This paper exploits nationalistic biases in Olympic winter sport judging to study the problem of designing a decision making process that uses the input of potentially biased agents. Judges score athletes from their own countries higher than other judges do, and they appear to vary their biases...

We investigate whether the size and quality of the networks of firms engaging in illegal/unethical acts are affected by those acts. Using legitimacy, status, and resource dependence theories, we hypothesize that size will be affected and quality will deteriorate. Using a sample of 208 firms, we...

This paper provides a theory of private politics in which an activist seeks to change the production practices of a firm for the purpose of redistribution to those whose interests it supports. The source of the activist's influence is the possibility of support for its cause by the public. The...

I study the human capital development and firm-worker matching processes for PhD economists. This group is useful for this purpose because the types of jobs they hold can be easily categorized and they have an observable productivity measure (that is, publications.) I derive a two-period model...

Corporations simultaneously claim that human capital is increasingly important to their success and that they seek to maximize shareholder value. This paper studies the relationship between these two developments. We show that the pursuit of shareholder interests may require ceding a role in...

When Less Developed Countries (LDCs) announce debt relief agreements under the Brady Plan, their stock markets appreciate by an average of 60 percent in real dollar terms--a $42 billion increase in shareholder value. In contrast, there is no significant stock market increase for a control group...

After entering into supply contracts, firms often later renegotiate the terms of those contracts. For example, firms that obtain market demand information after signing supply contracts may benefit by renegotiating the contracts to allow buyers facing poor market conditions to purchase less than...

This research examines the temporal range of subliminal priming effects on complex behavior. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants were subliminally primed with words either related or unrelated to intelligence before completing a practice exam, administered 1 to 4 days before an actual course...

We study self-interested routing in stochastic networks, taking into account the discrete stochastic dynamics of such networks. We analyze a two station multiclass queueing network in which the system manager chooses the scheduling rule used, and individual customers choose routes in a...

Recent research shows that hourly payment affects decisions about time use in ways that disfavor uncompensated activities such as volunteering. This paper extends that argument by showing that the activation of money and economics as aspects of a person's self-concept is one mechanism possibly...