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Article

Optimality Bias in Moral Judgment

By: Julian De Freitas and Samuel G.B. Johnson

We often make decisions with incomplete knowledge of their consequences. Might people nonetheless expect others to make optimal choices, despite this ignorance? Here, we show that people are sensitive to moral optimality: that people hold moral agents accountable... View Details

Keywords: Moral Judgment; Lay Decision Theory; Theory Of Mind; Causal Attribution; Moral Sensibility; Decision Making

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10 Feb 2016
Working Paper Summaries

Land Institutions and Chinese Political Economy: Institutional Complementarities and Macroeconomic Management

Keywords: by Meg Rithmire; Public Administration; Real Estate; Financial Services

Article

Present Bias Causes and Then Dissipates Auto-enrollment Savings Effects

By: John Beshears, James J. Choi, David Laibson and Peter Maxted

Present bias causes procrastination, which leads households to stick with auto-enrollment defaults. However, present bias also engenders overconsumption. Separation from each employer generates a rollover of 401(k) balances to an individual retirement account (IRA)... View Details

Keywords: Present Bias; Procrastination; Personal Finance; Decision Making; Social Psychology; Retirement

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March 1990 (Revised October 1999)
Case

Mary Kay Cosmetics: Sales Force Incentives (A)

By: Robert L. Simons and Hilary Weston

Describes the incentive system by which Mary Kay Cosmetics motivates the sales force of 200,000 independent agents who comprise the firm's only distribution channel. Illustrates the powerful effect on sales-force behavior that results when creative types of employee... View Details

Keywords: Motivation and Incentives; Cost Management; Salesforce Management; Distribution Channels; Beauty and Cosmetics Industry; United States

2006
Chapter

The Social Dimensions of Entrepreneurship

By: Amir Licht and Jordan I. Siegel

Schumpeter's canonical depiction of the entrepreneur as an agent of social and economic change implies that entrepreneurs are especially sensitive to the social environment. We use an organizing framework based on institutional economics, in combination with lessons... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Social Institutions; Culture; Law; Social Networks; Reputation; Social Entrepreneurship; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact

May 2007 (Revised March 2010)
Case

Maria Sharapova: Marketing a Champion (A)

By: Anita Elberse and Margarita Golod

In July 2004, a then 17-year-old Maria Sharapova won Wimbledon, arguably the most prestigious tennis tournament in the world. Max Eisenbud, Sharapova's agent at International Management Group (IMG), knew the championship would lead to a flood of new opportunities. What... View Details

Keywords: Marketing Strategy; Advertising; Gender; Product Marketing; Sports Industry

2015
Article

Beliefs About the True Self Explain Asymmetries Based on Moral Judgment

By: George E. Newman, Julian De Freitas and Joshua Knobe

Past research has identified a number of asymmetries based on moral judgments. Beliefs about (a) what a person values, (b) whether a person is happy, (c) whether a person has shown weakness of will, and (d) whether a person deserves praise or blame seem to depend... View Details

Keywords: Concepts; Social Cognition; Moral Reasoning; True Self; Values; Weakness Of Will; Blame; Values and Beliefs; Identity; Moral Sensibility; Happiness

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Research Summary

Optimal Contracts under Inequity Aversion with Voluntary Enforcement (with Tilman Borgers)

We analyze contract structure and efficiency in a Moral Hazard model with possibly fairminded agent and principal when the contract is not automatically enforced but this is a voluntary choice by the contracting parties independently. We find that no penalizing... View Details

2015
Working Paper

Misconduct in Financial Services: Differences across Organizations

By: Jennifer Brown and Dylan Minor

We examine misconduct in financial services. We propose a theory in which experts extract surplus based on the value of their firm's brand and their own skills. Using sales complaint data for insurance agents, we find that agents working exclusively for large branded... View Details

Keywords: Ethics; Insurance; Sales; Financial Services Industry; Insurance Industry

Article

Stability and Competitive Equilibrium in Trading Networks

By: John William Hatfield, Scott Duke Kominers, Alexandru Nichifor, Michael Ostrovsky and Alexander Westkamp

We introduce a model in which agents in a network can trade via bilateral contracts. We find that when continuous transfers are allowed and utilities are quasi-linear, the full substitutability of preferences is sufficient to guarantee the existence of stable outcomes... View Details

Keywords: Balance and Stability; Markets

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2018
Working Paper

Creativity Under Fire: The Effects of Competition on Creative Production

By: Daniel P. Gross

Though fundamental to innovation and essential to many industries and occupations, individual creativity has received limited attention as an economic behavior and has historically proven difficult to study. This paper studies the incentive effects of competition on... View Details

Keywords: Incentives; Tournaments; Radical Vs. Incremental Innovation; Motivation and Incentives; Competition; Creativity; Innovation and Invention

March 1992 (Revised April 2000)
Case

Joline Godfrey and the Polaroid Corporation (A)

By: Linda A. Hill and Nancy A Kamprath

Describes how Joline Godfrey, an intrapreneur at the Polaroid Corp., introduced and developed a project that could help Polaroid move to a more service- as opposed to product-oriented focus. Also depicts the mentor-protege relationship between Godfrey and Gerald... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Entrepreneurship; Rank and Position; Leading Change; Problems and Challenges; Change; Electronics Industry; Consumer Products Industry

August 2004
Article

Capital Controls, Risk and Liberalization Cycles

By: Laura Alfaro and Fabio Kanczuk

The paper presents an overlapping-generations model where agents vote on whether to open or close the economy to international capital flows. Political decisions are shaped by the risk over capital and labor returns. In an open economy, the capitalists (old) completely... View Details

Keywords: Business Cycles; Development Economics; Voting; Risk and Uncertainty; Cash Flow; Saving; Investment; Economy; Wages

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2008
Working Paper

'Fair Marriages:' An Impossibility

By: Bettina-Elisabeth Klaus

For the classical marriage model (introduced in Gale and Shapley, 1962) efficiency and envy-freeness are not always compatible, i.e., fair matchings do not always exist. However, for many allocation of indivisible goods models (see Velez, 2008, and references therein),... View Details

Keywords: Marketplace Matching; Fairness

2017
Chapter

Corporate Moral Agency, Positive Duties, and Purpose

By: Nien-hê Hsieh

A long-standing question in business ethics is whether business enterprises are themselves moral agents with distinct moral responsibilities. To date, the debate about corporate moral agency has focused on responsibility for past wrongdoing that involves violating... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Moral Sensibility; Mission and Purpose

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Research Summary

The Appropriability of Reputation in Franchises Selling Brands

We develop a multi-market model in which there are two kinds of firms: brands and small firms (or agents). Firms interact with short lived clients in the market for goods (or services) and with each other in the market for franchises. The model is one of adverse... View Details

June 2021
Article

Making Marketplaces Safe: Dominant Individual Rationality and Applications to Market Design

By: Benjamin N. Roth and Ran I. Shorrer

Often market designers cannot force agents to join a marketplace rather than using pre-existing institutions. We propose a new desideratum for marketplace design that guarantees the safety of participation: Dominant Individual Rationality (DIR). A marketplace is DIR if... View Details

Keywords: Dominant Individual Rationality; Market Design; Safety

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September 2018 (Revised August 2019)
Case

The Progressive Corporation, 2018

By: John R. Wells and Benjamin Weinstock

In early 2019, The Progressive Corporation (Progressive), the USA’s third-largest auto insurance writer, reported earned premiums were up 20% in 2018 compared to the previous year, and net income was up 64%. Direct sales of personal auto policies rose 21%, while agent... View Details

July 2024
Module Note

The Scope of the Corporation

By: David J. Collis

Every company, regardless of size or configuration, has to make decisions about the appropriate scope of its operations. In fact, the issue is so fundamental that Ronald Coase won the Nobel Prize in Economics for merely asking the question, “what determines the scope... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Strategy; Mission and Purpose

Article

Anger and Regulation

By: Rafael Di Tella and Juan Dubra

We study a model in which agents experience anger when they see a firm that has displayed insufficient concern for the welfare of its clients (i.e., altruism) making high profits. Regulation can increase welfare, for example, through fines (even with no changes in... View Details

Keywords: Altruism; Populism; Public Relations; Profit; Consumer Behavior; Perception; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms

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