Artificial Intelligence is revolutionizing all fields of business, forcing academics and practitioners to revise their fundamentals. To discuss these new challenges, HEC Associate Professor Carlos Serrano and his colleague Thomas Åstebro organized a groundbreaking workshop inviting some of the world’s top researchers to compare their approach to those of leading industrialists. In our latest Breakthroughs, we discuss some of the takeaways with Serrano, an academic in the school’s Department of Economics and Decision Sciences.
How to find a balance between executives and employees' objectives to attract and retain talents? How to show legitimacy and trust to align with citizens' values in a time of conflicts? What is the good timing to leave a company? Understanding these multifaceted questions is key for navigating the talent competition and fostering personal career growth. Today, students seek ethical employers, while employees yearn for deeper meaning in their work. Simultaneously, governments and consumers closely examine firms' practices throughout the supply chain. In this edition, researchers from diverse fields offer insights and business cases gleaned from their investigations.
These days, workers at management consulting, investment banking, accounting, and law firms tend to be as interested in their career paths as they are in their salaries—which often means jumping from one firm to another in pursuit of better opportunities. But their career paths and motivation can be powerfully influenced by what sort of tasks an employer assigns to them. A study by Raphaël Lévy, Associate Professor of Economics and Decision Sciences at HEC Paris, and his colleague Heski Bar-Isaac, Professor in the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, explores how these firms’ task allocation strikes a balance between producing value for the business and offering workers opportunities to prove their talent. Three key findings: • “Lose it to use it”: To attract and motivate employees, employers sometimes sell their jobs as springboards to a great career even outside the firm. • Employees are motivated to perform when granted exposure on the labor market and when assigned to tasks allowing them to showcase their skills. • Different human resources policies coexist: some firms consent to high exposure to their employees to boost their professional advancement, others, more concerned with employee retention, offer flatter career paths.
By Raphaël Levy
The 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference or Conference of the Parties, more commonly referred to as COP28, is the 28th United Nations Climate Change conference. This year’s annual summit at Expo City, Dubai ends on December 12, 2023. Before it began on November 30, we invited Igor Shishlov, lecturer at HEC Paris in Climate Change Economics, to discuss the evolution of the international climate regime over the past 30 years before arriving to COP 28. Shishlov is also the Head of Climate Finance at Perspectives Climate Group and has been researching environmental economics for over a decade. These are extracts of his November 23 RESKILL Masterclass.
A recent study by economists Antonin Bergeaud (HEC Paris), Arthur Guillouzouic (IPP), Emeric Henry (SciencePo and CEPR), and Clément Malgouyres (CNRS and CREST) shows how government spending on academic research spurs private companies with connections to academia to spend more on their own R&D efforts as well. By studying reports produced by academic researchers and with data on labor mobility and public-private R&D partnerships, Bergeaud and his colleagues developed a new way to measure the proximity between academics and business, making us understand its benefits for innovation.
By Antonin Bergeaud
After obtaining their diploma, graduates with a Ph.D. can choose between becoming academics, joining a large company, or founding or joining a start-up. The fraction of Ph.D.s in science and engineering who have started or joined a new firm has declined by approximately 38% in the U.S. since 1997. Entrepreneurship and Innovation Professor Thomas Astebro of HEC Paris, explains this phenomenon, summarizing his article published this summer in the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal with Serguey Brgauinsky and Yuheng Ding of the University of Maryland.
By Thomas Åstebro
Most decisions have consequences that are uncertain and materialize in the future. Perception of uncertainty may be biased when it regards the future. Indeed, recent research led by Emmanuel Kemel, Professor of Economics and Decision Sciences at HEC Paris and CNRS researcher, and Corina Paraschiv, Professor at LIRAES, has found that people are more likely to take risks if the consequences of their decision aren’t felt immediately.
By Emmanuel Kemel
Artificial Intelligence has a potentially disruptive impact on organizations, firms, and society at large. The latest mind-boggling illustration came with the discovery of chatGPT’s mesmerizing results in November 2022. This followed a fall of investments in AI last year in Silicon Valley. From analyzing data in one’s business to increasing customer engagement and replacing humans in routine tasks across industries, AI is becoming more relevant to our lives and economy every day. Everyone talks about it, but do we really understand its opportunities and threats? And how can we make the best out of it, whilst ensuring that ethical requirements are met?
On the eve of the 11th annual D-TEA conference, promoting Dialogues between Theory, Experimental findings and Applications of decision-making (hence the acronym), we talk to its co-organizer Professor Itzhak Gilboa. Last year, the professor of decisions sciences was ranked by Stanford University in the world’s top six theoretical economists. Gilboa’s research centers on decision under uncertainty and decision models whereby uncertainty can’t be quantified. That is called non-Bayesian decision models – as opposed to the Bayesian approach which assigns probabilities based on experience or best guesses. The HEC Paris academic questions these axioms, or self-evident truths. He believes his research can help answer unforeseen crises, called black swans, like the war in Ukraine, health pandemics or the climate crisis. Extracts.
An important concern in the current wave of inflation is whether agents such as firms and households perceive price changes to be persistent and whether this leads them to change their decisions, for example on consumption. In a recent paper, forthcoming in the Journal of Monetary Economics, we have investigated how households form inflation expectations and how they connect these expectations to their consumption decisions, using French household survey data from 2004 to 2018.
By Eric Mengus
