The aim of auditing is to protect active and potential investors from accounting fraud. However, the large number of auditing scandals demonstrates that auditing has a dark side. This dark side of auditing is the topic of this paper. Correct auditing is a public good, provided by private...

We investigate the impact of strategic consumer behavior on retailers' dynamic pricing decisions. We present a stylized two-period model, and test the equilibrium predictions in a set of behavioral experiments in which human subjects played the role of pricing managers. Our main insight is that...

Much significant research has been done to shed light on discrimination of females in, for example, labor markets. Less is known, in contrast, about the amount of discrimination in the virtual world of online gaming. In an early study, Castronova (2004) finds that female avatars receive about...

Stock exchange operators compete for order flow by setting "make" fees for limit orders and "take" fees for market orders. When traders quote continuous prices, they can choose prices that perfectly neutralize any fee division, and traders stream to the exchange with the lowest total fee. The...

The Internet has changed the nature of doing business as well as the nature of competition in many industries. Consumers are more empowered than ever with valuable information such as prices, products, and store ratings. Because of this, some researchers even predicted, during the early stage of...

This paper explores the private and social benefits from barter exchange in a monetized economy. We first prove a no-trade theorem regarding the ability of firms with double-coincidences-of-wants to negotiate improvements in trade among themselves relative to the market outcomes. We then...

We consider an entrepreneur that is the sole producer of a cost reducing skill, but the entrepreneur that hires a team to use the skill cannot prevent collusive trade for the innovation-related knowledge between employees and competitors. We show that there are two types of diffusion-avoiding...

We build a model of debt for firms with investment projects for which flexibility and free cash flow problems are important issues. We focus on the factors that lead the firm to select the zero-debt policy. Our model provides an explanation of the so-called "zero-leverage puzzle" (Strebulaev and...

It is well-established that incumbent firms may try to deter new market entry by pretending to be stronger than they really are (e.g. by imitating the high output level of a low cost monopolist). In this article, we show that in some cases an incumbent may prefer the opposite, namely to...

This paper explores the private and social benefits from barter exchange in a monetized economy. We first prove a no-trade theorem regarding the ability of firms with double-coincidences-of-wants to negotiate improvements in trade among themselves relative to the market outcomes. We then...