Publications

Problem definition: We study how online platforms can leverage the behavioral considerations of their users to improve their assortment decisions. Motivated by our collaboration with a dating company, we study how a platform…

Data is nonrival: a person’s location history, medical records, and driving data can be used by any number of firms simultaneously. Nonrivalry leads to increasing returns and implies an important role for market structure and property…

In many areas, practitioners seek to use observational data to learn a treatment assignment policy that satisfies application-specific constraints, such as budget, fairness, simplicity, or other functional form constraints. For example, policies…

Scrutiny of CEO pay increases during times of economic stress, when it is not clear how much pay CEOs should receive when corporate profitability suffers due to an unforeseen decline in the operating environment. On the one hand, the board might…

It has long been known that advocating for a cause can alter the advocate’s beliefs. Yet a guiding assumption of many advocates is that the biasing effect of advocacy is controllable. Lawyers, for instance, are taught that they can retain…

The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly lengthened the list of developing and emerging market economies in debt distress. For some, a crisis is imminent. For many more, only exceptionally low global interest rates may be delaying a reckoning.…

For an incompatible patient-donor pair, kidney exchanges often forbid receipt-before-donation (the patient receives a kidney before the donor donates) and donation-before-receipt, causing a double-coincidence-of-wants problem. Our proposed…

This paper presents an infinite horizon dynamic model in which two firms compete in a market vertically differentiated by the qualities of their products and consumers have heterogeneous preferences for quality. Given the product qualities…

An increasingly popular trend is for consumers to get paid more often, resulting in more frequent, yet smaller paychecks. However, surprisingly little is known about whether and how payment frequency impacts consumer behavior. The current work…

As households reduce discretionary spending in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, concerns are high that a resulting fall in aggregate demand can lead to a lasting recession post-COVID-19. Consequently, policies aimed at stimulating consumer…

When debt is priced fairly, governments face a trade-off between insuring bondholders and taxpayers. If the government decides to fully insure bondholders by manufacturing risk-free debt, then it cannot insure taxpayers against permanent macro-…

In severe viral pneumonia, including Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), the viral replication phase is often followed by hyperinflammation (‘cytokine storm syndrome’), which can lead to acute respiratory distress syndrome, multi-organ failure,…

Individuals often influence others’ relationships, for better or worse. We conceptualize social influence processes that impact others’ social networks as brokering, and advance a multifaceted model that explains how brokering behaviors can…

Companies that freeze defined benefit pension plans save the equivalent of 13.5% of the long-horizon payroll of current employees. Furthermore, firms with higher prospective accruals are more likely to freeze their plans. Cost savings would not…

Candidate debates have a rich history and remain integral to contemporary campaign strategy. There is, however, little evidence that they affect the behavior of voters or politicians. The scarcity of political information in the developing world…

This paper studies equilibrium voluntary disclosures for a company financed with both debt and equity, where the firm’s manager is compensated based on a linear combination of the market prices of the firm’s equity and enterprise values (i.e.,…

Using a comprehensive sample of credit card data from a leading Chinese bank, we show that government bureaucrats receive 16% higher credit lines than non-bureaucrats with similar income and demographics, but their accounts experience a…

We relate the risk characteristics of currencies to measures of physical, cultural, and institutional distance. The currencies of countries which are more distant from other countries are more exposed to systematic currency risk. This is due to a…

A buying firm might in the future incur costs associated with a supplier’s carbon dioxide emissions, safety violations, or other social or environmental impacts. Learning about a supplier’s impacts requires costly effort, but it is necessary (and…

We analyze confirmed cases and new hospitalizations in Wisconsin in the weeks surrounding the April 7, 2020 election, and find no evidence of a surge in SARS-CoV-2 transmission.