Organizations & Markets

In this paper, we examine people's appraisals of unusual objects and their intuitions about whether others will like those objects. Prior work suggests uniqueness motives (e.g., Need for Uniqueness) affect appraisals, but the effect of these motives on projection of appraisals to others is unclear. Contrary to some prior work, we argue that uniqueness motives do not govern projection of appraisals but rather that individual differences in perceived similarity to a target group do.

We survey and interview more than 400 executives to determine the factors that drive reported earnings and disclosure decisions. We find that managers would rather take economic actions that could have negative long-term consequences than make within-GAAP accounting choices to manage earnings. A surprising 78% of our sample admits to sacrificing long-term value to smooth earnings. Managers also work to maintain predictability in earnings and financial disclosures.

In this paper, we analyze the optimal policy for a risk averse agent who wants to sell a large block of shares of a risky security in the presence of price impact and transactions costs. Our framework reduces to the standard Merton portfolio problem in the absence of any market frictions. Optimal liquidation results in revenue distributions which are substantially different from those generated by a naive strategy. The main tradeoff involves choosing between revenue distributions which have high means versus those which have low variances.

Prior research suggests that bicultural individuals (i.e., individuals with 2 distinct sets of cultural values) shift the values they espouse depending on cues such as language. The authors examined whether the effects of language extend to a potentially less malleable domain, behavioral decisions, exploring the extent to which bilingual individuals shift the underlying strategies used to resolve choice problems.

Mental state inferences - judgments about what others think, want, and feel - are central to social life. Models of such "mind-reading" have considered main effects, including social projection and stereotyping, but have not specified the conditions that govern when these tools will be used. This paper develops such a model, claiming that when perceivers assume an initial general sense of similarity to a target, they engage in greater projection and less stereotyping. Three studies featuring manipulations of similarity supported this claim.

Participants in 401(k) retirement plans violate the basic principle of diversification by investing significant fractions of their savings in their employers' equity. This paper characterizes investors' active changes to their company stock investment over time by analyzing new inflows and transfers. The average investor seems to base active changes on salient information, paying attention to past returns, volatility, and business performance.

In asset pricing models, the uncertainty surrounding firm fundamentals plays a central role, driving expected returns, volatility, and valuation ratios. In this paper, we extract estimates of the uncertainty embedded in earnings announcements using option prices. To do this, we take seriously the fact that the timing of earnings announcements, although not the response of equity prices, is known in advance. We develop a no-arbitrage option pricing model incorporating jumps on earnings announcement dates.

Disputes by their nature involve contentious behavior. If one attributes such behavior to underlying personality traits, these attributions can be quite damning. The current research investigated negative trait attributions and their impact on dispute resolution decisions. We hypothesized that judging one's opponent to be low in agreeableness and high in emotionality (e.g. stubborn and volatile) shifts one?s preference towards more formal procedures ? formal in the sense that a third party judge controls the process and outcome.