Publications

Employer-provided benefits are a large and growing share of compensation costs. In this paper, I consider three factors that can affect the value created by employer-sponsored benefits. First, firms have a comparative advantage (e.g., due to…

This paper employs sample path arguments to derive the following convexity properties and comparative statics for an M/M/S queue with impatient customers. If the rate at which customers balk and renege is an…

Despite the growing consensus that consumer preferences are often constructed when decisions are made, we still know very little about the factors that determine the strength and stability of constructed preferences. We propose that the manner in…

We propose that White men derive a psychological benefit from believing that affirmative action is a quota-based policy. Three studies provide evidence that quota beliefs protect White men’s self-esteem by boosting their sense of self-competence…

Traditional theories of confidence and information processing suggest that people engage in greater processing activity when they feel doubtful…

How do organizations survive in the face of change? Underlying this question is a rich debate about whether organizations can adapt—and if so how. One perspective, organizational ecology, presents evidence suggesting that most organizations are…

We formulate a finite-horizon nonstationary dynamic single-asset assembly problem, which covers both a liquid-asset assembly problem, based on the work of Rosling published in 1989, where the single asset is the single product being assembled,…

When government fails, whom do citizens blame? Do these assessments rely on biased or content-rich information? Despite the vast literatures on retrospective voting in political science and attribution in psychology, there exists little theory…

Three axioms from decision theory select sets of Nash equilibria of signaling games in extensive form with generic payoffs. The axioms require undominated strategies (admissibility), inclusion of a sequential equilibrium (backward induction), and…

In this paper, we take a first step toward exploring empirically the product assortment strategies of oligopolistic firms. Our starting point is a discrete- choice demand model for differentiated products. We incorporate the demand model into an…

We use a panel data set that combines annual brand-level advertising expenditures for over three hundred brands with measures of brand awareness and perceived quality from a large-scale consumer survey to study the effect of advertising.…

One consequence of the proliferation of vote-by-mail (VBM) in certain areas of the United States is the opportunity for voters to cast ballots weeks before Election Day. Understanding the ensuing effects of VBM on late campaign information loss…

For three years after the typical developing country opens its stock market to inflows of foreign capital, the average annual growth rate of the real wage in the manufacturing sector increases by a factor of seven. No such increase occurs in a…

Investing for retirement is one of the most consequential yet daunting decisions consumers face. We present a way to both aid and understand consumers as they construct preferences for retirement income. The method enables consumers to build…

The use of the World Wide Web to conduct surveys has grown rapidly over the past decade, raising concerns regarding data quality, questionnaire design, and sample representativeness. This research note focuses on an issue that has not yet been…

From a variant of Kuhn’s triangulation we derive a discrete version of the Global Newton Method that yields an epsilon-equilibrium of an N-player game and then sequentially reduces epsilon toward zero to obtain any desired precision or the best…

We provide evidence that firms with more transparent earnings enjoy a lower cost of capital. We develop an earnings transparency measure that captures cross-sectional and intertemporal variation in the extent to which earnings and change in…

We show that institutional shareholders of acquiring companies on average do not lose money around public merger announcements, because they hold substantial stakes in the targets and make up for the losses from the acquirers with the gains from…

Despite temptations to broaden its focus, the Rural Development Institute has remained single-mindedly devoted to its mission. As a result, the organization has helped 400 million poor farmers around the world take ownership of some 270…

We present the strategy diamond, which extends received strategic management theory by integrating the positional view and the resource-based view, the formulation and implementation of strategy, and the firms internal selection environment into…