Working Papers

In 2007 and 2008, the price of oil skyrocketed, hitting historic highs. The corresponding increase in gas price was felt sharply in the United States by ordinary people, industries, the military and the government. Citizens were spending more and…

Prices for goods such as blades for razors, ink for printers and concessions at movies are often set well above cost. This paper empirically analyzes concession sales data from a chain of Spanish theaters to demonstrate that high prices on…

In this review of the personnel economics literature, we introduce key topics of personnel economics, focus on some relatively new findings that have emerged since prior reviews of some or all of the personnel economics literature, and suggest…

This paper explores the quantity-based price discrimination of reward programs by analyzing estimates from a dynamic structural model of consumer choice applied to a reward program for a golf course. The expected value of participating in the…

We propose a model in which an optimal dynamic financing contract for a cash-constrained entrepreneur is a credit line with a growing credit limit. This simple contract, which resembles those used in practice, presents a good benchmark to…

We investigate the short and long run effects of prices and software availability on the category-level diffusion of 32/64 bit video-game consoles in the US. We adopt an estimation framework that allows for a flexible…

This study examines how executives’ and lower-level employees’ option exercise behavior affects firms’ stock option grant cost estimates. Prior research suggests that option grant cost estimates are not materially different when calculated a…

We document that the observed persistence amongst the worst performing actively managed mutual funds is attributable to funds that have performed poorly both in the current and prior year. We demonstrate that this persistence results from an…

This paper develops a new nonparametric series estimator for the average treatment effect for the case with unconfounded treatment assignment, that is, where selection for treatment is on observables. The new estimator is efficient. In addition…

I study the human capital development and firm-worker matching processes for PhD economists. This group is useful for this purpose because the types of jobs they hold can be easily categorized and they have an observable productivity measure (…

In this research we propose a web-based adaptive self-explicated approach for multi-attribute preference measurement (conjoint analysis) with a large number (ten or more) of attributes. In the empirical application reported here the proposed…

Oblivious equilibrium is a new solution concept for approximating Markov perfect equilibrium in dynamic models of imperfect competition among heterogeneous firms and has recently been used in multiple economic studies. In this paper, we present…

Based on comparative case studies of Apple Computers strategic actions in the music and cellular telephony industries, we develop the concept of cross-boundary disruptor as a new type of entrepreneurial actor in inter-industry strategic dynamics…

The findings and value of market research depend critically on consumers understanding of the research objectives and their roles. The present research presents a three-phase investigation of the impact of research participants theories about…

An N-player game can be approximated by adding a coordinator who interacts bilaterally with each player. The coordinator proposes strategies to the players, and his payoff is maximized when each player’s optimal reply agrees with his proposal.…

In this paper we describe how margins in the channel vary over time within a product category and identify the market, manufacturer, and retailer characteristics that explain this variation. To obtain the equilibrium margins, we explicitly model…

This paper examines a common assertion that customers in reward programs become “locked in” as they accumulate credits toward earning a reward. We define a measure of switching costs and use a dynamic structural model of demand in a reward…

We describe a two-step algorithm for estimating dynamic games under the assumption that behavior is consistent with Markov perfect equilibrium. In the first step, the policy functions and the law of motion for the state variables are estimated.…

This paper integrates two perspectives on why producers who span categories suffer social and/or economic disadvantage. According to the audience-side perspective, audience members refer to established categories to make sense of producers; they…

This research models the dynamics of customer relationships using typical transaction data. It permits the evaluation of the effectiveness of customer-brand encounters on the dynamics of customer relationships and the subsequent buying behavior.…