Working Papers

This study investigates the relation between corporate governance and CEO pay levels, and the extent to which the higher pay found in firms using compensation consultants is related to governance differences. Using proxy statement disclosures…

We estimate classification models of deceptive discussions during quarterly earnings conference calls. Using data on subsequent financial restatements (and a set of criteria to identify especially serious accounting problems), we label the…

The two major paradigms in the theoretical agency literature are moral hazard (i.e., hidden action) and adverse selection (i.e., hidden information). Prior research typically solves these problems in isolation, as opposed to simultaneously…

Entrepreneurship is risky. Most new technologies and new businesses fail. Shane (2008) reported that 25% of new businesses failed in the first year and that by the fifth year, fewer than half had survived. In the United Kingdom, Stark (2001)…

For an all-pay sealed-bid auction of an item for which each bidder’s realized value can depend on every bidder’s privately observed signal, existence of equilibria in behavioral strategies is established using only the assumption that bidders’…

For two symmetric bidders, weak monotonicity conditions are shown to imply existence of an equilibrium in mixed behavioral strategies for a sealed-bid first-price auction of an item for which each bidder’s value depends on every bidder’s observed…

A first-price sealed-bid auction of an item for which bidders are risk-neutral and have privately known values is shown to have an equilibrium in mixed behavioral strategies if the joint distribution of bidders’ values has a continuous density on…

Although a substantial amount of research has examined the link between money and happiness, far less has examined the link between time and happiness. This paper argues, however, that time plays a critical role in understanding happiness, and it…

Marketing researchers have used models of consumer demand to forecast future sales; to describe and test theories of consumer behavior; and to measure the response to marketing interventions. The basic framework typically starts from…

We introduce a model in which firms trade goods via bilateral contracts which specify a buyer, a seller, and the terms of the exchange. This setting subsumes (many-to-many) matching with contracts, as well as supply chain matching. When firms…

This study examines how key market participantsmanagers and analystsresponded to SFAS 123Rs controversial requirement that firms recognize stock-based compensation expense. Despite mandated recognition of the expense, some firms managers exclude…

Consumers use warmth and competence, two fundamental dimensions that govern social judgments of people, to form perceptions of firms. Three experiments showed that consumers perceive non-profits as being warmer than for-profits, but as less…

This paper proposes a novel theoretical framework to model the dynamics of organizational mortality. The main theoretical contribution is a clarification of the relations between organizational fitness, endowment, organizational capital and…

In the wake of the recent financial crisis, over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives have been blamed for increasing systemic risk. Although OTC derivatives were not a central cause of the crisis, the complexity and limited transparency of the market…

Under pressure, people often prefer what is familiar, which can seem safer. We show that such familiarity-favoring can lead to choices precisely contrary to the source of felt pressure, thus exacerbating, rather than mitigating, its negative…

We measure the revenue and cost implications to supermarkets of changing their price positioning strategy in oligopolistic downstream retail markets. Our approach formally incorporates the dynamics induced by the repositioning in a model with…

This note provides the proof of proposition 5 in our paper titled “Dynamics of Rate-of-Return Regulation.”

We present an empirical framework to analyze real-world sales-force compensation schemes and report on a multi-million dollar, multi-year project involving a large contact lens manufacturer in the U.S., where the model was used to improve sales-…

This paper investigates the market reaction to recent legislative and regulatory actions pertaining to corporate governance. The managerial power view of governance suggests that executive pay, the existing process of proxy access, and various…

An examination of emotions reported on 12 million personal blogs along with a series of surveys and laboratory experiments show that the meaning of happiness is not fixed; instead, it systematically shifts over the course of ones lifetime.…