Leadership & Organizational Behavior

This article offers a primer on social power and social class with respect to their theoretical importance, conceptual distinction, and empirical relationship. We introduce and define the constructs of social power, social class, and one's psychological sense of power. We next explore the complex relationship between social power and social class. Because social class can produce a sense of power within an individual, studies on social power can inform theory and research on social class.

Exploiting variation in the timing of resets of adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs), we find that a sizable decline in mortgage payments (up to 50%) induces a significant increase in car purchases (up to 35%). This effect is attenuated by voluntary deleveraging. Borrowers with lower incomes and housing wealth have significantly higher marginal propensity to consume. Areas with a larger share of ARMs were more responsive to lower interest rates and saw a relative decline in defaults and an increase in house prices, car purchases, and employment.

Many organizations employ diversity initiatives, such as diversity mission statements, in order to effectively recruit and manage a diverse workforce. One approach emphasizes multiculturalism, which focuses on the acknowledgement and celebration of racial diversity. Multiculturalism has been found to produce greater inclusion by racial majorities and increased psychological engagement of racial minorities, but has also been linked to negative outcomes among Whites, from feelings of exclusion to greater stereotyping to perceiving racial discrimination claims as less valid.

We examine the relation between shareholder activism and voluntary disclosure. An important consequence of voluntary disclosure is less adverse selection in the capital markets. One class of traders that finds less adverse selection unprofitable is activist investors who target mispriced firms whose valuations they can improve. Consistent with this idea, we find that managers issue earnings and sales forecasts more frequently when their firm is more at risk of attack by activist investors, and that these additional disclosures reduce the likelihood of becoming an activist's target.

Since John Lynch’s presidential address at the 1998 annual meeting of the Association for Consumer Research (Lynch 1998), a large number of articles have appeared in the marketing literature pertaining to the review process in our field. Almost every new journal editor makes some statement about the standards and etiquette that reviewers should adopt during his or her editorial regime. For some good examples, see Shugan (2003), Desai (2011), and Kumar (2016). Other useful discussions of the review process also exist (e.g., Holbrook’s 1986 paper with seven suggestions for reviewers).

Past research paints a mixed picture of rationales in negotiations: Some findings suggest rationales might help, whereas others suggest they may have little effect or backfire. Here, we distinguish between two kinds of rationales buyers commonly employ — constraint rationales (referring to one's own limited resources) and disparagement rationales (involving critiques of the negotiated object) — and demonstrate their divergent effects.

We study how much communication is needed to find a stable matching in a two-sided matching market with private preferences. Segal (2007) and Gonczarowski et al. (2015) showed that, in the worst case, any protocol that computes a stable matching requires the communication cost per agent to scale linearly with the total number of agents. In markets with many thousands of agents, this communication requirement is implausibly high, casting doubt on whether stable matchings can arise in large markets.

Whether in everyday disagreements, bargaining episodes, or high-stakes disputes, people typically see a spectrum of possible responses to dealing with differences with others, ranging from avoidance and accommodation to competition and aggression. We believe people judge their own and others' behaviors along this dimension, which we call interpersonal assertiveness, reflecting the degree to which someone stands up and speaks out for their own positions when they are faced with someone else who does not want the same outcomes.

To align employees' interests with the firm's goals, employers often use performance-based pay, but designing such a compensation plan is challenging because performance is typically multifaceted. For example, a sales employee should be incentivized to sell the company's product, but a focus on current sales without rewarding the salespeople according to the quality of the product and/or customer service may result in fewer future sales.