better framed as a set of considerations that can contribute to more careful CBAs.
Policy Bundling to Overcome Loss Aversion: A Method for Improving Legislative Outcomes
| Authors: | Katherine L. Milkman, Mary Carol Mazza, Lisa L. Shu, Chia-Jung Tsay and Max H. Bazerman |
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| Published: | July 15, 2009 |
| Paper Release Date: | June 2009 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
Citizens hope their elected representatives will pass legislation that creates net gains that outweigh net harms—in other words, legislation that has positive expected value for society. However, economist Joseph Stiglitz has noted that legislators often fail to pass such legislation, even when its net positive expected value is highly significant. The psychology and economics literature suggests that legislators face an uphill battle when proposing legislation that has both costs and benefits due to the power of loss aversion, a cognitive bias that has been found to cause individuals to dramatically overweight losses relative to gains. Here the authors propose and test a new type of policy bundling technique in which related bills that have both costs and benefits are combined in a way that reduces the harmful effects of loss aversion.
On Good Scholarship, Goal Setting, and Scholars Gone Wild
| Authors: | Lisa D. Ordóñez, Maurice E. Schweitzer, Adam D. Galinsky, and Max H. Bazerman |
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| Published: | May 20, 2009 |
| Paper Release Date: | April 2009 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
When confronted by anecdotal evidence and some causal evidence, how should scholars—and indeed businesses and society—react? In this response to a critique in the journal Academy of Management Perspectives, the authors articulate the aims of their article "Goals Gone Wild: How Goals Systematically Harm Individuals and Organizations," describe points of disagreement with the critics, offer a definition of good scholarship, and suggest a program of research for future studies of goal setting.
Sharpening Your Skills: Managing Teams
| Published: | May 14, 2009 |
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| Feature: | Sharpening Your Skills |
The ability to lead teams is fast becoming a critical skill for all managers in the 21st century. Here are four HBS Working Knowledge stories from the archives that address everything from how teams learn to turning individual performers into team players.
When Goal Setting Goes Bad
| Q&A with: | Max H. Bazerman |
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| Published: | March 2, 2009 |
| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
If you ever wondered about the real value of goal setting in your organization, join the club. Despite the mantra that goals are good, the process of setting beneficial goals is harder than it looks. New research by HBS professor Max H. Bazerman and colleagues explores the hidden cost when stretch goals are misguided.
Barriers to Acting in Time on Energy and Strategies for Overcoming Them
| Author: | Max H. Bazerman |
|---|---|
| Published: | February 26, 2009 |
| Paper Release Date: | October 2008 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
What can the new presidential administration do to address our energy problems? For the past decade, most experts have accepted climate change as a fact, making the issue difficult to ignore—yet many politicians, and the voters who elect them, have done exactly that: ignored the problem. Scientists, policymakers, and others have come up with good ideas to address climate change and other energy issues. Many people seek to identify one cause of climate change, when it is abundantly clear that there are multiple causes. Cognitive, organizational, and political barriers exist that prevent us from addressing energy problems despite clearly identified courses of action. The creation and implementation of wise policy recommendations requires us to anticipate resistance to change and develop strategies that can overcome these barriers. Enacting wise legislation to act in time to solve energy problems requires surmounting cognitive, organizational, and political barriers to change.
Dishonest Deed, Clear Conscience: Self-Preservation through Moral Disengagement and Motivated Forgetting
| Authors: | Lisa L. Shu, Francesca Gino, and Max H. Bazerman |
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| Published: | February 19, 2009 |
| Paper Release Date: | January 2009, revised April 2009 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
Why do people engage in unethical behavior repeatedly over time? In Everybody Does It! (1994), Thomas Gabor documents the pervasive immorality of ordinary people. Challenging the stereotype that only criminals violate the law, Gabor describes the numerous transgressions of everyday life and suggests that the excuses people make for their dishonest behavior parallel the justifications criminals make for their crimes. This common tendency of people to justify and distance themselves from their unethical behavior has captured the attention of several psychologists, and a long stream of research has documented differences in the way people think about their own ethical behavior and that of others. Harvard Business School's Lisa Shu and Max Bazerman, with colleague Francesca Gino, show that seemingly innocuous aspects of the environment can promote the decision to act ethically or unethically.
Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side Effects of Over-Prescribing Goal Setting
| Authors: | Lisa D. Ordóñez, Maurice E. Schweitzer, Adam D. Galinsky, and Max H. Bazerman |
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| Published: | February 11, 2009 |
| Paper Release Date: | January 2009 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
For decades, goal setting has been promoted as a halcyon pill for improving employee motivation and performance in organizations. Advocates of goal setting argue that for goals to be successful, they should be specific and challenging, and countless studies find that specific, challenging goals motivate performance far better than "do your best" exhortations. The authors of this article, however, argue that it is often these same characteristics of goals that cause them to "go wild."
Published in 2008
Dirty Work, Clean Hands: The Moral Psychology of Indirect Agency
| Authors: | Neeru Paharia, Karim S. Kassam, Joshua D. Greene, and Max H. Bazerman |
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| Published: | October 9, 2008 |
| Paper Release Date: | August 2008, revised January 2009 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
When powerful people do morally questionable things, they rarely interact directly with their putative victims. Mobsters have hit men. CEOs have vice presidents, lawyers, and accountants. More specifically, the powerful are likely to carry out their intentions through the actions of other agents, with varying degrees of explicit direction and control. This working paper describes four studies that explore the effects of such "indirect agency" on moral judgment.
Nameless + Harmless = Blameless: When Seemingly Irrelevant Factors Influence Judgment of (Un)ethical Behavior
| Authors: | Francesca Gino, Lisa L. Shu, and Max H. Bazerman |
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| Published: | October 2, 2008 |
| Paper Release Date: | August 2008 (revised October 2009) |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
Most of us regularly make ethical judgments about others' behavior and make decisions regarding whether or not to punish others' unethical behavior. Although many of us know how we would rationally like to behave in these situations, little prior research has explored the systematic errors we commit in the process of evaluating others' unethical behavior and acting upon it. The present research by Gino, Shu, and Bazerman focuses on the effects of both the outcome of unethical acts and the identifiability of the victim of wrongdoing on ethical judgments and decisions to punish unethical behavior.
How Can Decision Making Be Improved?
| Authors: | Dolly Chugh, Katherine L. Milkman, and Max H. Bazerman |
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| Published: | August 28, 2008 |
| Paper Release Date: | June 2008, revised July 2008 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
While scholars can describe how people make decisions, and can envision how much better decision-making could be, they still have little understanding of how to help people overcome blind spots and behave optimally. Chugh, Milkman, and Bazerman organize the scattered knowledge that judgment and decision-making scholars have amassed over several decades about how to reduce biased decision-making. Their analysis of the existing literature on improvement strategies is designed to highlight the most promising avenues for future research.
No Harm, No Foul: The Outcome Bias in Ethical Judgments
| Authors: | Francesca Gino, Don A. Moore, and Max H. Bazerman |
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| Published: | April 1, 2008 |
| Paper Release Date: | February 2008 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
Too often, workers are evaluated based on results rather than on the quality of the decision. Given that most consequential business decisions involve some uncertainty, the upshot is that organizations wind up rewarding luck rather than wisdom. From a rational decision-making perspective, people's decisions should be evaluated based on the information the decision maker had available to him or her at the time, and not based on the ultimate results. This paper tests predictions about this effect, known as the outcome bias, in two studies in which participants were asked to consider various ethically questionable behaviors. Participants were also given information about the outcome of such behaviors and were asked to rate the ethicality of the described actions with or without the outcome information. The findings extend prior research in psychology and ethics.
Modeling Expert Opinions on Food Healthiness: A Nutrition Metric
| Authors: | Jolie Mae Martin, John Leonard Beshears, Katherine Lyford Milkman, Max H. Bazerman, and Lisa Sutherland |
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| Published: | March 18, 2008 |
| Paper Release Date: | March 2008 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
Despite an increased standard of living in the United States and other developed countries, health problems attributable to poor nutrition persist in part due to consumers' inability to translate the dietary advice of nutrition experts into anything actionable. Citing the improvement of public health as a primary objective, numerous studies have highlighted the need for a nutritional scoring system that is both comprehensive in its coverage of food products and easily understood by consumers. In this paper the researchers advance this objective by proposing a nutrition metric that is based on the current views of leading experts in the field. The metric can be used to score any food or beverage for which several component nutrient quantities are known.
Psychological Influence in Negotiation: An Introduction Long Overdue
| Authors: | Deepak Malhotra and Max H. Bazerman |
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| Published: | February 8, 2008 |
| Paper Release Date: | January 2008 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
This paper attempts to encourage a better dialogue between research on social influence and on negotiation. It provides an overview of the literature on both areas, and identifies opportunities for creating more effective and useful research. First, HBS professors Deepak Malhotra and Max Bazerman identify those elements of psychological influence that do not require the influencer to change the economic or structural aspects of the bargaining situation in order to persuade the target. Second, they review prior research on behavioral decision-making in negotiation to identify those ideas that may be relevant to influence in negotiation. Third, they provide a framework for thinking about how to leverage behavioral decision research to wield influence in negotiation. Fourth, they consider how targets of influence might defend against these tactics. Fifth, because psychological influence is, by definition, aimed at achieving one's own ends through the strategic manipulation of another's judgment, they consider the ethical issues surrounding its application in negotiation.
See No Evil: When We Overlook Other People's Unethical Behavior
| Authors: | Francesca Gino, Don A. Moore, and Max H. Bazerman |
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| Published: | January 11, 2008 |
| Paper Release Date: | January 2008 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
Even good people sometimes act unethically without their own awareness. This paper explores psychological processes as they affect the ethical perception of others' behavior, and concludes with implications for organizations. First, there is a tendency for people to overlook unethical behavior in others when recognizing such behavior would harm them. Second, people might readily ignore unethical behavior when others have an agent do their dirty work for them. Third, gradual moral decay leads people to grow comfortable with behavior to which they would otherwise object. Fourth, the tendency to value outcomes over processes can lead us to accept unethical processes for far too long.
Published in 2007
Mental Accounting and Small Windfalls: Evidence from an Online Grocer
| Authors: | Katherine L. Milkman, John Beshears, Todd Rogers, and Max H. Bazerman |
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| Published: | October 12, 2007 |
| Paper Release Date: | September 2007 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
In the course of daily life, people occasionally receive small windfalls. Every so often we are handed a gift certificate for $5 off a meal, find a $10 bill on the street, or win $20 in an impromptu game of poker. According to standard economic theory, these types of small windfalls should have no noticeable effect on spending decisions because such windfalls constitute meaningless changes to lifetime wealth. However, if you have ever been the recipient of a small windfall, you may remember thinking about ways to spend this unexpected cash, buying items you might not have otherwise purchased. This kind of behavior can be interpreted as an example of "mental accounting" as theorized by economists Richard H. Thaler and Hersh M. Shefrin. This paper presents evidence supporting some of the implications of a theory of mental accounting in the domain of online grocery shopping.
Harnessing Our Inner Angels and Demons: What We Have Learned About Want/Should Conflicts and How That Knowledge Can Help Us Reduce Short-Sighted Decision Making
| Authors: | Katherine L. Milkman, Todd Rogers, and Max H. Bazerman |
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| Published: | October 10, 2007 |
| Paper Release Date: | September 2007 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
Many of the most important problems facing the world today are exacerbated by myopic decision-making. Examples include climate change, under-saving for retirement, deficit spending, and obesity. As observed by Freud, contemporary psychologists and researchers, and entertainers, people everywhere struggle to choose between doing what they want to do and what they should do. This paper synthesizes 15 years of empirical explorations of this "want/should" conflict and discusses the most important applications of this work. The results of recent studies have the potential to help individuals and policymakers by arming them with insights about how to increase the chances that they and their constituents, respectively, will favor options that are in their best interest.
Dealing with the 'Irrational' Negotiator
| Published: | October 3, 2007 |
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| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
"Negotiators who are quick to label the other party 'irrational' do so at great potential cost to themselves," say HBS professors Deepak Malhotra and Max H. Bazerman. Their new book, Negotiation Genius, combines expertise in psychology with practical examples to show how anyone can improve dealmaking skills. In this excerpt, Malhotra and Bazerman describe what to do when the other party's behavior does not make sense.
Encouraging Dissent in Decision-Making
| Published: | October 1, 2007 |
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| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
Our natural tendency to maintain silence and not rock the boat, a flaw at once personal and organizational, results in bad—sometimes deadly—decisions. Think New Coke, The Bay of Pigs, and the Columbia space shuttle disaster, for starters. Here's how leaders can encourage all points of view.
