Publications

We survey the theoretical and empirical literature on decentralization within firms. We first discuss how the concept of incomplete contracts shapes our views about the organization of decision-making. We then overview the empirical evidence on…

The once mutual relationship between social movement and organizational studies has recently become lopsided. Organizational studies scholars have increasingly drawn on insights from the social movements literature, at the same time social…

We study the nature of deflation risk by extracting the objective distribution of inflation from the market prices of inflation swaps and options. We find that the market expects inflation to average about 2.5 percent over the next 30 years.…

Many have argued that financial statements created under an accounting model that measures financial instruments at fair value would not fairly represent a bank’s business model. In this study we examine whether financial statements using fair…

This paper considers a particular class of dynamic robust optimization problems, where a large number of decisions must be made in the first stage, which consequently fix the constraints and cost structure underlying a one-dimensional,…

High-trust organizations are characterized by lower bureaucracy, simpler procedures, and higher productivity. Would shareholders be better off if companies had fewer controls and instead spent more time fostering trust?

We thank Luke Stein for excellent research assistance, Will Adams for his contributions to this project, and two anonymous referees, the editor, Chris Knittel, Ulrike Malmendier, Vikrant Vig, and seminar participants at IO Fest 2008 at Stanford,…

Subjective perceptions of outcome interdependence play a critical role in conflict situations. People who subscribe to different beliefs about outcome interdependence in conflict essentially play different games, with different sets of rules.…

An increasingly demanding business environment, combined with more complex and distributed supply chains, have led a growing number of companies to take steps to improve electronic communication capabilities and B2B collaboration. Part 2 of this…

In this paper, we explored how collaborative behaviours were related to the self-concepts of creative workers. Our findings, derived from a qualitative study of corporate toy designers, showed that the personal (vs. social) identities …

In recent years, with the emergence and growth of illegal file sharing on the Internet, individual piracy of digital goods, i.e., consumers making illegal copies on their own rather than relying on purchasing copies from commercial pirates, has…

We exploit changes in wind speeds at surfing locations in Switzerland as a source of variation in users’ propensity to post content about their surfing activity on an online social network. We exploit this variation to test whether users’…

We review the literature on recent changes to US employment relationships, focusing on the causes of those changes and their consequences for inequality. The US employment model has moved from a closed, internal system to one more open to…

Do people accurately perceive the Supreme Court’s ideology in relation to their own positions? Which types of people are most likely to misperceive? Answering these questions is important for understanding the basis of public support for the…

Knowing users’ views and demographic traits offers a great potential for personalizing web search results or related services such as query suggestion and query completion. Such signals however are often only available for a small fraction of…

A study conducted by the Center for Leadership Development and Research at Stanford Graduate School of Business, Stanford University’s Rock Center for Corporate Governance, and The Miles Group reveals that boardrooms are giving poor grades to…

We study dynamic bargaining with asymmetric information and interdependent values. We base our analysis on the equilibria characterized by Deneckere and Liang (2006) for the gap case. We show that as the gap between the cost and value of the…

We examine characteristics of the 400 wealthiest individuals in the United States over the past three decades as tabulated by Forbes Magazine, and analyze which theories of increasing inequality are most consistent with these data. The people of…

We investigated the link between tipping, an altruistic act, and bribery, an immoral act. We found a positive relationship between these two seemingly unrelated behaviors, using archival cross-national data for 32 countries, and controlling for…

All companies face challenges designing a governance system that works best for their particular situation and structure. Even the owners of privately held companies sometimes struggle with issues of separation and control. The challenges can be…