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KickStart III: Marketing to Hard-to-Reach Consumers
KickStart was founded by Martin Fisher and Nick Moon to design tools that would enable Africa’s poor to launch and sustain profitable businesses. Its first product was a line of manually operated irrigation pumps—branded “MoneyMaker Pumps”—that…
KickStart IV: Measuring Impact
KickStart was founded by Martin Fisher and Nick Moon to design tools that would enable Africa’s poor to launch and sustain profitable businesses. Its first product was a line of manually operated irrigation pumps — branded “MoneyMaker Pumps” —…
Lattice games and the economics of aggregators
We model the strategic decisions of web sites in content markets, where sites may reduce user search cost by aggregating content. Example aggregations include political news, technology, and other niche-topic websites. We model this market…
Legislative Organization and Ideal-Point Bias
Four pure types of legislative organization are characterized as data generating processes for commonly used measures of preferences or, in the spatial vernacular, ideal points. The types of legislative organization are differentiated by their…
Liability Holding Companies
An international debate continues to unfold in banking law, corporate governance, and finance on whether the capital structure of the world’s largest financial institutions is too heavily dependent on debt, too little on equity. Two of…
Life Force Kiosks II: Engaging Local Talent
Life Force Kiosks is a nonprofit that aims to reduce preventable waterborne diseases like typhoid, cholera, and diarrhea to save lives in the most vulnerable communities. The organization developed a new model of preventing water contamination by…
Life Force Kiosks I: Reporting and Accountability
Life Force Kiosks is a nonprofit that aims to reduce preventable waterborne diseases like typhoid, cholera, and diarrhea to save lives in the most vulnerable communities. The organization developed a new model of preventing water contamination by…
LifeStraw Carbon for Water: Sustainable Funding for a Public Health Intervention
Vestergaard Frandsen (VF) is a for-profit company that operates under a humanitarian entrepreneurship business model. Committed to supporting the achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, VF creates and deploys technologies…
Making Banks Transparent
It was March 2007, and in the Mediterranean resort of Monte Carlo, Matt King was making dire predictions about a collapse of the U.S. subprime housing market-a subject that must have seemed as inconsequential as it was foreign to most of this…
Market Liquidity: Asset Pricing, Risk, and Crises
This book presents the theory and evidence on the effect of market liquidity and liquidity risk on asset prices and on overall securities market performance. Illiquidity means incurring a high transaction cost, which includes a large price impact…
A Market-Based Study of the Costs of Default
This article proposes a novel method of extracting the cost of default from the change in the market value of a firm’s assets upon default. Using a large sample of firms with observed prices of debt and equity that defaulted over fourteen years,…
Masters of Disaster: The Ten Commandments of Damage Control
Whether you’re a politician caught with his pants down, a publicly traded company accused of accounting improprieties, a family-owned restaurant with a lousy Yelp review or just the guy in the corner cubicle who inadvertently pushed “reply all,”…
Maternova: Bringing Together Buyers and Sellers
Maternova was founded in 2009 as a mission-driven for-profit organization with two main objectives: (1) to provide an online knowledge platform that would allow health workers, innovators, organizations, policymakers, and individuals working in…
Metacognitive theory in consumer research
Imagine the following scenario: Two consumers, Suzy and Carrie, are both looking to buy a new car. They have identical demographic and socioeconomic profiles, go to the same dealer, interact with the same salesperson, and ultimately arrive at the…
Microeconomic Foundations I: Choice and Competitive Markets
Microeconomic Foundations I develops the choice, price, and general equilibrium theory topics typically found in first-year theory sequences, but in deeper and more complete mathematical form than most standard texts provide. The…
Multi-Method Approaches to Studying Judgment in Real-World Trust Dilemmas
Not All Selves Feel the Same Uncertainty: Motivated Assimilation to Primes among Individualists and Collectivists
Three experiments and a pilot study demonstrated that uncertainty about the self is uncomfortable (Pilot Study) and causes people to change their self-concepts in response to primes (Experiments 1–3), depending on both the nature of the…
Not Only What But also When: A Theory of Dynamic Voluntary Disclosure
We study a dynamic strategic model of voluntary disclosure of multiple pieces of information. Such situations are prevalent in real life, e.g., in corporate disclosure environments that are characterized by information asymmetry between the firm…
On the Power of (Even a Little) Resource Pooling
We propose and analyze a multi-server model that captures a performance trade-off between centralized and distributed processing. In our model, a fraction p of an available resource is deployed in a centralized manner (e.g., to serve a most-…
Out of Tune: The Rise and Fall of Modernistic Music in Brussels, 1919-1939
Genre emergence is a collective sense-making process that goes together with the classification of cultural objects. New genres achieve a taken-for-granted status and obtain legitimacy when audiences reach consensus about the labels and…