Organizations & Markets

Do people know when they are seen as pressing too hard, yielding too readily, or having the right touch? And does awareness matter? We examined these questions in four studies. Study 1 used dyadic negotiations to reveal a modest link between targets' self-views and counterparts' views of targets' assertiveness, showing that those seen as under- and over-assertive were likely to see themselves as appropriately assertive.

Recent findings of low societal consensus in cultural values suggest that our field’s dominant paradigm — culture as shared values — is a fallacy. The perennial persistence of this illusion may come from the fact that it appeals to the human brain’s hardwired capacity for essentialism. Evidence against value consensus, however, does not doom all shared-meaning models of culture (pace Schwartz, 2013).

Rarely need one justify a topic as much as online entertainment for Africa. There is a lot of headshaking and muttering that it is not really important for Africans to watch TV shows on the Internet and that in any event their basic networks are too far behind to make this a realistic issue.

We present a model of the maturity of a bank's uninsured debt. The bank borrows funds and chooses afterwards the riskiness of its assets. This moral hazard problem leads to an excessive level of risk. Short-term debt may have a disciplining effect on the bank's risk-shifting incentives, but it may lead to inefficient liquidation. We characterize the conditions under which short-term and long-term debt are feasible, and show circumstances under which only short-term debt is feasible and under which short-term debt dominates long-term debt when both are feasible.

How likely is a catastrophic event that would substantially reduce the capital stock, GDP, and wealth? How much should society be willing to pay to reduce the probability or impact of a catastrophe? We answer these questions and provide a framework for policy analysis using a general equilibrium model of production, capital accumulation, and household preferences.

Hedge fund managers trade o the benefits of leveraging on the alpha-generating strategy against the costs of inefficient fund liquidation. In contrast to the standard risk-seeking intuition, even with a constant-return-to-scale alpha-generating strategy, a risk-neutral manager becomes endogenously risk-averse and decreases leverage following poor performance to increase the fund's survival likelihood. Our calibration suggests that management fees are the majority of the total compensation.

In this study of the impact of protests against Walmart (a first entrant) on Target (a second entrant) from 1998 to 2008 in U.S. geographic markets, we develop and test a theory of information spillovers from protests against corporations proposing to enter a new market. We argue that the number of protests directed against a first entrant is a noisy signal for the second entrant because such protests are likely to be dominated by protest-prone activists and so do not reflect the sentiments of the community.

I examine the relationship across diseases between the long-run growth in the number of publications about a disease and the change in the age-adjusted mortality rate from the disease. The diseases analyzed are almost all the different forms of cancer, i.e. cancer at different sites in the body (lung, colon, breast, etc.). Time-series data on the number of publications pertaining to each cancer site were obtained from PubMed. For articles published since 1975, it is possible to distinguish between publications indicating and not indicating any research funding support.

For generations, the Pritzkers, one of the wealthiest and most philanthropic families in the United States, primarily managed their assets in order to enrich the family as a whole, as opposed to generating wealth for individual family members. The Pritzkers were historically publicity shy, but their saga gained much media attention in the early 2000s when some family members questioned the asset distribution and leadership requests of their forefathers.