This study presents evidence on the role of moral support on performance in a competitive environment. We take advantage of an unusual change in the Argentinean football legislation. In August 2013, as a matter of National security, the Argentinean government forced all the teams of the first...

Business practices and performance vary widely across businesses within the same sector. A key outstanding question is why profitable practices do not readily diffuse. We conduct a field experiment among urban retailers in Indonesia to study whether alleviating informational and behavioral...

To boost employees' performance, firms often offer monetary bonuses when production goals are reached. However, the available evidence indicates that the particular level at which a goal is set is critical to the effectiveness of this practice. Goals must be challenging yet achievable. Computing...

We study whether poverty can induce affective states that decrease productivity. In a controlled laboratory setting, we find that subjects randomly assigned to a treatment, in which they view a video featuring individuals that live in extreme poverty, exhibit lower subsequent productivity...

Small-scale entrepreneurs are ubiquitous in emerging market economies, yet very few graduate to become larger businesses. This paper asks whether such entrepreneurs aspire to grow and, if so, on which dimensions of the business? What factors influence these aspirations, how realistic are they,...

What determines the adoption of electronic-payment instruments? Do these instruments impact business outcomes, in particular access to finance? To shed light on these questions, we conducted a Randomized-Controlled-Trial with Kenyan SMEs. Our experiment released barriers to adopt a novel payment...

If decision-makers (DMs) do not always do what is in their best interest, what do choices reveal about welfare? This paper shows how observed choices can reveal whether the DM is acting in her own best interest. We study a framework that relaxes rationality in a way that is common across a...

Allowing for the possibility that individuals may not always act in their best interest, what is the connection between choice and welfare? This paper addresses this concern by studying the normative implications of a general model of individual decision-making that allows for suboptimal...