Publications

There is growing appreciation for the advantages of experimentation in the social sciences. Policy-relevant claims that in the past were backed by theoretical arguments and inconclusive correlations are now being investigated using more…

Motivated by India’s nationwide biometric program for social inclusion, we analyze verification (i.e., one-to-one matching) in the case where we possess similarity scores for 10 fingerprints and two irises between a resident’s biometric…

Facebook’s Gross National Happiness (FGNH) indexes the positive and negative words used in the millions of status updates submitted daily by Facebook users. FGNH has face validity: it shows a weekly cycle and increases on national holidays. Also…

We study how competition for talent affects CEO compensation, taking into consideration that CEO decisions and CEO skills or talent are not observable, and CEOs can manipulate performance as measured by outsiders. Firms compete by offering…

This paper explores consumers’ commitment to and conviction about their beliefs in the form of attitude certainty. Based on a review of past research, we present a new framework for understanding attitude certainty and how consumers’…

Demographic lexica have potential for widespread use in social science, economic, and business applications. We derive predictive lexica (words and weights) for age and gender using regression and classification models from word usage in Facebook…

We develop a model of information exchange through communication and investigate its implications for information aggregation in large societies. An underlying state determines payoffs from different actions. Agents decide which other agents to…

We introduce a new method, differential language analysis (DLA), for studying human development in which computational linguistics are used to analyze the big data available through online social media in light of psychological theory. Our open…

We provide a real-options model of an industry in which agents time abandonment of their projects in an effort to protect their reputations. Agents delay abandonment attempting to signal quality. When a public common shock forces abandonment of a…

We consider the problem of allocating m objects to n agents. Each agent has unit demand, and has strict preferences over the objects. There are qj units of object j available and the problem is balanced in the sense that ∑jqj=…

We document some early effects of how mobile devices might change Internet and retail commerce. We present three main findings based on an analysis of eBay’s mobile shopping application and core Internet platform. First, early adopters of mobile…

In this article, we argue that institutional changes to the seniority system have electoral consequences to incumbents. Building on the theory of Conditional Party Government, we argue that the consolidation of power in the hands of party…

Uncertainty has qualitatively different implications than risk in studying executive incentives. We study the interplay between profitability uncertainty and moral hazard, where profitability is multiplicative with managerial effort. Investors…

Consider repeated two-player games with perfect monitoring and discounting. We provide an algorithm that computes the set V ∗ of payoff pairs of all pure strategy subgame-perfect equilibria with public randomization. The algorithm provides…

We construct a budget-balanced wagering mechanism that flexibly extracts information about event probabilities, as well as the mean, median, and other statistics from a group of individuals whose beliefs are immutable to the actions of others. We…

This article proposes that meaningful social classification emerges from an ecological dynamic that operates
in two planes: feature space and label space. It takes a dynamic view of classification, allowing objects’ movements in
both…

This article proposes that meaningful social classification emerges from an ecological dynamic that operates
in two planes: feature space and label space. It takes a dynamic view of classification, allowing objects’ movements in
both…

We present two studies that together test a fundamental yet rarely examined assumption underlying the contemporary appeal of authenticity — namely, that consumers assign higher value ratings to organizations regarded as authentic. Study 1…

Review and critical analysis of innovative book on biological approaches to organizational behavior.