John Hershey - Faculty Research in Knowledge@Wharton

Promises, Lies and Apologies: Is It Possible to Restore Trust?

Wed, 26 Jul 2006 12:03:13 EST

In the workplace, trust is essential to day-to-day business, whether it's one colleague trusting that another will do her share of a project, an employee trusting that his boss will reward him for working long hours to meet a deadline, or a customer trusting that a company will fill an order correctly and deliver it on time. The intertwining issues of trust, deception, apologies and promises are explored in a new research paper titled, "Promises and Lies: Restoring Violated Trust," by three Wharton professors who came up with a unique laboratory experiment to see what happens when trust breaks down. "While deception may be tempting because it can be used to increase short-term profits for the deceiver," the researchers note, "we find that the long-term costs of deception are very high."

2002: The Year of the Apology

Wed, 04 Dec 2002 00:00:00 EST

Earlier this fall, Safeway, a food retailer based in Pleasanton, Calif., took out radio and television ads apologizing to customers of some recently-acquired grocery stores for changes in these stores� operations. Safeway joined what seems to be a long list of apologizers � from investment bankers to fast food corporations � who have recently expressed regret for a variety of mistakes. With a year full of apologies now coming to a close, Knowledge@Wharton looks at how effective apologies are, what they signal, when they should be offered and whether they can backfire.

Genetic Testing�s Uneasy Relationship with Life Insurance

Wed, 01 Mar 2000 13:58:03 EST

On February 8, 2000, U.S. President Clinton signed an executive order prohibiting federal agencies from collecting genetic information from their employees or using such information to make hiring, promotion, or placement decisions. Clinton�s action clearly reflects efforts among consumer groups to protect an individual�s right to privacy in the area of genetic testing. Yet the insurance industry, among other groups, has a vested interest in the results of genetic testing when it comes to term life insurance. Using the most recent data in this field, a group of Wharton researchers build an actuarial model that evaluates the increased risk of breast and ovarian cancer in the presence of family history and/or gene mutation, and then calculates the possible effects on insurers who sell term life insurance.

Risk Management: Adding Information to Intuition

Fri, 10 Dec 1999 09:13:28 EST

As more firms move beyond risk assessment into risk management, the need for increasingly sophisticated analyses, including simulation models, is crucial. A three-day executive education course at Wharton, Decision Models for Management, tackles many of the challenges that risk managers confront on a daily basis, ranging from product mix decisions and applications of optimization models to operations management and marketing, portfolio optimization and yield management.