Mack Institute Research Archives

Assessing and Improving Emotional Experiences of Hospitalized Patients

In one of our recent studies, we found that nearly 50% of patients who desired emotional support during their hospitalizations reported that they did not always receive it. Not receiving such support is associated with poorer patient-reported care experiences, which research links to issues such as low adherence to treatment plans and ultimately worse clinical outcomes. Our project aims to improve patients’ emotional experiences during hospital stays, and thereby strengthen health care delivery, through organizational intervention. Our proposed intervention, which is based on findings from our prior studies of patient care experiences and co-designed with research site collaborators, consists of a human component paired with a technological (i.e., artificial intelligence-enabled) component. Together, these components are expected to enable assessment of emotional needs and enhanced emotional support at the times and in the forms hospitalized patients desire. We plan to test our intervention via a one-year field experiment with sites affiliated with a large medical center, evaluating the intervention using data from electronic records, surveys, and interviews of patients and hospital staff. Several industry stakeholders, especially hospitals, are expected to be interested in our results because the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), as well as other purchasers of health care, adjust hospital payments partially based on hospitals’ patient experience scores.…Read More

Financial Incentives to Adopt Green Technologies

Regulators often seek to spur the adoption of green technologies (such as electric vehicles) using one of two financial subsidies: lowering the upfront cost of buying the technology (such as an electric vehicle subsidy) and lowering the marginal cost of using the technology (such as an electricity tariff subsidy). This project evaluates how the economic characteristics of a setting or technology determine which of these is more effective in terms of tons of CO2 abated per dollar of government expenditure. Between August—December 2025 we implemented a randomized study with 2,100 households in Nakuru County, Kenya to study this problem among induction stoves in Kenya, which abate approximately the same amount of CO2 per year as the switch from a gasoline vehicle to an electric vehicle. We randomly allocated loan access, fixed cost subsidies, and marginal cost subsidies to study the relative impacts on electric stove adoption. We collected more than 5 million measurements of induction stove usage (15-minute data, in Watts, for more than 600 induction stove buyers), more than 100 million temperature measurements to record charcoal cookstove usage (2-minute data, in Celsius, for more than 1,700 charcoal stove users), and more than 20,000 loan instalment payments. Over the next 12 months we will analyze these data to understand the impact of subsidy dollars on fuel…Read More

Is It Better to Pursue Goals in Sequence or in Parallel?

Sophia Pink, PhD Candidate, Operations, Information, and Decisions, The Wharton School; Jose Cervantez, PhD Candidate, Operations, Information, and Decisions, The Wharton School; Katy Milkman, Operations, Information, and Decisions, The Wharton School Abstract: When people want to build multiple habits, is it better to start them all at once or to…Read More

Leadership Composition and Personal Narrative Framing in Female-Focused Ventures: A Hiring Experiment

Tiantian Yang, Management, The Wharton School Abstract: Female-led ventures in female-focused industries (e.g., FemTech) face a unique tension between authenticity and perceived legitimacy in the eyes of potential employees. While identity-based lived experience can signal market insight and mission alignment, it may also conflict with gendered norms about who leads…Read More

The Impact of Private Equity Ownership on Medical Technologies

Private Equity (PE) investment in healthcare is growing rapidly. Because medical-technology firms shape healthcare innovation, spending, and quality—and rely heavily on public insurance reimbursements—PE ownership in this sector could have substantial long-term implications for innovation, costs, and patient outcomes. Yet most existing research on PE in health care focuses on care delivery, despite 63% of PE healthcare investments involving medical devices, pharmaceuticals, and biotechnology. Our study will provide, to our knowledge, the first causal evidence on how PE ownership affects innovation, pricing, financial performance, and product safety among medical-technology firms.…Read More

Green Subsidies with Demand Distortions

Standard Pigouvian theory predicts that externalities should be corrected at the margin. However, demand distortions such as credit constraints or behavioral biases create a wedge between marginal benefit and marginal cost. While these distortions can lower aggregate abatement, they can increase the efficiency of green subsidy spending. In theory, this happens through two channels: by shifting the marginal adopter toward higher private and social benefits and by increasing demand elasticity. We test these predictions by cross-randomizing fixed cost subsidies, marginal cost subsidies, and loan access for an induction stove among 2,134 charcoal users in Kenya. Marginal cost subsidies that lower electricity costs by up to 75% have a precise zero effect on both adoption and usage. Fixed cost subsidies abate at just US$13 per ton of CO2e, and demand distortions are responsible for making this cost low: reducing credit constraints raises abatement costs to US$22 per tCO2e. These efficiency gains operate through the two hypothesized channels: demand distortions increase the marginal positive externality by 19% and lower the subsidy cost per marginal abatement by 30%. We estimate the model to generate counterfactual simulations and find that, without any distortions, abatement costs would reach US$122 per tCO2e. The social welfare gain would be US$3.1 per subsidy dollar; demand distortions increase this to US$20. These results suggest that contexts with larger demand distortions, including many low- and middle-income economies, could generate some of the lowest-cost opportunities on the abatement cost curve.…Read More

Research Spotlight: Hamsa Bastani and Angel Tsai-Hsuan Chung On More Effective Classroom AI

Headshots of two people, one with long dark hair wearing a dark jacket and blue top, and the other with long dark hair wearing a dark blouse.

For many students, asking ChatGPT for homework help has replaced raising a hand in class or going to office hours. As AI becomes a default classroom tutor, educators are grappling with a new question: how do you design these tools so they actually support learning? A new paper from Angel Tsai-Hsuan Chung (Wharton, PhD…Read More

New White Paper: Can AI Manage an Entire Medical Decision Process?

Stethoscope resting on a laptop keyboard with a person writing in the background, representing healthcare and digital technology integration.

Artificial intelligence has already proven it can perform specific medical tasks, such as interpreting X-rays or flagging risks in patient data. But caring for patients is not a series of isolated decisions. It is a dynamic process that unfolds over time, requiring clinicians to interpret signals from multiple sources and…Read More

New Report: Generative AI Adoption in the U.S. Military

Stylized depiction of the American flag with glowing red stripes and star patterns against a dark, mountainous landscape.

The U.S. Department of Defense is one of the most complex organizations in the world — so how is it approaching generative AI? A new report from Wharton’s Prof. Serguei Netessine and WG’25 Andrew Stiles examines the DoD’s early steps toward integrating GenAI and highlights lessons that industry leaders can…Read More

The Six Dimensions of Strong Theory

One of the most important features on which to judge the merit of any academic paper is the strength of its theory. Although commentary about what constitutes strong theory is widespread, there is no holistic account of the full range of existing perspectives. To address this oversight, I construct a typology composed of six dimensions of strong theory: importance, interestingness, actionability, generality, simplicity, and accuracy.…Read More

Outlier Neglect: A Decision-Making Bias with Implications for Hiring, Investment, and Consumer Choices

We propose and test a novel decision-making bias called “outlier neglect.” In general, when evaluating people, places, and opportunities with many features, people focus on the average of those features. For example, when hiring a team, people want the average performance of the team to be high, so they try to hire individuals who perform well on average. But in many cases, the relevant metric is not the average, but the best – for example, when a pharmaceutical company tests different types of malaria drugs, their success depends on the best-performing drug (not the average) because they can scale up the best and ignore lesser performers. We propose that evaluators neglect the importance of outliers in such cases and instead focus on portfolio averages. In some cases, this leads to suboptimal outcomes (e.g. in the drug scenario above, or it may be better to hire someone to join a team who is amazing at one specialized task than someone who is higher on average). We test this bias and show that across many contexts – including personnel selection, creative idea generation, consumer decisions, and investment strategy – people neglect outliers in favor of the average, leading to suboptimal decisions.…Read More

Business Model Innovation for Renewables

Consumers who want access to renewable energy have two main options: install renewable energy generation equipment “behind” the electrical meter (e.g., solar panels on the roof) or buy energy from a utility company, which would then source energy from generation companies. The first approach has obvious diseconomies of scale. It is only available to homeowners, while the second approach requires over-reliance on utility companies, which may not contract with renewable suppliers or may offer an expensive mix of renewable and nonrenewable energy. We study an alternative innovative business model, “community solar,” whereby consumers subscribe to own a portion of the energy generated by a large solar plant. We partner with Origo Energy, a Brazilian company that pioneered this model in South America, and we analyze the behavior of consumers who switch from the traditional business model to Origo’s subscription to understand boundary conditions for community solar.…Read More

Grid-Scale Mobile Battery Energy Storage Systems

Grid-scale electricity storage technologies play a vital role in balancing electricity supply and demand, particularly as renewable energy sources like wind and solar introduce greater variability into power systems. Lithium-ion batteries, accounting for 90% of U.S. electricity storage capacity, are widely regarded as essential to the clean energy transition. By storing excess electricity during periods of low demand, and thus low prices, and releasing it when demand, and thus price, is high, storage technologies smooth fluctuations in generation and earn significant revenues from arbitrage. Battery operators strategically locate systems in areas with high nodal price variability, but current practices often fail to adapt to changing market conditions, risking inefficient investments with diminishing price spread at selected locations.

Mobile Energy Storage Systems (MESS) present a transformative innovation, enabling both temporal and geographic flexibility in energy storage. Unlike existing Stationary Energy Storage Systems, MESS can be relocated to provide storage services at different points in the grid as market dynamics evolve with rapid addition of transmission and renewable generation capacity. Although MESS technologies currently find niche applications, such as disaster relief, advancements in material technology and declining battery costs make utility-scale adoption plausible. This study addresses a critical gap by modeling MESS fleet operations, analyzing their feasibility, and comparing their financial performance against stationary systems in renewable-rich grids. Our findings aim to guide developers and grid operators in leveraging MESS for enhanced energy flexibility and resilience in renewable-rich grids.…Read More

Private Equity Ownership and Human Capital Acquisition Strategy

The private equity industry has grown significantly in the past decades, and this explosive growth has generated much interest on the impact of private equity’s footprint on the economy and the labor market. Using career history data from nearly 11 million employees at 16,137 private equity-backed firms from 2000 to 2024, I find that firms controlled by private equity recruit specialized managerial workforce. Post-deal, newly hired senior executives and middle managers are more likely to have previously worked at a private equity-backed firm. Moreover, they are also more likely to have worked at a firm backed by the same private equity owner. I find evidence that some private equity firms facilitate managerial mobility within their portfolio, creating an “internal” network of senior and middle managers that mirrors the way public corporations have traditionally groomed executives internally. Altogether, my results suggest that private equity firms rely on specialized managerial workforce who are familiar with private equity operations and with a specific owner’s playbook.…Read More

The Hidden Tolls of Reputational Risk: Using Media Sentiment to Detect Threats to Corporate Reputation and Its Financial Impact

Corporate reputation is a vital strategic asset for organizations. Yet, its socially constructed nature has made it challenging for scholars to agree on a precise definition or develop a reliable measurement strategy for it. Historically, scholars have relied on measures that are useful for assessing reputation earned but fail to capture its dynamic nature or identify emerging threats in real time, exposing a critical blind spot in both theory and practice. To address these limitations, I propose Cumulative Abnormal Media Sentiment (CAMS), a novel approach for identifying and analyzing reputational risks and opportunities by tracking abnormal volatility in stakeholder sentiment. To validate this construct, I conduct a quasi-replication of Caroline Flammer’s 2013 event study, extending her analysis of corporate news coverage of environmental events for U.S. publicly traded organizations through 2024. Using this expanded dataset, I measure reputational signals surrounding coverage of eco-friendly and eco-harmful corporate behavior. My analysis reveals a direct relationship between reputational risk from eco-harmful events and stock price volatility. This research offers new insights into the established relationship between reputation and financial performance, while introducing a replicable and adaptable measurement tool for event study analyses, equipping future researchers with a robust framework for examining the dynamic interplay between reputation and financial outcomes.…Read More

Generative AI for Efficient and Equitable Healthcare on a Global Scale

This proposal presents two innovative research projects designed to harness the transformative power of AI to enhance healthcare outcomes. In close collaboration with the Somaliland Ministry of Health and Development (MoHD), the Taiwan International Cooperation Development Fund (ICDF), and Penn researchers, we aim to tackle critical healthcare challenges in Somaliland, one of East Africa’s most impoverished regions. Our main goal is to develop effective and safe AI methodologies to improve healthcare accessibility, quality, and efficiency. These projects will deepen our understanding of how AI can be applied in safety-critical scenarios and resource-constrained environments, facilitating healthcare advancement on a global scale.…Read More

Do We Write What AI Tells Us To? LLMs as Persuasive Agents

Consumers are increasingly turning to large language models (LLMs) as an aid to everyday writing (i.e., email, text). While it is clear that LLMs can enhance the grammatical and syntactical structure of written communication, might they also lead people to communicate things that depart from their original intentions? We explored this question through an experimental paradigm in which participants were first asked to create an opinionated message, then viewed a suggested revision generated by the Chat-GPT 4 LLM that was either more positive or negative than the original. Results of our experiment reveal that LLMs do exert a substantial influence on written communication, but this effect has important moderators. Notably, participants who initially conveyed negative (vs. positive) opinions were less resistant to persuasion from LLMs, and text revisions that made a message more positive (vs. negative) were embraced more readily.…Read More

Effects of Prior Authorization on Medicaid Prescription Drug Access

Prescription drug spending has increased rapidly over the last two decades. Prior authorization represents an innovative strategy in Medicaid’s prescription drug benefit management, using administrative tools to influence prescribing behaviors and control expenses. State Medicaid programs have widely adopted prior authorization policies to curb spending and enhance the targeting of treatments. Despite the importance of these policies for Medicaid, there is limited evidence of their impact on prescription drug access and patient outcomes. In this project, we use a novel regression-discontinuity design to study the consequences of prior authorization. We study the impact of these policies on the prescribing of drugs covered by prior authorization and substitution to other drugs as well as heterogeneous impacts across geographic areas and socio-demographic characteristics. We also assess the importance of different design features of these policies and their impact on inappropriate and appropriate prescribing.…Read More

Exploring the Demand Side for Commercializing Academic Science

Most of the prior research on the topic of commercializing academic science approaches the topic from the supply side (innovations from academic institutions and scientists). The needs and behavior of firms are rarely considered in this literature. We aim to do so by using a variety of data sources, both proprietary and public, to characterize technologies and situations in which firms are likely to license academic science. Doing so will also affect startup formation to commercialize such technologies, an increasingly important commercialization avenue.…Read More

Off on a Limb: Balancing the Decision to Amputate

Rising healthcare costs remain a significant challenge in the U.S., with one major contributor being the increasing incidence of amputations due to vascular diseases. The number of vascular disease-related amputations in the U.S. is projected to double by 2050, reaching an estimated 3.6 million cases. In 2023 alone, Medicare’s annual expenditure exceeded $900 billion, with $24.5 billion (~2.72%) allocated to amputation procedures and post-amputation care. Unfortunately, nearly 50% of individuals who undergo vascular disease-related amputations die within five years, a mortality rate higher than that of breast, colon, or prostate cancer.…Read More