Publications

Do people advocate more on behalf of their own attitudes and opinions when they feel certain or uncertain? Although considerable past research suggests that people are more likely to advocate when they feel highly certain, there also is evidence…

How likely are third parties to intervene in repeated conflicts between adversaries? Can third party intervention redirect competitive interactions toward collectively beneficial cooperation? Does mutual cooperation persist when the third party…

Active fund managers are skilled and, on average, have used their skill to generate about $3.2 million per year. Large cross-sectional differences in skill persist for as long as 10 years. Investors recognize this skill and reward it by investing…

This article aims to fill some gaps in theory and research on age trends in musical preferences in adulthood by presenting a conceptual model that describes three classes of determinants that can affect those trends. The Music Preferences in…

I investigate the effect of competition on bidder behavior and procurement cost using highway auction data from Michigan. While a bidder’s distance to a project location is important in explaining participation and bid levels, there is no…

Word embeddings are an effective tool to analyze language. They have been recently extended to model other types of data beyond text, such as items in recommendation systems. Embedding models consider the probability of a target observation (a…

Attitude data can reveal culture’s secrets, but only if analysts acknowledge and transcend two problematic forms of heterogeneity. The first, relational heterogeneity, reflects the fact that the meaning of a…

This paper was selected as a finalist for the 2014 Pierskalla award 

Currently available medication for treating many chronic diseases is often effective only for a subgroup of patients, and biomarkers…

Firms often finance their inventory through debt and subsequently sell it to generate profits and service the debt. Pricing of products is consequently driven by inventory and debt servicing considerations. We show that limited liability under…

This paper investigates the effect of a change in informational environment of borrowers on the organizational design of bank lending. We use micro-data from a large multinational bank and exploit the sudden introduction of a credit registry, an…

The financial system is meant to facilitate efficient allocation of resources, helping people and businesses fund, invest, save, and manage risks. This system is rife with conflicts of interests. Reckless practices, uncontrolled by market forces…

In online advertising markets, advertisers often purchase ad placements through bidding in repeated auctions based on realized viewer information. We study how budget-constrained advertisers may compete in such sequential auctions in the presence…

Machines are increasingly doing “intelligent” things. Face recognition algorithms use a large dataset of photos labeled as having a face or not to estimate a function that predicts the presence y of a face…

In this paper we develop new methods for estimating causal effects in settings with panel data, where a subset of units are exposed to a treatment during a subset of periods, and the goal is estimating counterfactual (untreated) outcomes for the…

The contextual bandit literature has traditionally focused on algorithms that address the exploration-exploitation tradeoff. In particular, greedy algorithms that exploit current estimates without any exploration may be sub-optimal in…

Historically, the literature on money management has not consistently applied the rational expectations equilibrium concept. We explain why and summarize recent developments in the money management literature that do apply this concept correctly…