Economics Insights @ CBS

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.

The dominant perspective in society is that stress has negative consequences, and not surprisingly, the vast majority of interventions for coping with stress focus on reducing the frequency or severity of stressors. However, the effectiveness of stress attenuation is limited because it is often not possible to avoid stressors, and avoiding or minimizing stress can lead individuals to miss opportunities for performance and growth. Thus, during stressful situations, a more efficacious approach is to optimize stress responses (i.e., promote adaptive, approach-motivated responses).

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.

Changes in a firm's backward-dispersion patent-citation score are a useful, non-financial indicator of patent value that is positively-related to Tobin's <em>q</em>. V-scores, which analyze content patterns between patents' technological-class codes and those of their antecedents, provide contemporaneous information for investors to assess firms' economic prospects that is more time-sensitive than forward-looking information such as forward citations.