We examine the impact of reputational concerns on seeking advice. While seeking can improve performance, it may affect how others perceive the seeker's competence. In an online experiment with white-collar professionals (N=2,521), we test how individuals navigate this tradeoff and if others'...

We study the interplay between quality provision and consumer search in a search market where firms may design products of inferior quality to promote them to naive consumers who fail to fully understand product characteristics. We derive an equilibrium in which both superior and inferior...

We study the implications of biased consumer beliefs for search market outcomes in the seminal framework due to Diamond (1971). Biased consumers base their search strategy on a belief function which specifies for any (true) distribution of utility offers in the market a possibly incorrect...

This paper studies organizations with autocratic decisionmaking.

Over the last few years, worldwide mergers and acquisitions (M&A) have increasedsharply both in terms of value and volume. This development has not only beendriven by corporate acquirers but also to an increasing extent by private equityinvestors. In this paper, we analyze differences in...

This paper investigates how patent applications and grants held by new ventures improve their ability to attract venture capital (VC) financing. We argue that investors are faced with considerable uncer-tainty and therefore rely on patents as signals when trying to assess the prospects of...

The existing literature identifies patent thickets indirectly. In this paper we propose a novel measure based on patent citations which allows us to measure the density of patent thickets directly. We discuss the algorithm which generates the measure and present descriptive results validating...

Oliver Hart and Bengt Holmström were awarded the 2016 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for their fundamental contributions to contract theory. This article offers a short summary and discussion of their path breaking work.

While it is a stylized fact that exporting firms pay higher wages than non-exporting firms, the direction of the link between exporting and wages is less clear. Using a rich set of German linked employer-employee panel data we follow over time plants that start to export. We show that the...

We study the behavior of football (soccer) agents in the German Bundesliga. Referees are requested to act as impartial agents. However, they may be tempted to allocate benefits and rewards in a biased way. Agency theory has long neglected this form of malfeasance of economic agents,but has...