MIT Sloan Management Review Article on Want to Make Better Decisions? Start Experimenting

Suppose you work on Google’s advertising team and need to decide whether ads should have a blue background or a yellow background. You think that yellow would attract the most clicks; your colleague thinks that blue is better. How do you make the decision?

In Google’s early days, the two of you might have debated the issue until someone caved or you both agreed to kick the decision up to the boss. But ultimately, it dawned on leaders throughout Google that many of these debates and decisions were unnecessary.

About the Author

Michael Luca (@mike_luca) is the Lee J. Styslinger III Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. Max H. Bazerman (@maxhbazerman) is the Jesse Isidor Straus Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. They are the authors of The Power of Experiments: Decision-Making in a Data-Driven World (MIT Press, 2020), from which this article is adapted.

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