It is difficult to test the prediction that future career prospects create implicit effort incentives because researchers cannot randomly “assign” career prospects to economic agents. To overcome this challenge, we use data from professional soccer, where employees of the same club face...

Firms often learn about their own capabilities through their products' successes and failures. This paper explores the interaction between learning about capabilities and product strategy in a formal model. We consider a firm that can launch a sequence of products, where each product's success...

It is difficult to test the prediction that future career prospects create implicit effort incentives because researchers cannot randomly “assign” career prospects to economic agents. To overcome this challenge, we use data from professional soccer, where employees of the same club face...

We consider a seller s ability to deter potential entrants by offering exclusive contracts to its downstream buyers. Rasmusen, Ramseyer, and Wiley (1991) showed that this can be a pro fitable strategy if there is a coordination failure on the part of the buyers. Segal and Whinston (2000) showed...

This paper develops a theory of contests based on perceived abilities, and provides evidence for the predictions of this theory using panel data from professional soccer. We examine how soccer players perform in club matches during the informal)nomination contests for national teams prior to an...

This article investigates downstream firms' ability to collude in a repeated game of competition between supply chains. We show that downstream firms with buyer power can collude more easily in the output market if they also collude on their input supply contracts. More specifically, an implicit...

This paper shows that a seller can benefit from strategically “demarketing” its product, meaning visibly suppressing marketing efforts to reduce demand. Demarketing lowers expected sales ex ante but improves product quality image ex post, as the market attributes good sales to superior...