Working Papers

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Since World War II, direct stock ownership by households has largely been replaced by indirect stock ownership by financial institutions.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…

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…

For fossil fuel power plants to be built in the future, carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies offer the potential for significant reductions in CO₂ emissions. We examine the break-even value for CCS adoptions, that is, the critical value…

This paper presents a theory of common agency lobbying in which policy-interested lobbies can first influence the choice of a governing coalition and then influence the legislative bargaining over policies. Equilibria can involve active lobbying…

Efficient allocation of a stochastic stream of financial income is characterized by an explicit stochastic differential equation for the case that each agent has stationary preferences and the probability law of the stochastic process is known.…

We examine the question of how competition between governments within metropolitan areas affects economic growth outcomes. Using data on metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in the United States, we find that the number of county governments is…

This paper studies information aggregation in dynamic markets with a finite number of partially informed strategic traders. It shows that for a broad class of securities, information in such markets always gets aggregated. Trading takes place in…

There is surprisingly little evaluation of business school or, for that matter, company leadership development efforts. What evidence exists suggests that business schools have not been particularly effective, overall, in their leadership…

We study the impact of limited records on reputation dynamics, that is, how the set of equilibria and equilibrium payoffs changes in a model in which one long-lived player faces a sequence of short-lived players who observe only limited…

This paper introduces modal logics to a sociological audience. We first provide an overview of the formal properties of this family of models and outline key differences with classical first-order logic. We then build a model to represent…

An experiment was conducted to determine if the decision-making process for choosing between alternative job offers by Stanford MBA’s is affected by a task requiring an individual to evaluate hypothetical combinations of a limited number of job…

Despite the very long history of research on heritable traits, we still know very little about genetic effects on judgment and choice, including consumer decision making. Building on recent advances in epigenetics, we hypothesize that people…