Publications

Empirical research shows decisions about time are often made differently than decisions about money, belying the oft-quoted maxim that “time is money”. However, there are organizational practices such as payment on the basis of time that…

The private pension structure in the United States, once dominated by defined benefit (DB) plans, is currently divided between defined contribution (DC) and DB plans. Wealth accumulation in DC plans depends on a participant’s contribution…

We propose a model in which an optimal dynamic financing contract for a cash-constrained entrepreneur is a credit line with a growing credit limit. This simple contract, which resembles those used in practice, presents a good benchmark to…

Past research suggests that under high elaboration conditions, source credibility can play more than one role in persuasion. In particular, source credibility can affect the valence of people’s thoughts generated in response to persuasive…

Consider a firm developing an innovative product. Due to market pressures, production must begin soon after the product development effort is complete, which requires that an upstream supplier invests in capacity while the design of the…

Despite a pervasive presence in politics, lying has not traditionally played a role in formal models of elections. In this paper we develop a model that allows candidates in the campaign stage to misrepresent their policy intentions if elected to…

Psychological essentialism is an ordinary mode of category representation that has powerful social-psychological consequences. This article reviews those consequences, with a focus on the distinctive ways people perceive, evaluate, and interact…

We propose that consumers often make choices that diverge from those of others to ensure that they effectively communicate desired identities. Consistent with this identity‐signaling perspective, four studies illustrate that consumers are…

The empirical research examining the association between typical measures of corporate governance and various accounting and economic outcomes has not produced a consistent set of results. We believe that these mixed results are partially…

We investigate the short and long run effects of prices and software availability on the category-level diffusion of 32/64 bit video-game consoles in the US. We adopt an estimation framework that allows for a flexible…

This article brings together the market for products, the market for talent, and firms’ organizational form. While the organizational design determines the allocation of blame and fame within the firm, the value of a good reputation depends on…

In an assemble-to-order system, a wide variety of products are rapidly assembled from component inventories in response to customer orders. We assume that orders must be filled within a product-specific target lead time. In the event that…

This study examines how executives’ and lower-level employees’ option exercise behavior affects firms’ stock option grant cost estimates. Prior research suggests that option grant cost estimates are not materially different when calculated a…

Collusion under imperfect monitoring is explored when firms’ prices are private information and their quantities are public information; such an information structure is consistent with several recent price-fixing cartels, such as those in lysine…

We investigate the determinants of the efficiency of firms with a focus on the role of corruption. We construct a simple theoretical model where corruption increases the factor requirements of firms because it diverts managerial effort away…

For two districts or countries that try to internalize externalities, I analyze a bargaining game under private information. I derive conditions for when it is efficient with uniform policies across regions — with and without side payments — and…

The importance of concession sales in the movie exhibition industry is widely acknowledged among economists and other social scientists that have studied this industry in the past. Despite this recognition, the lack of appropriate data has…

Elected officials are commonly accused of being ideologically rigid, or failing to alter their positions in response to relevant policy information. We examine this phenomenon with a theory in which politicians have private information…

Motivated by the failure of current methods to control dengue fever, we formulate a mathematical model to assess the impact on the spread of a mosquito-borne viral disease of a strategy that releases adult male insects homozygous for a dominant,…

This paper studies the problem of allocating a good between two players in each period of an infinite-horizon game. The players’ valuations in each period are private information, and the valuations change over time.