During the summer of 2005, the Big Three U.S. automobile manufacturers offered a customer promotion that allowed customers to buy new cars at the discounted price formerly offered only to employees. The initial months of the promotion were record sales months for each of the Big Three firms,...

Explaining why prices do not immediately adjust to business cycles remains one of the most important unresolved questions in macroeconomics. When researchers ask managers for an explanation, their responses reveal a reluctance to vary prices for fear of quot;antagonizing customers.quot; However,...

We use a dataset describing ownership of productive assets in the carpentry trade to evaluate several factors influencing the allocation of asset ownership among employers and employees. The findings suggest that the allocation involves a tradeoff between two incentive effects influencing how...

We use unique price data to study how retailers react to underlying cost changes. Temporary sales account for 95% of price changes in our data. Simple models would, therefore, suggest that temporary sales play a central role in price responses to cost shocks. We find, however, that, in response...

We show that some customers systematically purchase new products that flop. Their early adoption of a new product is a strong signal that a product will fail - the more they buy, the less likely the product will succeed. These customers, whom we call ‘Harbingers' [of failure], prefer products...

We propose an approach for determining the sample size required when using an experiment to train and certify a targeting policy. Calculating the rate at which the performance of a targeting model improves with additional training data is a complex problem. We approximate the problem by grouping...