Publications

September 2023
Article

A Pull versus Push Framework for Reputation

By: Jillian J. Jordan

Reputation is a powerful driver of human behavior. Reputation systems incentivize 'actors' to take reputation-enhancing actions, and 'evaluators' to reward actors with positive reputations by preferentially cooperating with them. This article proposes a reputation... View Details

Keywords: Reputation; Behavior; Game Theory

Article

Third-party Punishment as a Costly Signal of Trustworthiness

By: Jillian J. Jordan, Moshe Hoffman, Paul Bloom and David G. Rand

Third-party punishment (TPP), in which unaffected observers punish selfishness, promotes cooperation by deterring defection. But why should individuals choose to bear the costs of punishing? We present a game theoretic model of TPP as a costly signal of... View Details

Keywords: Third-party Punishment; Trustworthiness; Behavior; Trust; Game Theory

June 2012 (Revised July 2013)
Exercise

Competition Simulator Exercise: Instructions

By: Eric Van den Steen

In the Competition Simulator Exercise, students explore through trial and error some important economic foundations of competitive strategy and managerial economics. In particular, the nine simulator exercises let students explore horizontal differentiation with and... View Details

Keywords: Competitive Strategy; Economics; Strategy; Game Theory

Purchase

March 2008
Article

Deferred Acceptance Algorithms: History, Theory, Practice, and Open Questions

By: Alvin E. Roth

The deferred acceptance algorithm proposed by Gale and Shapley (1962) has had a profound influence on market design, both directly, by being adapted into practical matching mechanisms, and, indirectly, by raising new theoretical questions. Deferred acceptance... View Details

Keywords: History; Market Design; Labor; System; Practice; Performance; Theory; Boston; New York (city, NY)

2023
Working Paper

Channeled Attention and Stable Errors

By: Tristan Gagnon-Bartsch, Matthew Rabin and Joshua Schwartzstein

We develop a framework for assessing when somebody will eventually notice that she has a misspecified model of the world, premised on the idea that she neglects information that she deems—through the lens of her misconceptions—to be irrelevant. In doing so, we... View Details

Keywords: Attentional Stability; Cognition and Thinking; Attitudes; Information; Theory

2008
Working Paper

Stability and Nash Implementation in Matching Markets with Couples

By: Claus-Jochen Haake and Bettina-Elisabeth Klaus

We consider two-sided matching markets with couples. First, we extend a result by Klaus and Klijn (2005, Theorem 3.3) and show that for any weakly responsive couples market there always exists a "double stable" matching, i.e., a matching that is stable for the couples... View Details

Keywords: Marketplace Matching; Balance and Stability; Game Theory

17 May 2011
First Look

First Look: May 17

founders. To motivate the empirical analysis we develop a simple theory of costly bargaining, where founders trade off the simplicity of accepting an equal split, with the costs of negotiating a differentiated allocation of founder... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

16 Mar 2010
First Look

First Look: March 16

a firm's headquarters—for the presence of large, non-managerial individual shareholders in firms. These shareholders have a large impact on firms, controlling for selection effects. Course Research: Using the Case Method to Build and Teach Management View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

19 Mar 2009
Working Paper Summaries

Beyond Gender and Negotiation to Gendered Negotiations

Keywords: by Deborah Kolb & Kathleen L. McGinn

17 Nov 2008
Research & Ideas

Decoding the Artful Sidestep

We heard question-dodging in the U.S. presidential debates not long ago. And everyone hears it in normal political discourse, in business meetings, and in typical daily life—but are people really listening? Sometimes, it seems, individuals who are asked a difficult... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

2006
Article

Empowerment through Choice? A Critical Analysis of the Effects of Choice in Organizations

By: Roy Y.J. Chua and S Iyengar

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Theory; Organizations

July 2002
Article

The Economist As Engineer: Game Theory, Experimental Economics and Computation As Tools of Design Economics

By: Alvin E Roth

Keywords: Game Theory; Economics; Mathematical Methods; Design

18 Oct 2016
First Look

October 18, 2016

and miss? Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen has the answer. A generation ago, Christensen revolutionized business with his groundbreaking theory of disruptive innovation. Now, he goes further, offering powerful new... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

24 Nov 2009
First Look

First Look: Nov. 24

pioneering work of Howard Raiffa and often expressed in the pages of the Negotiation Journal, the emergent prescriptive field of "negotiation analysis" progressively developed from Raiffa's early contributions to game theory and... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

spring 2006
Article

All's Fair in Love, War, & Bankruptcy: Corporate Governance Implications of CEO Turnover in Financial Distress

By: Ethan S. Bernstein

Prior discussions of management turnover during financial distress have examined bankrupt and non-bankrupt firms as distinct groupings with little overlap. Separately investigating rates of turnover in-bankruptcy and out-of-bankruptcy, without a direct comparison... View Details

Keywords: CEO Turnover; Bankruptcy; Restructuring; Shadow Of Bankruptcy; Borrowing and Debt; Credit; Financing and Loans; Corporate Governance; Finance; Theory; Markets; United States

December 2010
Article

Social Preferences and Strategic Uncertainty: An Experiment on Markets and Contracts

This paper reports a three-phase experiment on a stylized labor market. In the first two phases, agents face simple games, which we use to estimate subjects' social and reciprocity concerns. In the last phase, four principals compete by offering agents a contract from... View Details

Keywords: Strategy; Risk and Uncertainty; Markets; Contracts; Decisions; Distribution; Labor; Game Theory