Publications

We examine the press’ role in monitoring and influencing executive compensation practice using more than 11,000 press articles about CEO compensation from 1994 to 2002. Negative press coverage is more strongly related to excess annual pay than to…

This article examines the classic question of how religious diversity in a community affects church membership in a period of high growth and social change. Using panel data on local U.S. communities from 1890 to 1926, the authors estimate…

Max-product “belief propagation” (BP) is an iterative, message-passing algorithm for finding the maximum a posteriori (MAP) assignment of a discrete probability distribution specified by a graphical model. Despite the spectacular success of the…

The author critiques the decline of pragmatism and fact-based experimentation in U.S. education. Seminal achievements in U.S. education, such as the land-grant colleges founded in the 19th century, are presented as examples of the pragmatic…

Social interactions occur when agents in a network affect other agents’ choices directly, as opposed to via the intermediation of markets. The study of such interactions and the resultant outcomes has long …

Historical representations explicitly depicting Blacks as apelike have largely disappeared in the United States, yet a mental association between Blacks and apes remains. Here, the authors demonstrate that U.S. citizens implicitly associate…

Employer-provided benefits are a large and growing share of compensation costs. In this paper, I consider three factors that can affect the value created by employer-sponsored benefits. First, firms have a comparative advantage (e.g., due to…

This paper employs sample path arguments to derive the following convexity properties and comparative statics for an M/M/S queue with impatient customers. If the rate at which customers balk and renege is an…

Despite the growing consensus that consumer preferences are often constructed when decisions are made, we still know very little about the factors that determine the strength and stability of constructed preferences. We propose that the manner in…

We propose that White men derive a psychological benefit from believing that affirmative action is a quota-based policy. Three studies provide evidence that quota beliefs protect White men’s self-esteem by boosting their sense of self-competence…

Traditional theories of confidence and information processing suggest that people engage in greater processing activity when they feel doubtful…

How do organizations survive in the face of change? Underlying this question is a rich debate about whether organizations can adapt—and if so how. One perspective, organizational ecology, presents evidence suggesting that most organizations are…

We formulate a finite-horizon nonstationary dynamic single-asset assembly problem, which covers both a liquid-asset assembly problem, based on the work of Rosling published in 1989, where the single asset is the single product being assembled,…

When government fails, whom do citizens blame? Do these assessments rely on biased or content-rich information? Despite the vast literatures on retrospective voting in political science and attribution in psychology, there exists little theory…

Three axioms from decision theory select sets of Nash equilibria of signaling games in extensive form with generic payoffs. The axioms require undominated strategies (admissibility), inclusion of a sequential equilibrium (backward induction), and…

In this paper, we take a first step toward exploring empirically the product assortment strategies of oligopolistic firms. Our starting point is a discrete- choice demand model for differentiated products. We incorporate the demand model into an…

We use a panel data set that combines annual brand-level advertising expenditures for over three hundred brands with measures of brand awareness and perceived quality from a large-scale consumer survey to study the effect of advertising.…

One consequence of the proliferation of vote-by-mail (VBM) in certain areas of the United States is the opportunity for voters to cast ballots weeks before Election Day. Understanding the ensuing effects of VBM on late campaign information loss…

For three years after the typical developing country opens its stock market to inflows of foreign capital, the average annual growth rate of the real wage in the manufacturing sector increases by a factor of seven. No such increase occurs in a…