The paper attempts to shed light on the key drivers of consumer tipping behavior and reports the findings from an exploratory study aimed at addressing consumer motivations and their influence on consumers’ willingness to tip. When approaching the research issue, the phenomenon presents an...

Analyzing consumer welfare from observable data, or empirical demand functions has been a very controversial issue in economics. One metric often used is deadweight loss from a tax or price increase. A classic debate in economic history regarding the appropriate methodology for measuring...

Two complementary sources of information are studied in a multiperiod agency model. One is an accounting source which partially but credibly conveys the agent’s private information through accounting recognition. The other is an unverified communication by the agent (i.e., a self-report). In a...

We conduct an experiment to examine how lending decisions are affected by lender perceptions of reporting and governance quality. We perform a set of experiments to determine whether lenders are sensitive to the quality of governance as measured by board composition along multiple dimensions,...

As networks improve and new services emerge, questions arise that affect service deployments and network choices. The Internet is arguably a successful example of a network shared by many services. However, combining heterogeneous services on the same network need not always be the right answer,...

This dissertation contains three essays that can be read independently. The first chapter examines how a debt crisis can occur and persist as a result of unanticipated, transitory, real interest rate and commodity price shocks. Using an optimal stopping framework, the debtor country's optimal...