The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 15 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Ariely: Disparity in appreciation between management and rank-and-file hurts stock performance
“One of the things we find is that it's not about just the overall level of, let's say, feeling appreciated. So we find that feeling appreciated is a very good signal. But it's not just the overall level of being appreciated. It's the difference between how man…”
Ariely: Treating employees well generates 6% annual alpha
“And we find, if you look at our results, we have, like, six percent a year of alpha of treating your employees well does better.”
Ariely: Compensation fairness drives performance much more than absolute pay levels
“We found that overall level of compensation doesn't matter so much. Fairness, perception of fairness in compensation matters a lot.”
Ariely: Widening gap between leadership and employee sentiment signals shorting opportunity
“I will tell you that we find that in every company, when the gap between how Leadership feels about the company and how the rank and file employees feel about the company. As this gap grows, it's a good sign to short the stock.”
Ariely: JPMorgan found his human capital data uncorrelated with ESG
“And the team at JP Morgan did a really nice analysis of our data. They were unbelievably thorough. I was deeply impressed by these guys, and it came basically with very good analysis and result, and it's kind of nice to have somebody like a third It's a little…”
Ariely: A gender-focused index underperforms a pure human capital index
“The real index was designed to maximize return from the beginning with no other constraint. The gender index was taking the best we had, but limiting it to companies who do well on, on gender. So it does not as well. Maybe we have something like slightly more …”
Ariely: High-appreciation firms gained 15% in early COVID versus 5% market average
“The companies in general, if I remember correctly, between March and October, the stock market lost a lot and then gained a lot, and it was about five percent net overall. The companies that I'll tell you now about went up by 15%. That's a big gap, and those c…”
Ariely: Employee benefits are a lagging indicator, not a predictor of performance
“So for example, the dimension of benefits, that one changes much more as a result of how companies do financially rather as a lead indicator. And actually in our data, we don't see much of an effect for that.”
Gleich: Harbor found unexplained alpha in Dan Ariely's human capital factor
“But after doing our research, we discovered that there was a nice idiosyncratic piece of alpha left over that couldn't be explained by any other model that we put down to the human capital factor.”
Ariely: Directly asking employees beats proxy metrics like sick days
“And when we don't look at what's happening inside people's brains, and we look at other things instead, we're giving up a lot. So for example, think about something like sick days. Sick days is obviously a really good indication of how excited people are about…”
Ariely: Employees adapt to office perks, but appreciation yields lasting motivation
“If you think about things like better coffee, better tables, better chairs compared to feeling appreciated, There's just no comparison, and the thing that happens there is if you get better coffee, and I'm a big fan of coffee, so I love good coffee, if you get…”
Ariely: The importance of inclusive innovation increased during COVID
“We found one of the things that changed during COVID is what we call inclusive innovation has increased in its importance.”
Ariely: Sector-specific human capital models are no better than universal models
“So we didn't do this research during COVID, but we did, of course, in the pre-COVID data, right, from 2006 and on, and we found no difference. When you do kind of statistical modeling, there's what's called nested models. So you could say, let me create a mode…”
Ariely: Human capital sentiment data has an 18-month half-life
“So in general, what we find is that this data has a half lifetime of about 18 months.”
Ariely: Third-party surveys yield better employee data than internal collection
“When we ask people with these data providers, it is very important that the data is being collected by a third party. You know, if the company is trying to collect the data directly from employees, there's always a risk that people are trying to create some im…”