Working Papers

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 participants, managers and analysts responded to SFAS 123Rs controversial requirement that firms recognize stock-based compensation expense. Despite mandated recognition of the expense, some firms managers…

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.…

The common heuristic association between scarcity and value implies that more valuable things appear scarcer (King, Hicks, & Abdelkhalik, 2009), an effect we show applies to time. In a series of studies we find that both income and wealth,…

The Bass seminars at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business offer faculty and small groups of students the opportunity to interact in highly focused and intense ways on research topics of common interest. Our S373 Bass seminar…

Open source software is becoming increasingly prominent, and the economic structure of open source development is changing. In recent years, firms that are motivated by revenues from software services markets have become primary contributors to…

Since World War II, direct stock ownership by households has largely been replaced by indirect stock ownership by financial institutions. We argue that tax policy is the driving force. Using long time-series from eight countries, we show…

We present a demand system for tied goods incorporating dynamics arising from the tied-nature of the products and the stockpiling induced by storability and durability. We accommodate competition across tied good systems and …

What prevents majorities from extracting surplus from minorities in legislatures? We study an infinite horizon game where a legislative body votes to determine distributive policy each period. Proposals accepted by a simple majority are…

Developing organizational theory to explain voter behavior, we explore the relationship between the population structure of local newspapers and electoral turnout.  We argue that diversity in newspaper identities increases turnout in ways…

Companies constantly seek to enhance customer satisfaction by improving product or service features. Two methods are commonly used to assess customer priorities for product or service features from individual customers: ratings and constant-sum…

Three axioms from decision theory are applied to refinements that select connected subsets of the Nash equilibria of games with perfect recall. The first axiom requires all equilibria in a selected subset to be admissible, i.e. each player’s…