We investigate whether organizations can create value by introducing visual transparency between consumers and producers. Although operational transparency has been shown to improve consumer perceptions of service value, existing theory posits that increased contact between consumers and producers may diminish work performance. Two field and three laboratory experiments in food service settings suggest that transparency that 1) allows customers to observe operational processes and 2) allows employees to observe customers not only improves customer perceptions, but also increases service quality and efficiency. In our fully specified models, the introduction of reciprocal operational transparency contributed to a 22.2% increase in customerreported quality and reduced throughput times by 19.2%. Laboratory studies revealed that customers who observed employees engaging in labor perceived greater effort, better appreciated that effort, and valued the service more. Employees who observed customers felt that their work was more appreciated and more impactful, and thus were more satisfied with their work and more willing to exert effort. We find that transparency, by visually revealing operating processes to consumers and beneficiaries to producers, generates a positive feedback loop through which value is created for both parties.

a b s t r a c tTo understand how talent and achievement are perceived, three experiments compared the assessments of "naturals" and "strivers." Professional musicians learned about two pianists, equal in achievement but who varied in the source of achievement: the "natural" with early evidence of high innate ability, versus the "striver" with early evidence of high motivation and perseverance (Experiment 1). Although musicians reported the strong belief that strivers will achieve over naturals, their preferences and beliefs showed the reverse pattern: they judged the natural performer to be more talented, more likely to succeed, and more hirable than the striver. In Experiment 2, this "naturalness bias" was observed again in experts but not in nonexperts, and replicated in a between-subjects design in Experiment 3. Together, these experiments show a bias favoring naturals over strivers even when the achievement is equal, and a dissociation between stated beliefs about achievement and actual choices in expert decision-makers.

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Policies that would create net benefits for society but would also involve costs frequently lack the necessary support to be enacted because losses loom larger than gains psychologically. To reduce the harmful consequence of loss aversion, we propose a new type of policy bundling technique in which related bills that have both costs and benefits are combined. In our first laboratory study, we confirm across a set of four legislative domains that this bundling technique increases support for bills that have both costs and benefits. We also show in a second study that this effect stems from a diminished focus on losses and heightened focus on gains when policies are evaluated in bundled form.

A preference for "naturals" over "strivers" in performance judgments was investigated to test whether the effect is generalizable across domains, as well as to ascertain any costs imposed on decision quality by favoring naturals. Despite being presented with entrepreneurs equal in achievement, participants judged the natural and his business proposal to be superior to the striver and his proposal on multiple dimensions of performance and success (Study 1a and Study 1b). These findings were extended in Study 2, which quantified the costs of the naturalness bias using conjoint analysis to measure specific decision tradeoffs. Together, these three studies show that people tend to pass over better-qualified individuals in favor of apparent naturals.