Scholars working on the border of economics and psychology have documented many contexts in which individual decision-making is unreliable and might be improved by paternalistic interventions. Against this mounting body of negative evidence, economists' default belief in consumer sovereignty has...

Why do people frequently cooperate in defiance of their immediate incentives? One explanation is that individuals are conditionally cooperative. As an explanation of behavior in one-shot settings, such preferences require individuals to be able to discern their opponents' preferences. Using data...

Recent research has attempted to document that the financial gains associated with takeovers, LBOs, and other types of restructuring are attributable to subsequent improvements in operating performance. In this paper, the authors develop a more general framework for measuring the effect of...