One of Chandler's basic insights was that the new organizational structures adopted after the 1920s reflected a specialization of the roles of business and corporate managers. Business managers coordinated functions and corporate managers allocated resources. This article studies the impact of...

This article analyzes the market for experience goods when the product's quality is uncertain. Unlike the case of certain product quality, in this setting, a customer who receives a bad product cannot automatically infer that the producer has "cheated." In this two-period model, producers select...

Software piracy by users is generally believed to harm both software firms (through lower profits) and buying customers (through higher prices). Thus, it is thought that perfect and costless technological protection would benefit both firms and consumers. The model developed here suggests that...

Film studios occasionally withhold movies from critics before their release. Because the unreviewed movies tend to be below average in quality, this practice provides a useful setting in which to test models of limited strategic thinking: Do moviegoers seem to realize that no review is a sign of...

This work discusses the boom and bust dynamics which are a common feature of a large range of different industries. especially but not only new born ones. The common managerial behavior underpinning such dynamics is aggressive capacity expansion in the boom period ultimately yielding excess...

A reference price is an internal price that consumers are believed to use to compare actual prices. Reference effects for price have been demonstrated in many settings. Reference effects for quality also have been demonstrated using scanner data. Here we present experimental evidence. Firstly,...

Film studios occasionally withhold movies from critics before their release. These cold openings provide a natural setting to apply laboratory-developed models of limited strategic thinking to the field. In a set of 1,303 widely released movies, cold opening is correlated with a 10-30 percent...