Publications

Spectrum auctions are used by governments to assign and price licenses for wireless communications. Effective auction design recognizes the importance of competition, not only in the auction, but in the downstream market for wireless…

Can combat experience foster organizational skills that engender political collective action? We use the arbitrary assignment of troops to frontline combat in World War 2 to identify the effect of combat experience on two channels that change…

Given costly and limited annuity products, we investigate how annuity market innovation could improve participation and increase individual welfare. We find that participation gains are most likely with new annuity products that concentrate…

We examine a duopoly where one of the firms does not maximize profit, but instead maximizes customer surplus subject to a profit constraint. (Customer surplus for a firm is the sumo f its customers individual consumer surpluses, i.e., the dollar…

Last week I witnessed an exceptional example of someone communicating with a group of people not predisposed to agree with her. I’d been called for jury duty in San Francisco. A court employee, Christine Carmichael, had the job of telling about…

Using a novel dataset that records individual debt issues on the balance sheets of public firms, we demonstrate that traditional capital structure studies that ignore debt heterogeneity miss substantial capital structure variation. Relative to…

Elections sometimes give policy makers incentives to pander, i.e., to implement a policy that voters think is in their best interest, even though the policy maker knows that a different policy is actually better for the voters. Pandering…

Early admissions are widely used by selective colleges and universities. We identify some basic facts about early admissions policies, including the admissions advantage enjoyed by early applicants and patterns in application behavior, and…

Because consumers ask different questions to establish commitment at beginning versus advanced stages of goal pursuit, we propose that progress that they attribute to themselves and to the situation will have a distinctive impact on motivation,…

Understanding when new forms will emerge constitutes a core theoretical issue for organizational theory. The ecological theory of form emergence falls short of providing a full explanation because it treats legitimation as a primitive (…

Proxy advisory and corporate governance rating firms (such as RiskMetrics/Institutional Shareholder Services, Governance Metrics International, and The Corporate Library) play an increasingly important role in U.S. public markets. They rank the…

We present a nearly-linear time algorithm for counting and randomly generating simple graphs with a given degree sequence in a certain range. For degree sequence (d i ) i=1 n with maximum degree d max =O(m 1/4−τ ), our algorithm generates almost…

We present a tractable, linear model for the simultaneous pricing of stock and bond returns that incorporates stochastic risk aversion. In this model, analytic solutions for endogenous stock and bond prices and returns are readily calculated.…

As part of its long-term strategic commitment to accelerate economic development in previously excluded markets, in 2009 SAP launched a program leveraging microfinance, education, and technology to improve income of women Shea nut farmers in…

The cultural cognition thesis holds that individuals form risk perceptions that reflect their commitments to contested views of the good society. We conducted a study that used the dispute over mandatory HPV vaccination to test the cultural…

Is there a limit to trade cooperation that the WTO can facilitate? In this paper I present a theory of the WTO in which the WTO is an equilibrium outcome of multiple bilateral repeated prisoners’ dilemma games among countries. The equilibrium…

This paper addresses the question of how exchange rates affect consumer demand in markets where advertising plays an important role. We identify an effect that has not been emphasized in the existing literature: when foreign exchange rates…

The current research examines the link between narcissism and creativity at the individual, relational, and group levels of analysis. It finds that narcissists are not necessarily more creative than others, but they think they are, and they are…

The authors investigate whether need for closure affects how people seek order in judging social relations. In Study 1, the authors find that people who have a high need for closure (NFC) were more likely to assume their social contacts were…