Decision Making & Negotiations

Recent evidence suggests that investors are inattentive to their portfolios and hire expensive portfolio managers. This paper develops a life-cycle portfolio-choice model in which the investor experiences loss-averse utility over news and can ignore his portfolio. In such a model, the investor prefers to ignore and not rebalance his portfolio most of the time because he dislikes bad news more than he likes good news such that expected news cause a first-order decrease in utility.

Students who want to work in business are well served by taking anthropology courses and earning anthropology degrees. Their anthropological education can be applied in a broad array of businesses: marketing, advertising, marketing research, design, new product development, organizational culture and change, sustainability, risk management, and more.

The rigidity of mortgage contracts and a variety of frictions in the design of the market and the intermediation sector hindered efforts to restructure or refinance household debt in the aftermath of the financial crisis. In this paper, we focus on understanding the design and implementation challenges of ex ante and ex post debt relief solutions that are aimed at a more efficient sharing of aggregate risk between borrowers and lenders.

This paper provides quasi-experimental evidence on the impact of paid leave legislation on fathers' leave-taking, as well as on the division of leave between mothers and fathers in dual-earner households. Using difference-in-difference and difference-in-difference-in-difference designs, we study California's Paid Family Leave (CA-PFL) program, which is the first source of government-provided paid parental leave available to fathers in the United States.

Consumer reviews and ratings of products and services have become ubiquitous on the Internet. This paper analyzes, given the sequential nature of reviews and the limited feedback of such past reviews, the information content they communicate to future customers. We consider a model with heterogeneous customers who buy a product of unknown quality and we focus on two different informational settings. In the first setting customers observe the whole history of past reviews. In the second one they only observe the sample mean of past reviews.

We study a multi-server queueing model of a revenue-maximizing firm providing a service to a market of heterogeneous price- and delay-sensitive customers with private individual preferences. The firm may offer a selection of service classes that are differentiated in prices and delays. Using a deterministic relaxation, which highlights the first-order economic structure of the problem, we construct a solution that is incentive compatible and near-optimal in systems with large capacity and market potential.

We extend latent Dirichlet allocation by introducing a topic model, hierarchically dual latent Dirichlet allocation (HDLDA), for contexts in which one type of document (e.g., search queries) are semantically related to another type of document (e.g., search results). In the context of online search engines, HDLDA identifies not only topics in short search queries and web pages, but also how the topics in search queries relate to the topics in the corresponding top search results.

The most effective behavioral policies are often also the most contentious. Psychologically informed interventions that promote non-deliberative behaviors ("nudges") are often more effective than "traditional" policies (like informational and educational campaigns) that target more deliberative processes. Yet, precisely because of their deliberative nature, people are often said to prefer the latter over the former.

Sustaining large-scale public goods requires individuals to make environmentally friendly decisions today to benefit future generations. Recent research suggests that second-order normative beliefs are more powerful predictors of behaviour than first-order personal beliefs. We explored the role that second-order normative beliefs — the belief that community members think that saving energy helps the environment — play in curbing energy use.