Publications

American voters are assigned to vote at a particular polling location (e.g., a church, school, etc.). We show these assigned polling locations can influence how people vote. Analysis of a recent general election demonstrates that people who were…

 This paper describes a new continuous-time principal-agent model, in which the output is a diffusion process with drift determined by the agent’s unobserved effort. The risk-averse agent receives consumption continuously. The optimal…

Objectification has been defined historically as a process of subjugation whereby people, like objects, are treated as means to an end. The authors hypothesized that objectification is a response to social power that involves approaching useful…

Why do successful organizations often move in new directions and then fail? We propose that this pattern is especially likely among organizations that have survived a history of competition. Such experience adapts organizations to their…

There is a growing consensus that preferences are inherently constructive and largely determined by the task characteristics, the choice context, and the description of options. Although the fact that construction influences often play an…

This paper examines a novel means of increasing elaboration of persuasive messages. Whereas much previous research has focused on ways to promote actual self-relevance of the message (e.g., by changing the message to match the recipient), the…

The present studies demonstrate that conceiving of racial group membership as biologically determined increases acceptance of racial inequities (Studies 1 and 2) and cools interest in interacting with racial outgroup members (Studies 3-5). These…

We examine whether application of International Accounting Standards (IAS) is associated with higher accounting quality. The application of IAS reflects combined effects of features of the financial reporting system, including standards, their…

This research explores the possibility that when people receive sequential persuasive messages about different issues, the trustworthiness of the source of an early (prior) message can influence people’s motivation to process a subsequent (…

We consider a dynamic Bertrand game in which prices are publicly observed and each firm receives a privately observed cost shock in each period. Although cost shocks are independent across firms, within a firm costs follow a first-order Markov…

Drawing hypotheses from resource mobilization and resource partitioning theories (RMT and RPT), this article examines how interorganizational competition and social movement industry (SMI) concentration affect the level of tactical and goal…

People’s opinions can deviate from that of the average group member in two ways. Descriptive deviants diverge from the average group attitude in a direction consistent with the desirable group attitude; prescriptive deviants diverge from the…

I investigate when side payments facilitate cooperation in a context with strategic delegation. On the one hand, allowing side payments may be necessary when one party’s participation constraint otherwise would be violated. On the other, with…

Self-consciousness has been shown to both increase and decrease the magnitude of prime-to-behavior effects. In this paper, we decouple the facets of self-consciousness into internal state awareness and self-reflectiveness and show that self-…

We find that equity returns associated with credit risk changes are attenuated by the debt value effect of the credit risk changes, as Merton (1974) predicts. We find that the relation between credit risk changes and equity returns is…

We analyze optimal fiscal and monetary policy in an economy with distortionary labor income taxes, nominal rigidities, nominal debt of various maturities and short-selling constraints. Optimal policy prescribes the almost exclusive use of long…

Many older US households have done little or no planning for retirement, and there is a substantial population that seems to undersave for retirement. Of particular concern is the relative position of older women, who are more vulnerable to old-…

We consider a cross-calibration test of predictions by multiple potential experts in a stochastic environment. This test checks whether each expert is calibrated conditional on the predictions made by other experts. We show that this test is good…

This article, published in the Center for Social Innovation Newsletter (Spring 2008, Vol. 4), summarizes a white paper that addresses trends in the development of socially and environmentally responsible supply chains with respect to the…

A well-known result in the Bayesian inventory management literature is: If lost sales are not observed, the Bayesian optimal inventory level is larger than the myopic inventory level (one should “stock more” to learn about the demand distribution…