About

Ian Larkin is an associate professor in the UCLA Anderson Strategy group and serves as the senior associate dean of MBA programs. His research focuses on compensation, incentives, employee motivation, and human resources, with particular interest in how firms can use HR policies to generate sustainable improvements in productivity and profits. His primary research has examined corporate awards and recognition programs, decision-making influenced by sales tactics, and the effects of workplace wellness programs and gamification on employee motivation and behavior. Larkin's professional background includes four years at McKinsey & Company, where he advised senior executives in Hong Kong and Silicon Valley on corporate strategy within the banking and high technology industries. He began his academic career as an assistant professor at Harvard Business School before returning to California to join UCLA Anderson. His research has been published in leading journals such as the Journal of the American Medical Association, Management Science, and Strategic Management Journal, and has been cited by major media outlets including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and NPR. He holds a Ph.D. from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, a master's degree from the University of London, and a bachelor's degree from the University of Arizona. Larkin's interests extend beyond academia to activities like cooking, traveling, writing fiction, and supporting the Green Bay Packers.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Law
• Business
• Finance
• Computer Science
• Engineering
• Management science
• Marketing
• Engineering ethics
• Data science
• Pharmacology
• Psychology
• Family medicine
• Social psychology
• Medicine

Selected publications

• The Health and Employment Effects of Employer Vaccination Mandates

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2024-10-01 · 3 citations

  reportOpen access

  Health care facilities considering mandating staff vaccination face a difficult tradeoff.While additional vaccination coverage will directly reduce disease transmission within the facility, the imposition of a mandate may also cause vaccine-hesitant staff to quit, which could harm patient care.To study this tradeoff, we leverage comprehensive administrative data covering virtually all US nursing homes, including payroll-based records on approximately 500 million daily nurse shifts and weekly data on COVID transmission and mortality at each facility.We use a difference-in-differences framework to estimate the impact of employerimposed vaccine mandates at 581 nursing homes on disease spread, employment outcomes, and several patient care metrics.While mandates did slightly increase staff turnover, the effects were concentrated on staff working less than 20 hours per week, and resulted in a reduction of less than two minutes per patient-day.Furthermore, there is only limited evidence of lower levels of care at mandate facilities in typically-monitored conditions such as patient falls, pressure ulcers, or urinary tract infections.In contrast, implementing a vaccine mandate led to large increases in staff vaccinations at mandate facilities, which directly led to less transmission of and lower patient mortality from COVID.We estimate that vaccine mandates saved one patient life for every two facilities that enacted a mandate, a large effect given the typical facility has around 100 beds.Our results suggest that the health benefits of mandates far outweigh the costs in terms of reduced patient care from staff turnover.

  PublisherDOI

• The Health and Employment Effects of Employer Vaccination Mandates

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Regulating Conflicts of Interest in Medicine Through Public Disclosure: Evidence from a Physician Payments Sunshine Law

  Management Science · 2021 · 17 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Business
  • Family medicine

  Hospital and healthcare administrators name high prescription drug costs as one of their largest problems. A significant body of research demonstrates that meals and honoraria from pharmaceutical firms to physicians leads to higher prescribing of expensive, brand name drugs, despite little difference in efficacy. Some administrators and scholars have advocated for mandatory disclosure of these payments in order to reduce this conflict of interest, but many practitioners believe disclosure has little effect on prescribing, and the empirical evidence is mixed. This paper uses a quasi-experiment of a 2009 payment disclosure policy in Massachusetts to estimate the causal impact of public disclosure on prescribing. The comprehensive data set includes all retail prescriptions for 262 drugs in nine drug classes written by 5,730 physicians in five states over 48 months. We show a significant postdisclosure reduction in brand name drug prescriptions by Massachusetts physicians, relative to control physicians in other states. These effects are driven by heavy prescribers of brand name drugs in the prepolicy period, particularly for drugs with large prepolicy sales forces. Effects are also detected before the first data were released, implying that the effects are not because patients or administrators responded to the disclosed payments. Instead, some physicians may have changed their payments and prescriptions behavior to avoid appearing biased. Taken in tandem with the many studies showing that pharmaceutical industry payments influence prescribing, this study suggests a strong role for mandatory public disclosure in reducing conflicts of interest in medicine and costly prescribing of brand name drugs. This paper was accepted by Stefan Scholtes, healthcare management.

  PublisherDOI

• The opportunities and challenges of behavioral field research on misconduct

  Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes · 2021 · 16 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Computer Science
  • Psychology
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Regulating Conflicts of Interest Through Public Disclosure: Evidence From a Physician Payments Sunshine Law

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2020 · 3 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Law
  • Business
  PublisherDOI

• Strategic compensation: a critique and research agenda

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2019-12-04 · 6 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Scholars and management practitioners often hold that management of a firm’s compensation system can be a source of strategic advantage. This chapter argues that the academic literature on compensation has not yet provided a compelling theory for how a firm’s compensation systems can generate long-term sustainable competitive advantage over its rivals. It reviews the basic theory of competitive advantage and shows that, while the current literature is clear that compensation systems can affect performance, it is unclear whether improved use of compensation systems simply represents a correction of a previous inefficiency or actually provides a way for firms to outperform competitors in a way competitors cannot imitate. The chapter lays out what a true theory of strategic compensation might look like, and critiques several pitfalls that inhibit current compensation research from making a compelling case for the strategic role of compensation by firms.

  PublisherDOI

• Why Do Goals Cause Cheating? Unpacking the Confounding Effects of Mere Goals, Social Comparisons, and Pay

  ACR North American Advances · 2017-01-01

  articleSenior author
  Publisher

• Association Between Academic Medical Center Pharmaceutical Detailing Policies and Physician Prescribing

  JAMA · 2017-05-02 · 112 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  IMPORTANCE: In an effort to regulate physician conflicts of interest, some US academic medical centers (AMCs) enacted policies restricting pharmaceutical representative sales visits to physicians (known as detailing) between 2006 and 2012. Little is known about the effect of these policies on physician prescribing. OBJECTIVE: To analyze the association between detailing policies enacted at AMCs and physician prescribing of actively detailed and not detailed drugs. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS: The study used a difference-in-differences multivariable regression analysis to compare changes in prescribing by physicians before and after implementation of detailing policies at AMCs in 5 states (California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and New York) that made up the intervention group with changes in prescribing by a matched control group of similar physicians not subject to a detailing policy. EXPOSURES: Academic medical center implementation of policies regulating pharmaceutical salesperson visits to attending physicians. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES: The monthly within-drug class market share of prescriptions written by an individual physician for detailed and nondetailed drugs in 8 drug classes (lipid-lowering drugs, gastroesophageal reflux disease drugs, diabetes drugs, antihypertensive drugs, hypnotic drugs approved for the treatment of insomnia [sleep aids], attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder drugs, antidepressant drugs, and antipsychotic drugs) comparing the 10- to 36-month period before implementation of the detailing policies with the 12- to 36-month period after implementation, depending on data availability. RESULTS: The analysis included 16 121 483 prescriptions written between January 2006 and June 2012 by 2126 attending physicians at the 19 intervention group AMCs and by 24 593 matched control group physicians. The sample mean market share at the physician-drug-month level for detailed and nondetailed drugs prior to enactment of policies was 19.3% and 14.2%, respectively. Exposure to an AMC detailing policy was associated with a decrease in the market share of detailed drugs of 1.67 percentage points (95% CI, -2.18 to -1.18 percentage points; P < .001) and an increase in the market share of nondetailed drugs of 0.84 percentage points (95% CI, 0.54 to 1.14 percentage points; P < .001). Associations were statistically significant for 6 of 8 study drug classes for detailed drugs (lipid-lowering drugs, gastroesophageal reflux disease drugs, antihypertensive drugs, sleep aids, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder drugs, and antidepressant drugs) and for 9 of the 19 AMCs that implemented policies. Eleven of the 19 AMCs regulated salesperson gifts to physicians, restricted salesperson access to facilities, and incorporated explicit enforcement mechanisms. For 8 of these 11 AMCs, there was a significant change in prescribing. In contrast, there was a significant change at only 1 of 8 AMCs that did not enact policies in all 3 areas. CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE: Implementation of policies at AMCs that restricted pharmaceutical detailing between 2006 and 2012 was associated with modest but significant reductions in prescribing of detailed drugs across 6 of 8 major drug classes; however, changes were not seen in all of the AMCs that enacted policies.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Why Do Goal-Based Incentives Cause Cheating? Unpacking the Confounding Effects of Goals, Social Comparisons and Pay

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2017-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Doing Well by Making Well: The Impact of Corporate Wellness Programs on Employee Productivity

  Management Science · 2017-12-19 · 196 citations

  article

  This paper investigates the impact of a corporate wellness program on worker productivity using a panel of objective health and productivity data from 111 workers in five laundry plants. Although almost 90% of companies use wellness programs, existing research has focused on cost savings from insurance and absenteeism. We find productivity improvements based both on program participation and postprogram health changes. Sick and healthy individuals who improved their health increased productivity by about 10%, with surveys indicating sources in improved diet and exercise. Although the small worker sample limits both estimate precision and our ability to isolate mechanisms behind this increase, we argue that our results are consistent with improved worker motivation and capability. The study suggests that firms can increase operational productivity through socially responsible health policies that improve both workers’ wellness and economic value, and provides a template for future large-scale studies of health and productivity. The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2883 . This paper was accepted by Serguei Netessine, operations management.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Lamar Pierce

  Washington University in St. Louis

  13 shared

• Matthew Chao

  Williams College

  9 shared

• Timothy Gubler

  Brigham Young University

  8 shared

• Benjamin Edelman

  7 shared

• Stephen Leider

  7 shared

• Hal Movius

  7 shared

• Karen Huang

  Georgetown University

  4 shared

• Donald Palmer

  University of California, Davis

  4 shared

Awards & honors

• Harry S. Truman Scholar
• British Marshall Scholar
• Faculty Teaching Award, 2014
• Teaching Excellence Award in the Fully Employed MBA (FEMBA)…
• Dean George W. Robbins Assistant Professor Teaching Award, 2…