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Patent Privateering
In a patent privateering strategy, firms sell patents to a non-practicing entity (NPE) with the expectation that the NPE sues the seller’s rivals for patent infringement. We examine whether firms under competitive pressure and facing barriers to…
Optimal Redistribution via Income Taxation and Market Design
Policymakers often distort goods markets to effect redistribution—for example, via price controls, differential taxation, or in-kind transfers. We investigate the optimality of such policies alongside the (optimally-designed) income tax. In our…
2025 Survey of Investors, Retirement Savings, and ESG
In fall 2025, Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Governance of Organizations Working Group at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University hired Prolific to conduct a nationwide survey of 2,653 individual investors — broadly…
Data and Welfare in Credit Markets
We show how to measure the welfare effects arising from increased data availability. When lenders have more data on prospective borrower costs, they can charge prices that are more aligned with these costs. This increases total social welfare and…
A Dynamic Model of Context-based Retrieval
We propose a comprehensive model of how experiences are encoded and retrieved from memory. At the core of the model is a dynamic retrieval process incorporating two essential mechanisms: iterative retrieval, whereby information is sequentially…
Patent Disclosures, Examiners, and Greenwashing
We examine how patent disclosures influence technology classification decisions by patent examiners and how firms strategically tailor these disclosures to affect classification outcomes. Using a novel machine learning approach, we construct a…
Race and Economic Well-Being in the United States
We construct a measure of consumption-equivalent welfare for Black and White Americans that incorporates life expectancy, incarceration, consumption, leisure, and inequality. Based on this incomplete list of factors, welfare for Black Americans…
Rational and Irrational Belief in the Hot Hand: Evidence from “Jeopardy!”
We use a play-by-play dataset from the game show “Jeopardy!” to study the hot hand phenomenon, whereby people appear to exhibit “hot” states of elevated performance in domains with repeat trials. We first demonstrate that Jeopardy contestants…
The Consumer Welfare Effects of Online Ads: Evidence from a Nine-Year Experiment
Research on the effects of online advertising on consumer welfare is limited due to challenges in running large-scale field experiments. We analyze a long-running field experiment on Facebook in which a random subset of users received no ads in…
The Paradox of Privilege: The Downsides of Masculinity for Men and Organizations
Gender research in organizational behavior has primarily focused on understanding and addressing the disadvantages women face in masculine work environments. While this body of work has been essential to understanding gender inequality in the…
What Would it Cost to End Extreme Poverty?
We study poverty minimization via direct transfers, framing this as a statistical learning problem while retaining the information constraints faced by real-world programs. Using nationally representative household consumption surveys from 23…
Cognitive Technologies and Their Histories
Cognitive technologies are socially shared and culturally evolved systems whose function is principally cognitive. Throughout human history and prehistory, they have aided in classifying, organizing, or managing information and knowledge,…
Earnings Targets, Strategic Patent Sales, and Patent Trolls
Innovative public firms sell significantly more patents in the last month of their fiscal year compared to earlier in the year. Consistent with reporting incentives driving these sales, final month patent sales are disproportionately internally…
A Simple Threshold Captures the Social Learning of Conventions
A persistent puzzle throughout the cognitive and social sciences is how people manage to learn social conventions from the sparse and noisy behavioral data of diverse actors, without explicit instruction. Here, we show that the dominant theories…
Novelty in Content Creation: Experimental Results Using Deep Learning–Based Image Recognition on a Large Social Network
Social networks utilize award recognition and front pages to motivate user content creation, facilitate consumer discovery of content, and provide attention and recognition to high-quality content. Past research shows that such attention and…
Evaluating Transparency in AI/ML Model Characteristics for FDA-Reviewed Medical Devices
The rapid integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) into medical devices has underscored the need for transparency in regulatory reporting. In 2021, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued Good Machine…
The Dynamic and Multisource Nature of Support for Frontline-Led Innovation Teams
This 24-month inductive study examined the practices provided by a variety of supporters to six frontline-led innovation teams. Analyzing 86 interviews with 35 team members and 17 supporters, we propose a comprehensive, idealized framework of…
Putting Climate into Context: How Culture and Composition Shape the Effects of Diversity Climate
Existing evidence demonstrates that an organization’s diversity climate can enhance its bottom line. Though some scholars theorize potential mediators to explain these effects, recent meta-analytic and literature reviews conclude that much…
Comparing Experimental and Nonexperimental Methods: What Lessons Have We Learned Four Decades after LaLonde (1986)?
In 1986, Robert LaLonde published an article comparing nonexperimental estimates to experimental benchmarks (LaLonde 1986). He concluded that the nonexperimental methods at the time could not systematically replicate experimental benchmarks,…
Culture Cartography: Mapping the Landscape of Cultural Knowledge
To serve global users safely and productively, LLMs need culture-specific knowledge that might not be learned during pre-training. How do we find knowledge that is (1) salient to in-group users, but (2) unknown to LLMs? The most common solutions…