Economics Insights @ CBS

In the experiments reported here, we integrated work on hierarchy, culture, and the enforcement of group cooperation by examining patterns of punishment. Studies in Western contexts have shown that having high status can temper acts of dominance, suggesting that high status may decrease punishment by the powerful. We predicted that high status would have the opposite effect in Asian cultures because vertical collectivism permits the use of dominance to reinforce the existing hierarchical order.

A new class of online services allows internet media sites to direct users from articles they are currently reading to other content they may be interested in. This process creates a "browsing path'' along which there is potential for repeated interaction between the user and the provider, giving rise to a dynamic optimization problem. A key metric that often underlies this recommendation process is the click-through rate (CTR) of candidate articles.

In the last two decades, organized retailing has transformed the retailing landscape in emerging economies, where unorganized retailing has traditionally been dominant. In this paper, we build a theoretical model of unorganized and organized retailing in emerging economies by carefully modeling key characteristics of the retailing environment, the retailers, the consumers, and product categories.