Working Papers

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SSRN Research Paper Series

The Social Science Research Network’s Research Paper Series includes working papers produced by Stanford GSB the Rock Center.

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Entry and Predation: British Shipping Cartels 1879-1929

Fiona Morton
1996

I examine the outcomes of cases of entry by merchant shipping lines into established markets around the turn of the century. These established markets are completely dominated by an incumbent cartel composed of several member shipping lines.…

Equilibrium Interest Rate and Liquidity Premium with Transaction Costs

Dimitri Vayanos, Jean-Luc Vila
1996

In this paper we study the effects of transaction costs on asset prices. We assume an overlapping generations economy with two riskless assets. The first asset is liquid while the second asset carries proportional transaction costs. We show that…

Evolving Null Hypotheses and the Base Rate Fallacy: A Functional Interpretation of Scientific Myth

Brian Gibbs
1996

The meaning of an experimental result depends on the experiment’s conceptual backdrop, particularly its null hypothesis. This observation provides the basis for a functional interpretation of belief in the base rate fallacy. On this…

Factors Influencing Firms' Disclosures about Environmental Liabilities

Mary E. Barth, Maureen McNichols, G. Wilson
1996

This paper examines factors related to environmental liability disclosure decisiions for firms in industries with substantial Superfund site involvement. We hypothesize that the extent of disclosure about environmental liabilities is associated…

Getting A Job: Networks and Hiring in a Retail Bank

Roberto M. Fernandez, Nancy Weinberg
1996

A significant strand of research on the job-person matching process has focused on the role of social networks in the hiring process. Past empirical studies of the comparative effectiveness of recruiting sources for getting jobs have started with…

Global Strategy and Organization

David P. Baron, David Besanko
1996

This paper investigates the fit between strategy and structure for a decentralized global firm that may organize along product and geography dimensions. Organization serves two purposes. First, it provides for the management of spillovers across…

Growth Cycles

Paul Evans, George Romer, Seppo Honkapohja
1996

We construct a rational expectations model in which aggregate growth alternates between a low growth and a high growth state. When all agents expect growth to be slow, the returns on investment are low and little investment take place. This slows…

Interorganizational Learning: The Effect of Outcomes on Learning from the Experience of Others

Pamela Haunschild
1996

In this study, we explore the issue of how and when firms respond to other firms’ experience with a given practice or structure. Existing theory has emphasized two ways this occurs: (1) firms tend to adopt practices that most other firms have…

Keeping a Job: Networking Hiring and Turnover in a Retail Bank

Kathryn M. Neckerman, Roberto M. Fernandez
1996

Abstract not available.

Lobbying and Incentives for Legislative Organizations

Roger B. Myerson, Daniel Diermeier
1996

Formal theories of the internal organization of legislature have mainly focused on the United States Congress. While these models have been successful in showing why committee systems should emerge in Congress, they fail to explain the variance…

Looking for Loss Aversion in Scanner Panel Data: The Confounding Effect of Price-Response Heterogeneity

James M. Lattin, David Bell
1996

Recent work in marketing has drawn on behavioral decision theory to advance the notion that consumers evaluate attributes not just in absolute terms, but as deviations from a reference point. Using scanner panel data, choice modelers have…

Marketing Information: A Competitive Analysis

Philip Parker, Miklos Sarvary
1996

Selling information that is later used in decision making constitutes an increasingly important business in modern economies (Jensen 1991). Information is sold under a large variety of forms: industry reports, consulting services, database…

Matrix Organization

David P. Baron, David Besanko
1996

This paper presents a theory of the internal organization of a decentralized firm that operates along more than one dimension; e.g., a multiproduct firm that operates along more than one dimension; e.g. a multiproduct firm that operates in more…

Modes of Interorganizational Imitation: The Effects of Outcome Salience and Uncertainty

Pamela Haunschild
1996

Drawing primarily on neoinstitutional and learning theories, we distinguish three distinct modes of selective interorganizational imitation: frequent imitation, where organizations copy very common practices; trait imitation, where organizations…

A New Approach to the Regulation of Trading Across Securities Markets

Haim Mendelson, Yakov Amihud
1996

Trading the same security in more than one market, commonly known as multimarket trading, is becoming an increasingly widespread phenomenon both across and within countries. For example, the London Stock Exchange, the third largest stock market…

On Biases in Tests of the Expectations Hypothesis of the Term Structure of Interest Rates

Robert Hodrick, David Marshall, Geert Bekaert
1996

We document extreme bias and dispersion in the small sample distributions of five standard regression tests of the expectations hypothesis of the term structure of interest rates. These biases, derive from the extreme persistence in short…

Predisposing the Decision Maker Versus Framing the Decision: A Consumer-Manipulation Approach to Dynamic Preference

Brian Gibbs
1996

The dominant approach to the study of dynamic preference is to generate preference change by manipulating aspects of decision-problem presentation (problem description, task procedure, contextual options). The predisposing approach instead holds…

Relative Explanatory Power of Agency Theory and Transaction Cost Analysis in German Salesforces

Manfred Krafft, Rajiv Lal, Sonke Alberts
1996

In this paper we take an integrated view of Transaction Cost Analysis and Agency Theory to study the direct vs rep decision and the design of compensation plans in German salesforces. While we attempt to investigate the generalizability of the…

Sticky Prices, Inventories, and Market Power in Wholesale Gasoline Markets

Severin Borenstein, Andrea Shepard
1996

We present and test an explanation for lags in the adjustment of wholesale gasoline prices to changes in crude oil prices. Our simple model with costly adjustment of production and inventories implies that output prices will respond with a lag…