Making Sense of Evidence, Markets, and Business

My LinkedIn feed came alive with this post:       Francesca Gino is the Harvard ...

In 2016, the finance company MSCI released a study claiming that CEO pay bears no link to company performance. It couldn’t have been better timed. That year, soaring CEO pay was controversial on both sides of the Atlantic. The UK government was so concerned that it launched an official inquiry into it (and other aspects of how companies are run).

Last week, Harvard Business Review published an article entitled "Research: How Women Improve Decision-Making on ...

Corporate governance...can genuinely add value for business. I was delighted to see a company’s study reach this conclusion. Corporate governance is my main research topic; I’m a Fellow of the European Corporate Governance Institute, and at the time I was Academic Director of the LBS Centre for Corporate Governance.

Someone thoughtfully sent me a Harvard Business Review article, ‘How Your Company's Social Purpose Can Also Drive ...

Today, BlackRock released a study, ‘Lifting Financial Performance By Investing in Women’ which has already been ...

Many forms of misinformation have a clear source — authors or journalists misquoting a study, or a famous person giving an extreme quote. That allows us to check the underlying source, as in this example.

One of my research fields in behavioural economics, which suggests that people don’t always act in perfectly rational ways. A famous experiment in this field is known as the Ultimatum Game. There are two players, a ‘proposer’ whom we’ll call Amelia, and a ‘responder’, Bilal.

In an earlier post, I covered a Moore Global study claiming that companies with strong ESG performance enjoyed higher profits. If all companies took ESG as seriously as the ESG leaders, their profits would rise by $4 trillion in aggregate.

In late 2022, a CEO posted this on LinkedIn: ‘Companies that place importance on #ESG factors saw profits rise 9.1% and revenue grow 9.7% over the past 3 years’. Having written a book on the value of ESG, I was intrigued.

The first step in overcoming confirmation bias is to check the facts, even if you’re tempted to take them at face value. But doing so is not always straightforward. My TED talk opened with how Belle Gibson claimed to have beaten cancer through diet. Since Belle’s medical records are private, the person on the street can’t easily check this claim.

One of the most famous psychology experiments conducted on children is the Marshmallow Study. In a 1972 paper, Walter Mischel and co-authors gave three-to-five-year-olds at the Stanford Bing Nursery School a marshmallow. They could eat it now, but if they waited 15 minutes, they’d get a second marshmallow.