Publications

Ever wonder why that government clerk was so rude and condescending? Or why the mid-level manager at your company always doles out the most demeaning tasks? Or, on a more profound level, why the guards at Abu Ghraib tortured and humiliated their…

This article explores the relationship between an ethnic-based social network and vertical integration decisions in the laundry services industry. We find that stores in the social network are significantly less likely to vertically…

This paper presents a theory of common agency lobbying in which policy-interested lobbies can first influence the choice of a proto-coalition and then influence the legislative bargaining over policy within that coalition. The equilibrium policy…

We find that several recently proposed consumption-based models of stock returns, when evaluated using an optimal set of managed portfolios and the associated model-implied conditional moment restrictions, fail to capture key features of…

Better measurement of the output produced and capital employed by firms substantially improves the ability to explain capital structure variation in the cross section. For every firm, we construct the set of other firms producing the same output…

Across three studies, this research elucidates when loss- versus gain-framed messages are most effective in influencing consumer recycling by examining the moderating role of whether a more concrete or abstract mind-set is activated. First…

This case examines seven commonly accepted myths about corporate governance. How can we expect managerial behavior and firm performance to improve, if practitioners continue to rely on myths rather than facts to guide their decisions?

This case examines seven commonly accepted myths about executive compensation. Public perception is that executives are overpaid and that compensation contracts are not structured in the best interest of shareholders. Why don’t experts rely on…

This paper presents a dynamic model of elections, government formation, and legislation in a parliamentary democracy with proportional representation in which the policy chosen in one period becomes the status quo for the next period. The…

The disrupt-then-reframe (DTR) influence technique involves confusing consumers with a disruptive message and then reducing ambiguity by reframing the message. Experiment 1 shows that the DTR technique increases retail sales in a supermarket…

This paper develops a model of financing that jointly determines a firm’s capital structure, its voluntary disclosure policy, and its cost of capital. Investors who receive securities in return for supplying capital sometimes incur losses when…

Marketing researchers have used models of consumer demand to forecast future sales; to describe and test theories of behavior; and to measure the response to marketing interventions. The basic framework typically starts from microfoundations of…

This paper studies the optimal compensation problem between shareholders and the agent in the…

We study reputation dynamics in continuous-time games in which a large player (e.g., government) faces a population of small players (e.g., households) and the large player’s actions are imperfectly observable. The major part of our…

This case study examines prominent features of the governance system of Tesla Motors, as it has evolved from inception to IPO. Now that Tesla is public, how is its governance likely to change in the future?

We prove that there exist equilibrium payoffs arbitrarily close to the efficient payoff in the two-player prisoner’s dilemma with low discounting under imperfect private monitoring, provided that the monitoring structure is not too uninformative…

Theories of visionary leadership propose that groups bestow leadership on exceptional group members. In contrast, social identity perspectives claim that leadership arises, in part, from a person’s ability to be seen as representative of the…

The recommendations of Institutional Shareholder Services are influential in the proxy voting process, particularly in matters relating to equity compensation and exchange offers. What evidence is there that these recommendations increase…