Publications

We survey the theoretical and empirical literature on decentralization within firms. We first discuss how the concept of incomplete contracts shapes our views about the organization of decision-making within firms. We then overview the empirical…

We present the puzzling evidence that, from 1962 to 2009, an average 10.2% of large public nonfinancial US firms have zero debt and almost 22% have less than 5% book leverage ratio. Zero-leverage behavior is a persistent phenomenon. Dividend-…

We introduce an alternative perspective on the study of consumer judgment and decision making, which is based on the notion that judgment and choice problems consist of comparisons that decision makers might select. Our new perspective proposes…

Social scientists use the term diffusion to refer to the spread or flow of an innovation across actors in a social system. When we speak of diffusion of social movements, we mean that some element of a social movement (e.g. tactic, frame…

Firm-specific information can affect expected returns if it affects investor uncertainty about risk-factor loadings. We show that a stock’s expected return is decreasing in factor-loading uncertainty, controlling for the average level of its…

We present a preliminary study on the relations between personality types and user preferences in multiple entertainment domains, namely movies, TV shows, music, and books. We analyze a total of 53,226 Facebook user profiles composed of both…

The financial crisis of 2007–09 has spurred significant ongoing changes in the “pipes and valves” through which cash and risk flow through the center of our financial system. These include adjustments to the forms of lender-of-last-…

To ensure that individual actors take certain actions, community enforcement may be required. This can present a rules-versus-discretion dilemma: it can become impossible to employ discretion based on information that is not widely held,…

Language in social media reveals a lot about people’s personality and mood as they discuss the activities and relationships that constitute their everyday lives. Although social media are widely studied, researchers in computational linguistics…

The failure to align the incentives of self-interested groups in favor of beneficial reform is often considered a major cause of civil conflict and persistent underdevelopment around the world. However, much less is known about strategies that…

I survey a literature on auctions with contingent payments, that is auctions in which payments are allowed to depend on an ex-post verifiable variable, such as revenues in oil lease auctions. Based on DeMarzo et al. (2005), I describe a partial…

We study dynamic bargaining with private information and a deadline. As commitment power disappears, there is a clear “deadline effect.” That is, trade takes place smoothly before the deadline and with an atom right at the deadline. Prices,…

Estimation of discrete games of complete information, which have been applied to a variety of contexts such as market entry, technology adoption and peer effects, is challenging due to the presence of multiple equilibria. In this paper, we take a…

Drawing on theories of social movements and organizations, we examine how the expanding presence of commercial organizations and the growing diversity of their forms can foster policy change securing rights for a group of challengers in a…

This chapter develops a unified modeling framework for analyzing the strategic behavior of forecasters. The theoretical model encompasses reputational objectives, competition for the best accuracy, and bias. Also drawing from the extensive…

Scholars have argued that childhood experiences strongly impact political attitudes, but we actually have little causal evidence since external factors that could influence preferences are correlated with the household environment. We utilize a…

For a variety of models, including independent sets, MAX-CUT, coloring and K-SAT, we prove that the free energy both at a positive and zero temperature, appropriately rescaled, converges to a limit as the size of the underlying graph diverges to…

We define the class of two-player zero-sum games with payoffs having mild discontinuities, which in applications typically stem from how ties are resolved. For games in this class we establish sufficient conditions for existence of a value of the…