Publications

Phoenix Medical Systems was founded to manufacture an incubator designed specifically to address the needs of low-resource healthcare providers in India. When leaders from a multinational medical equipment company approached Phoenix about a…

In this chapter, we consider strategies for producing behavior change on a large scale, analyzing various intervention efforts in light of their capacity to move people toward desirable behavior and away from undesirable behavior. Invariably,…

To help address the burden of childhood asthma in developing countries, Respira Design created an asthma spacer that was produced from a single sheet of paper. The device could ship and store flat and then be transformed into a usable spacer…

As a psychological construct, the self has long occupied a preeminent place in both psychological and management theories regarding human behavior. In fact, the self is among the most widely studied concepts in the social sciences. The…

As a psychological construct, the self has long occupied a preeminent place in both psychological and management theories regarding human behavior. In fact, the self is among the most widely studied concepts in the social sciences. The…

Winner of the AEJ Microeconomics Best Paper Award, 2014

Set-asides and subsidies are used extensively in government procurement and resource sales. We analyze these policies in an empirical model of U.S. Forest Service timber…

Considerable attention goes to whether there is a “first-mover advantage” among organizations. Technical mechanisms have been considered for this advantage, such as learning and occupancy of preferred market segments. We argue that first movers…

Being happy and finding life meaningful overlap, but there are important differences. A large survey revealed multiple differing predictors of happiness (controlling for meaning) and meaningfulness (controlling for happiness). Satisfying one’s…

The private equity industry is young and evolving. The jury is still out on what fraction of equity investments should be in permanent capital / publicly-traded form versus limited-life capital / private form. The traditional fee and carry model…

The floor-leverage rule is a spending and investment strategy designed for retirees who can tolerate investment risk but insist on sustainable spending. The rule calls for purchasing a spending guarantee with 85% of wealth and investing the…

When subjects interact in continuous time, their ability to cooperate may dramatically increase. In an experiment, we study the impact of different time horizons on cooperation in (quasi) continuous time prisoner’s dilemmas. We find that…

I provide evidence that the degree to which medieval Hindus and Muslims could provide complementary, non-replicable services and a mechanism to share the gains from exchange has resulted in a sustained legacy of ethnic tolerance in South Asian…

Public sector innovators are improving government by replicating the market conditions that have long fostered breakthrough innovation in the private sector. 

Vertical integration occupies a central role in organizational economics. Williamson (2005) calls it the “paradigm” problem for explaining the distribution of firms and markets in modern economies. In this chapter, we review research on vertical…

The authors investigate how the amount and source of income affects the importance placed on money. Using a longitudinal analysis of the British Household Panel Survey and evidence from two laboratory experiments, they found that larger amounts…