theory and behavior of multiple unit discriminative auctions this paper reports the results of controlled experiments designed to test the harrisraviv generalization of the vickrey theory of bidding in multiple unit discriminative auctions the paper also discusses further development of the theory in a way suggested by the experimental results to include bidders with distinct risk preferences in a well known paper vickrey 20 formulated a nash equilibrium model of bidding by risk neutral economic agents in single unit auctions this analysis was subsequently extended in numerous papers vickrey 21 generalized his original model to include multiple unit auctions in which each of n risk neutral bidders can bid on one out of a total of q homogeneous items up for auction where 1 c q n in both of the vickrey papers individual values for the auctioned object s were assumed to be drawn from a uniform distribution holt 12 and riley and samuelson 19 for single unit auctions and harris and raviv 11 for multiple unit auctions have extended the vickrey model to the case in which valuations are from a general distribution function and all agents have identical concave utility functions this paper reports the empirical properties of individual bidding behavior and seller revenue for a group of 28 laboratory experiments designed to test the harris raviv generalization of the vickrey hereafter vhr model of nash equilibrium behavior in multiple unit discriminative auctions in section i we summarize briefly the theoretical results of the vhr model which form the basis for the hypotheses that we test section ii describes the experimental design that we use section iii describes the experimental results and various tests based on the bidding behavior of individual subjects and on aggregate market seller revenue data the results from six of the ten n q parameter designs reported

garp for kids on the development of rational choice behavior in this paper we examine the extent to which consumption choices by 7 and 11 year old children and college undergraduates satisfy the axioms of revealed preference we find that choices by even the 7 year olds are considerably more likely to obey revealed preference axioms than would be true if they were choosing randomly 11 year olds do better still while college students do no better than 11 year old children we also find that mathematical ability is not correlated with choosing rationally we argue that this evidence suggests that the ability to choose rationally is not innate but that it does develop quickly

long run effects of promotion depth on new versus established customers three field studies we use the results of three large scale field experiments to investigate how the depth of a current price promotion affects future purchasing of first time and established customers while most previous studies have focused on packaged goods sold in grocery stores we consider durable goods sold through a direct mail catalog the findings reveal different effects for first time and established customers deeper price discounts in the current period increased future purchases by first time customers a positive long run effect but reduced future purchases by established customers a negative long run effect overall the results show evidence of several long run effects forward buying selection customer learning and increased deal sensitivity short run metrics that ignore these effects overstate the overall change in demand for established customers the implication is that if prices are set based on short run elasticity then they will be too low among first time customers the short run metrics underestimate the total increase in demand if prices are set based on short run elasticity then they will be too high

building criminal capital behind bars peer effects in juvenile corrections this paper analyzes the influence that juvenile offenders serving time in the same correctional facility have on each other s subsequent criminal behavior the analysis is based on data on over 8 000 individuals serving time in 169 juvenile correctional facilities during a two year period in florida these data provide a complete record of past crimes facility assignments and arrests and adjudications in the year following release for each individual to control for the non random assignment to facilities we include facility fixed effects thereby estimating peer effects using only within facility variation over time we find strong evidence of peer effects for various categories of theft burglary and felony drug and weapon crimes the influence of peers primarily affects individuals who already have some experience in a particular crime category we also find evidence that peer effects are stronger in smaller facilities and that the predominant types of peer effects differ in residential versus non residential facilities effects in the latter are consistent with network formation among youth serving time close to home

the impact of group membership on cooperation and norm enforcement evidence using random assignment to real social groups due to incomplete contracts efficiency of an organization depends on willingness of individuals to take non selfish actions such as cooperating when there is no incentive to do so or punishing inefficient actions by others organizations also constitute a social boundary or group we investigate whether this social aspect of organizations has an important benefit fostering unselfish cooperation and norm enforcement within the group but also whether there is a dark side in the form of hostility between groups our experiment provides the first evidence free from the confounding effect of self selection into groups individuals are randomly assigned to different platoons during a four week period of officer training in the swiss army we conduct choice experiments simultaneous prisoner s dilemma games with and without third party punishment in week three random assignment significantly increases willingness to cooperate with fellow platoon members assignment does not lead to hostility in the sense of vindictive punishment of outsiders but does affect norm enforcement enhancing willingness to enforce a norm of cooperation towards fellow platoon members this suggests that the social aspect of organizations motivates efficient behavior even when ordinary incentives fail and helps to explain practices designed to foster social ties or group identification within an organization this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

advertising learning and consumer choice in experience good markets an empirical examination this article empirically analyzes different effects of advertising in a nondurable experience good market a dynamic learning model of consumer behavior is presented in which i allow both informative effects of advertising and prestige or image effects of advertising this learning model is estimated using consumer level panel data tracking grocery purchases and advertising exposures over time empirical results suggest that in this market advertising s primary effect was that of informing consumers the estimates are used to quantify the value of this information to consumers and evaluate the welfare implications of an alternative advertising regulatory regime

the economics of has beens the evolution of technology causes human capital to become obsolete we study this phenomenon in an overlapping generations setting assuming that technology evolves stochastically and that older workers find updating uneconomic experience and learning by doing may offer the old some income protection but technology advance always turns them into has beens to some degree we focus on the determinants demand elasticities persistence of technology change etc of the severity of the has beens effect it can be large even leading to negatively sloped within occupation age earnings profiles and an occupation dominated by a few young high income workers architecture displays the sort of features the theory identifies as magnifying the has beens effect and both anecdotes and some data suggest that the has beens effect in architecture is extreme indeed

evolving standards for academic publishing a q r theory this paper develops models of quality standards to examine two trends academic journals increasingly require extensive revisions of submissions and articles are becoming longer and changing in other ways papers are modeled as varying along two quality dimensions q reflects the importance of the main ideas and r other aspects of quality observed trends are regarded as increases in r quality a static equilibrium model illustrates comparative statics explanations a dynamic model in which referees with a biased view of their own work learn social norms for weighting q and r is shown to produce a long gradual evolution of social norms

institutional contributions to the leading finance journals 1975 through 1986 a note in a recent issue of this journal heck cooley and hubbard 2 provided several rankings of finance departments the various rankings were based on publications in the journal of finance since 1946 the year in which the journal began publication separate rankings were generated for the leading institutions on the basis of source of doctorate and current employment the employer rankings were provided for the past forty years 1946 through 1985 and for several ten year subperiods 1946 through 1955 1956 through 1965 1966 through 1975 and 1976 through 1985 the work by heck cooley and hubbard builds on earlier contributions by klemkosky and tuttle 3 4 schweser 6 ederington 1 and moore and taylor 5 in their two papers klemkosky and tuttle measured the contributions to two groups of journals for the period 1966 through 1975 they included the volume of scholarship published in the three leading finance journals journal of finance journal of financial and quantitative analysis and journal of financial economics they also included the contributions to eight leading business and economics journals that publish finance and finance related articles journal of business journal of money credit and banking american economic review review of economics and statistics econometrica quarterly journal of economics journal of political economy and journal of monetary economics in their first paper klemkosky and tuttle 3 measured research performance according to the institutional source of publications in their follow up paper 4 they ranked programs on the basis of the publication output of doctoral students in a related paper schweser 6 analyzed the doctoral origins of contributions to the journal of finance for 1964 through 1975 ederington 1 prepared rankings of the top twenty departments based on total pages published in the journal of finance and journal of financial and quantitative analysis and citations in the social science citation index for works in these journals for the period 1967 through 1972 moore and taylor 5 tabulated the number of articles and pages published during 1972 through 1978 in fifteen leading journals in five academic areas of business including finance marketing management science behavioral management and general business for each area three journals were included and in finance the journals were the journal of finance journal of financial and quantitative analysis and financial management publication performance rankings were provided for all fields combined and for each discipline individually

risk and insurance in a rural credit market an empirical investigation in northern nigeria credit contracts play a direct role in pooling risk between households in northern nigeria repayments owed by borrowers depend on realizations of random shocks by both borrowers and lenders the paper develops two models of state contingent loans the first is a competitive equilibrium in perfectly enforceable contracts the second permits imperfect information and equilibrium default estimates of both models indicate that quantitatively important state contingent payments are embedded in these loan transactions but that a fully efficient risk pooling equilibrium is not achieved the research is based on a year long survey in zaria nigeria conducted by the author

control rights and capital structure an empirical investigation we show that incentive conflicts between firms and their creditors have a large impact on corporate debt policy net debt issuing activity experiences a sharp and persistent decline following debt covenant violations when creditors use their acceleration and termination rights to increase interest rates and reduce the availability of credit the effect of creditor actions on debt policy is strongest when the borrower s alternative sources of finance are costly in addition despite the less favorable terms offered by existing creditors borrowers rarely switch lenders following a violation a fundamental question in financial economics is how do firms choose their financial policies extant empirical research on this question has focused primarily on the presence of taxes and bankruptcy costs e g scott 1976 information asymmetry e g myers and majluf 1984 and more recently market timing behavior e g baker and wurgler 2002 however beginning with jensen and meckling 1976 a large body of theoretical research examines how incentive conflicts between managers and external investors affect corporate financial policies in particular theoretical research on financial contracting shows that in the presence of incentive conflicts optimal debt contracts will allocate certain rights to creditors after negative performance in order to help firms secure financing ex ante e g aghion and bolton 1992 and dewatripont and tirole

decision making under uncertainty capturing dynamic brand choice processes in turbulent consumer goods markets we construct two models of the behavior of consumers in an environment where there is uncertainty about brand attributes in our models both usage experience and advertising exposure give consumers noisy signals about brand attributes consumers use these signals to update their expectations of brand attributes in a bayesian manner the two models are 1 a dynamic model with immediate utility maximization and 2 a dynamic forward looking model in which consumers maximize the expected present value of utility over a planning horizon given this theoretical framework we derive from the bayesian learning framework how brand choice probabilities depend on past usage experience and advertising exposures we then form likelihood functions for the models and estimate them on nielsen scanner data for detergent we find that the functional forms for experience and advertising effects that we derive from the bayesian learning framework fit the data very well relative to flexible ad hoc functional forms such as exponential smoothing and also perform better at out of sample prediction another finding is that in the context of consumer learning of product attributes although the forward looking model fits the data statistically better at conventional significance levels both models produce similar parameter estimates and policy implications our estimates indicate that consumers are risk averse with respect to variation in brand attributes which discourages them from buying unfamiliar brands using the estimated behavioral models we perform various scenario evaluations to find how changes in marketing strategy affect brand choice both in the short and long run a key finding obtained from the policy experiments is that advertising intensity has only weak short run effects but a strong cumulative effect in the long run the substantive content of the paper is potentially of interest to academics in marketing economics and decision sciences as well as product managers marketing research managers and analysts interested in studying the effectiveness of marketing mix strategies our paper will be of particular interest to those interested in the long run effects of advertising note that our estimation strategy requires us to specify explicit behavioral models of consumer choice behavior derive the implied relationships among choice probabilities past purchases and marketing mix variables and then estimate the behavioral parameters of each model such an estimation strategy is referred to as structural estimation and econometric models that are based explicitly on the consumer s maximization problem and whose parameters are parameters of the consumers utility functions or of their constraints are referred to as structural models a key benefit of the structural approach is its potential usefulness for policy evaluation the parameters of structural models are invariant to policy that is they do not change due to a change in the policy in contrast the parameters of reduced form brand choice models are in general functions of marketing strategy variables e g consumer response to price may depend on pricing policy as a result the predictions of reduced form models for the outcomes of policy experiments may be unreliable because in making the prediction one must assume that the model parameters are unaffected by the policy change since the agents in our models choose among many alternative brands their choice probabilities take the form of higher order integrals we employ monte carlo methods to approximate these integrals and estimate our models using simulated maximum likelihood estimation of the dynamic forward looking model also requires that a dynamic programming problem be solved in order to form the likelihood function for this we use a new approximation method based on simulation and interpolation techniques these estimation techniques may be of interest to researchers and policy makers in many fields where dynamic choice among discrete alternatives is important such as marketing decision sciences labor and health economics and industrial organization

the effect of price advertising on prices evidence in the wake of 44 liquormart the 44 liquormart decision eliminating rhode island s ban on liquor price advertising made rhode island the subject of a natural experiment for measuring the effect of advertising on prices using massachusetts prices as controls we find that advertising stores substantially cut only prices of the products that they advertise prices of other products at both advertising and nonadvertising stores do not change advertising stores cut their prices on products advertised by rivals while nonadvertising stores do not we find no reductions in price dispersion across stores newspaper advertising stores appear to draw a higher share of customers after they advertise

informative advertising with differentiated products in this paper we study the role of promotional expenditures by sellers in a model of product differentiation advertising conveys full and accurate information about the characteristics of products heterogeneous consumers who have no source of information other than advertisements seek to purchase the products that best fit their needs despite the roles played by advertising in improving the matching of products and consumers and in increasing the elasticity of demand faced by each firm we find that the market determined levels of advertising are excessive given the extent of diversity in the market we derive a promotional equilibrium based on a specific information transmission technology paying explicit attention to the structure of consumer information and its impact on firms demand curves this allows us to study the effects of changes in the advertising technology including an increased ability to target messages to specific groups of consumers on the equilibrium in the product market we find that decreased advertising costs may reduce profits by increasing the severity of price competition

publish or perish what the competition is really doing this study provides comprehensive publications performance data over a twenty five year period for finance doctorates these data indicate that publishing one article per year in any finance journal or finance accounting economics or business journal over any prolonged period of time is a truly remarkable feat met by only 5 percent of the graduates tenure screens combining various quantity and quality requirements are examined to assess their ability to predict future publication productivity faculty and administrators seeking defensible benchmarks for evaluating faculty research productivity in finance will find that these data and results are particularly useful copyright 1992 by american finance association

donations risk attitudes and time preferences a study on altruism in primary school children abstract we study in a sample of 1070 primary school children aged seven to eleven years how altruism in a donation experiment is related to children s risk attitudes and intertemporal choices examining such a relationship is motivated by theories of reciprocal altruism that provide a cornerstone for understanding human social behavior we find that higher risk tolerance and patience in intertemporal choice increase in general the level of donations albeit the effects are non linear we confirm earlier results that altruism increases with age during childhood and that girls are more altruistic than boys having older brothers makes subjects less altruistic

the development of egalitarianism altruism spite and parochialism in childhood and adolescence we study how the distribution of other regarding preferences develops with age based on a set of allocation choices we classify each of 717 subjects aged 8 17 years as either egalitarian altruistic or spiteful we find a strong decrease in spitefulness with increasing age egalitarianism becomes less frequent and altruism much more prominent with age females are more frequently classified as egalitarian than males and less often as altruistic by varying the allocation recipient as either an in group or an out group member we also study how parochialism develops with age parochialism emerges significantly in the teenage years

economic behavior of children and adolescents a first survey of experimental economics results abstract about 15 years ago economic experiments with children and adolescents were considered as an extravagant niche of economic research since then this type of research has exploded in scope and depth it has become clear that studying the development of economic behavior and its determinants is important to understand economic behavior of adults and to provide a basis for potential policy interventions with respect to economic behavior in childhood and adolescence given the huge increase of papers we provide the first overview of economic experiments with children and adolescents we focus on the following aspects rationality of choices risk preferences time preferences social preferences cooperation and competitiveness all of these aspects are analyzed with respect to the influence of age and gender and we also consider the role of socio economic status or interventions

vintage human capital growth and the diffusion of new technology we develop a model of vintage human capital in which each technology requires vintage specific skills we examine the properties of a stationary equilibrium for our economy the stationary equilibrium is characterized by an endogenous distribution of skilled workers across vintages the distribution is shown to be single peaked under general conditions there is a lag between the appearance of a technology and its peak usage a phenomenon known as diffusion an increase in the rate of exogenous technological change shifts the distribution of human capital to more recent vintages thereby increasing the diffusion rate

the credibility revolution in empirical economics how better research design is taking the con out of econometrics since edward leamer s memorable 1983 paper let s take the con out of econometrics empirical microeconomics has experienced a credibility revolution while leamer s suggested remedy sensitivity analysis has played a role in this we argue that the primary engine driving improvement has been a focus on the quality of empirical research designs the advantages of a good research design are perhaps most easily apparent in research using random assignment we begin with an overview of leamer s 1983 critique and his proposed remedies we then turn to the key factors we see contributing to improved empirical work including the availability of more and better data along with advances in theoretical econometric understanding but especially the fact that research design has moved front and center in much of empirical micro we offer a brief digression into macroeconomics and industrial organization where progress by our lights is less dramatic although there is work in both fields that we find encouraging finally we discuss the view that the design pendulum has swung too far critics of design driven studies argue that in pursuit of clean and credible research designs researchers seek good answers instead of good questions we briefly respond to this concern which worries us little

sectoral shifts and cyclical unemployment a substantial fraction of cyclical unemployment is better characterized as fluctuations of the frictional or natural rate than as deviations from some relatively stable natural rate shifts of employment demand between sectors of the economy necessitate continuous labor reallocation since it takes time for workers to find new jobs some unemployment is unavoidable this paper presents evidence that most of the unemployment fluctuations of the seventies unlike those in the sixties were induced by unusual structural shifts within the u s economy simple time series models of layoffs and unemployment are constructed that include a measure of structural shifts within the labor market these models are estimated and a derived natural rate series is constructed

news media and crime perceptions evidence from a natural experiment abstract in democracies voters rely on media outlets to learn about politically salient issues this raises an important question how strongly can media affect public perceptions this paper uses a natural experiment the staggered introduction of the digital tv signal in italy to measure the effect of media persuasion on the perceptions individuals hold we focus on crime perceptions and combining channel specific viewership and content data we show that the reduced exposure to channels characterized by high levels of crime reporting decreases individual concerns about crime the effect is driven by individuals aged 50 and over who turn out to be more exposed to television while using other sources of information less frequently finally we provide evidence about the effect of the digital introduction on public policies closely related to crime perceptions and on voting behaviour

reputation and earnings the roles of quality and quantity in academe we examine the determinants of professional reputation does quantity of exposures raise reputation independent of quality does quality of the most important exposure have extra effects on reputation in a very large sample of academic economists there is little evidence that a scholar s most influential work provides any extra enhancement of reputation quality rankings matter more than absolute quality quantity has a zero or even negative effect on proxies for reputation data on salaries however show positive effects of quantity independent of quality we test explanations for the differences between the determinants of reputation and salary jel l14 j31

scholarships citations and salaries economic rewards in economics while substantial attention has been paid to the determinants of academics earnings 5 7 8 14 15 this literature has by implication suggested that the mere fact of having spent more time in the profession and the publication of more scholarly articles and books are the major determinants of salary differences our purpose here is to introduce a new determinant the quality of one s scholarly research measured by the frequency of references to that work as an additional objective measure of productivity we expect that this proxy for the extent of a scholar s influence on the work of other researchers is rewarded by the market in addition to giving a more complete picture of the determination of salaries in academic labor markets our approach should be useful in establishing a better framework for the evaluation of issues of discrimination in such markets than has been presented before 2 9

a simple theory of advertising as a good or bad our analysis treats advertisements and the goods advertised as complements in stable metautility functions and generates new results for advertising by building on and extending the general analysis of complements by assimilating the theory of advertising into the theory of complements we avoid the special approaches to advertising found in many studies that place obstacles in the way of understanding the effects of advertising we also use this approach to evaluate advertising from a welfare perspective whether there is excessive or too little advertising depends on several variables the effects on consumer utility the degree of competition in the market for advertised goods the induced changes in prices and outputs of advertised goods and whether advertising is sold to consumers

inflation and unemployment the world economy today is vastly different from the 1930s when seymour harris the chairman of this meeting infected me with his boundless enthusiasm for economics and his steadfast confidence in its capacity for good works economics is very different too both the science and its subject have changed and for the better since world war ii but there are some notable constants unemployment and inflation still preoccupy and perplex economists statesmen journalists housewives and everyone else the connection between them is the principal domestic economic burden of presidents and prime ministers and the major area of controversy and ignorance in macroeconomics i have chosen to review economic thought on this topic on this occasion partly because of its inevitable timeliness partly because of a personal interest reaching back to my first published work in 1941

financial systems in northern thai villages field research attempted to measure the risky environments the information structures the institutions and the risk response mechanisms of ten villages in northern thailand various key features are then modeled in an abstract but realistic way either with a full information risk sharing model or an information constrained version of the same model observations from some of the villages seem consistent with one or the other of these models but in many of the villages one is left with risk response variations across households which suggest that pareto improvements are possible

reputational capital and academic pay geoffrey k turnbull i introduction economists continue to have a strong interest in academic labor markets as the steady stream of earnings studies over the past several decades readily attests the academic labor market draws the attention of economists not only because it is a topic of direct personal interest but also because it presents an opportunity to examine general theories of labor markets in a context with which the researcher has intimate experience nonetheless important questions about how the market values research teaching and service remain unanswered to what extent does the market reward quality versus quantity of published research or team production in the form of co authorship furthermore how durable is reputational capital for individuals whose research productivity diminishes during their career ultimately these questions relate in one way or another to the nature of the incentive structure faced by academic economists we provide new evidence concerning the role of research quality co authorship administrative service and teaching performance in the production of reputational capital in addition we explore the question of the durability of reputational capital once some of these activities cease we assume that the quantity and quality of published research largely determines an individual s reputational capital in the external market to help us sort out the separate effects on reputational capital of both the quality and quantity of research activity we measure research quality by both journal quality and career citations employing an interactive quantity quality term a related question concerns the role of team production in building an individual s reputational capital do individuals receive differential returns to publishing single authored versus co authored research papers this is an interesting question in light of the substantial increase in co authorship over the last few decades 1 one explanation of this trend is that the academic market has presented scholars with increasing opportunities for specialization in the production of knowledge and that team production involves the combination of complementary skilled researchers if team production reflects complementarities in the production of research we should observe little difference in the returns to single versus co authored work another explanation is that co authorship involves the combination of substitute skilled researchers so that co authorship presents a way for individuals to reduce their research efforts without reducing their individual measured research output to the extent that co authorshi p represents such substitution the market should fully discount the returns to multiple authored papers in this article we also move beyond identifying the factors that enhance an individual s reputation in the market to study the question of the durability of reputational capital some individuals quit publishing once they are tenured or promoted while others experience lengthy but temporary breaks in their flow of research output we examine the potential penalties associated with gaps in research output providing the first empirical evidence concerning the durability of reputational capital for academic economists in order to ensure that our analysis deals with these issues in a way that is most relevant to a large portion of the market for academic economists we use data from several research universities but restrict the sample frame to a single discipline economics much of the previous work estimating how publications or other factors affect academic salaries typically use data from a single university with earnings equations estimated across disciplines restricting the sample to a single discipline has the additional advantage of reducing potential heterogeneity problems associated with measuring productivity across disciplines in addition our data enable us more thoroughly to explore the empirical issues in the debate since they permit more precise measures of the past and current productivity of individuals engaged in comparable work

a theory of quits and layoffs with efficient turnover this paper answers the efficient turnover literature s long silence regarding the quit layoff distinction treating quits as worker initiated separations and layoffs as firm initiated separations i establish that the existence of layoffs is compatible with optimizing workers and firms forming and dissolving employment matches to exploit all the gains from trade the efficient turnover approach is shown to be consistent with many empirical regularities that distinguish quits from layoffs structural implications of the model are tested on data from the psid

the illusion of sustainability this brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study entitled the illusion of sustainability conducted during the time period 1998 to 2001 in kenya the study observed that deworming is a public good since much of its social benefit comes through reduced disease transmission people were less likely to take deworming if their direct first order or indirect second order social contacts were exposed to deworming the introduction of a small fee for deworming drugs led to an 80 percent reduction in treatment rates take up was not sensitive to the exact price level suggesting that it is particularly counter productive to charge small positive prices for the treatment of infectious diseases an intensive school health education had no impact on worm prevention funding for the study derived from world bank nih fogarty international center berkeley center for health research

social preferences during childhood and the role of gender and age an experiment in austria and sweden we examine social preferences of swedish and austrian children and adolescents using the experimental design of charness and rabin 2002 we find that difference aversion decreases while social welfare preferences increase with age

adolescents cognitive ability and minimax play we conduct experiments with adolescent participants on repeated fixed play in three different zero sum games which have mixed strategy minimax solutions further we collect subject information on cognitive abilities and participation rates in competitive activities we find the adolescents correspondences with and deviations from minimax play largely consistent with previously and widely studied adult populations further we find strategic sophistication in terms of implementation of the mixed minimax strategy as well as earnings are not correlated with cognitive ability or experience in competitive situations

why not cut pay abstract i interviewed over 300 business people labor leaders business consultants and counselors of unemployed people all in the northeast of the united states during the recession of the early 1990 s in order to learn why wages and salaries declined in only a few firms employers were reluctant to cut pay because they believed doing so would hurt employee morale leading to lower productivity and current or future difficulties with hiring and retention it was thought that these effects would in the end cost more than the savings from lower pay there were few indications that unemployed people had excessive wage expectations on the contrary many unemployed were too flexible and found themselves rejected by firms as overqualified in most companies pay cuts were not a useful alternative to layoffs because pay cuts would not make it worthwhile to retain many employees and because layoffs harmed morale less than would pay cuts the findings support none of the theories of wage rigidity except those of solow and akerlof that emphasize morale

an empirical analysis of dynamic nonprice competition in an oligopolistic industry this article develops a dynamic model of nonprice competition in an oligopolistic industry and uses it to analyze advertising competition in the u s cigarette industry the model generalizes existing studies by allowing advertising to affect both firm market shares and the total size of the market the model also allows dynamic conjectural variations to arise from the intertemporal links created by the durability of advertising we use these dynamic conjectural variations to distinguish alternative models of competitive interaction we estimate the complete model of firm production demand and advertising choice by using data for u s cigarette producers the results indicate that firm advertising primarily affects the level of market demand with a firm s effect on rival firms market shares arising through variations in the number of brands sold empirical results on firm behavior suggest that firms act as if their advertising choices will alter the future advertising choices of rival firms in both the high tar and low tar cigarette markets

what s your identification strategy innovation in corporate finance research we study the diffusion of techniques designed to identify causal relationships in corporate finance research we estimate that the diffusion started in the mid 1990s lagged 20 years compared to economics and is now used in the majority of corporate finance articles consistent with recent theories of technology diffusion the adoption varies across researchers based on individuals expected net benefits of adoption younger scholars holders of phds in economics and those working at top institutions adopt faster adoption is accelerated through networks of colleagues and alumni and is also facilitated by straddlers who cross over from economics to finance our findings highlight new forces that explain the diffusion of innovation and shape the norms of academic research this paper was accepted by gustavo manso finance

price and advertising signals of product quality we present a signaling model based on ideas of phillip nelson in which both the introductory price and the level of directly uninformative advertising or other dissipative marketing expenditures are choice variables and may be used as signals for the initially unobservable quality of a newly introduced experience good repeat purchases play a crucial role in our model a second focus of the paper is on illustrating an approach to refining the set of equilibria in signalling games with multiple potential signals

dynamics of retail advertising evidence from a field experiment we use a controlled field experiment to investigate the dynamic effects of retail advertising the experimental design overcomes limitations hindering previous investigations of this issue our study uncovers dynamic advertising effects that have not been considered in previous literature we find that current advertising does affect future sales but surprisingly the effect is not always positive for the firm s best customers the long run outcome may be negative this finding reflects two competing effects brand switching and intertemporal substitution we also find evidence of cross channel substitution with the firm s best customers switching demand to the ordering channel that corresponds to the advertising jel l2 l81 m3 a firm s current advertising is generally associated with an increase in its sales but this effect is generally short lived

competing for low end markets recent business research points to the fortune awaiting to be tapped in low end markets in this paper we investigate how the size of the low end market influences a firm s profits and the pioneering firm s quality choice as low valuation consumers increase in a market on average consumers willingness to pay decreases this may lead us to expect firms profits to decrease as the size of the low end market increases our analysis shows that if the size of the low end market is below a threshold an increase in the size of the low end market may actually dampen price competition and improve profits as firms can then strategically choose their quality levels such that their products are more differentiated conventional wisdom also suggests that the pioneering firm will offer a higher quality product and earn more profits compared with the later entrant in contrast to this notion of quality advantage our analysis identifies circumstances in which a pioneer can offer a lower quality product and yet earn more profits an experimental test lends support for some of our model s predictions we further extend the model to consider markets with multiple firms firms with multiple products and consumers with limited purchasing power

sabotage in tournaments evidence from a laboratory experiment although relative performance schemes are pervasive in organizations reliable empirical data on induced sabotage behavior are almost nonexistent we study sabotage in repeated tournaments in a controlled laboratory experiment and observe that effort and sabotage are higher for higher wage spreads additionally we find that also in the presence of tournament incentives agents react reciprocally to higher wages by exerting higher effort destructive activities are reduced by explicitly calling them by their name sabotage communication among principal and agents can curb sabotage when they agree on flat prize structures and increased output if sabotage is not possible the principals choose tournament incentives more often this paper was accepted by peter wakker decision analysis

tax evasion and social interactions the paper extends the standard tax evasion model by allowing for social interactions in manski s manski c f 1993 identification of endogenous social effects the reflection problem review of economic studies 60 3 531 542 nomenclature our model takes into account endogenous interactions i e social conformity effects exogenous interactions i e fairness effects and correlated effects our model is tested using experimental data participants must decide how much income to report given individual and group tax rates and audit probabilities and given a feedback on the other members reporting behavior myopic and self consistent expectations are considered in the analysis in the latter case the estimation is based on a two limit simultaneous tobit with fixed group effects a unique social equilibrium exists when the model satisfies coherency conditions in line with brock and durlauf brock w a durlauf s n 2001b interactions based models in j heckman and e leamer eds handbook of econometrics 5 elsevier science b v 3297 380 the intrinsic nonlinearity between individual and group responses helps identify the model our results provide evidence of fairness effects but reject social conformity

sales and consumer inventory temporary price reductions sales are common for many goods and naturally result in a large increase in the quantity sold we explore whether the data support the hypothesis that these increases are at least partly due to demand anticipation at low prices consumers store for future consumption this effect if present has broad economic implications we test the predictions of an inventory model using scanner data with two years of household purchases the results are consistent with an inventory model and suggest that static demand estimates may overestimate price sensitivity

optimal mailing of catalogs a new methodology using estimable structural dynamic programming models we investigate the key determinants of the optimal direct mail policy in a dynamic environment where customers maximize utility and the direct mailer maximizes profits we measure the sensitivity of the customers to receiving a catalog in the mail while controlling for customer characteristics such as elapsed time in responses and number of purchases we apply our model to a database from a national cataloger that markets nonseasonal products we summarize the results of our model that are valid for these types of products we find that the dynamic model significantly outperforms its single period counterpart we find that it is not optimal to mail to individuals at low recency levels because they are likely to buy anyway it is better to save the mailing dollars for customers at higher recency levels we find that it is optimal to mail to customers who have purchased only a small or a medium number of times to induce them to continue to buy from this catalog and not switch to others it is not necessary to mail often to customers who have purchased many times before from the company unless they have high recency values we find that under the optimal mailing policy the cataloguer enjoys higher profits than under the current mailing policy

the costs of bankruptcy chapter 7 liquidation versus chapter 11 reorganization our paper explores a comprehensive sample of small and large corporate bankruptcies in arizona and new york from 1995 to 2001 bankruptcy costs are very heterogeneous and sensitive to the measurement method used we find that chapter 7 liquidations appear to be no faster or cheaper in terms of direct expense than chapter 11 reorganizations however chapter 11 seems to preserve assets better thereby allowing creditors to recover relatively more our paper also provides a large number of further empirical regularities our paper analyzes the largest sample of corporate bankruptcies to date we research approximately 300 cases from the arizona and new york federal bankruptcy courts from 1995 to 2001 these cases consist of 1 both publicly traded and privately held corporations and 2 both chapter 7 liquidations and chapter 11 reorganizations this sample is practically the entire population of unique corporate bankruptcies in these courts our paper s primary objective is to measure how the two available bankruptcy procedures differ especially but not only in terms of cost we explore four variables namely the change in the estate s value during bankruptcy a measure of indirect costs the time spent in bankruptcy another and more common measure of indirect costs the expenses submitted to and approved by the bankruptcy court a measure of direct costs and the recovery rates for creditors and apr violations our most important findings are that chapter 7 liquidations are not cheaper than chapter 11 reorganizations particularly after we control for endogenous self selection of firms into bankruptcy procedure bankruptcy professionals attorneys accountants trustees regularly end up with most of the post bankruptcy firm s value in chapter 7 arturo bris is at imd yale school of management and ecgi ivo welch is at brown uni