Publications

05 Jun 2020
Research & Ideas

How Anchor Investors Help Impact Funds Succeed

the experience of development and fundraising professionals in the impact investing space—that anchor investors are motivated by the ability to catalyze additional change by supporting fund managers early in their fund raise, often providing a View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Financial Services

2007
Other Unpublished Work

Influence and Inefficiency in the Internal Capital Market

By: Julie Wulf

I model inefficient resource allocations in M-form organizations due to influence activities by division managers that skew capital budgets in their favor. Corporate headquarters receives two types of signals about investment opportunities: private signals that can be... View Details

Keywords: Capital Budgeting; Investment; Knowledge Acquisition; Managerial Roles; Resource Allocation; Power and Influence

13 May 2022
Research & Ideas

Company Reviews on Glassdoor: Petty Complaints or Signs of Potential Misconduct?

Corporate scandals often follow a pattern: Whether it’s Theranos and its fraudulent blood testing technology, Wells Fargo and its fake financial accounts, or Volkswagen and its bogus emissions data, a whistleblower eventually comes forward to expose the behavior, and... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Technology

March 2017
Article

Risky Business: When Humor Increases and Decreases Status

By: T. B. Bitterly, A.W. Brooks and M. E. Schweitzer

Across eight experiments, we demonstrate that humor can influence status, but attempting to use humor is risky. The successful use of humor can increase status in both new and existing relationships, but unsuccessful humor attempts (e.g., inappropriate jokes) can harm... View Details

Keywords: Status and Position; Behavior; Groups and Teams; Perception

2024
Working Paper

Content Moderation with Opaque Policies

By: Scott Duke Kominers and Jesse M. Shapiro

A sender sends a signal about a state to a receiver who takes an action that determines a payoff. A moderator can block some or all of the sender's signal before it reaches the receiver. When the moderator's policy is transparent to the receiver, the moderator can... View Details

Keywords: Market Design; Communication; Knowledge Sharing; Information Infrastructure; Media

Register to Read

March 2008
Article

The Consequences of Information Revealed in Auctions

By: Brett E. Katzman and Matthew Rhodes-Kropf

This paper considers the ramifications of post-auction competition on bidding behavior under different bid announcement policies. In equilibrium, the auctioneer's announcement policy has two distinct effects. First, announcement entices players to signal information to... View Details

Keywords: Information; Auctions; Bids and Bidding

Article

Delayed-Response Strategies in Repeated Games with Observation Lags

By: Drew Fudenberg, Yuhta Ishii and Scott Duke Kominers

We extend the folk theorem of repeated games to two settings in which players' information about others' play arrives with stochastic lags. In our first model, signals are almost-perfect if and when they do arrive, that is, each player either observes an almost-perfect... View Details

Keywords: ＂Repeated Games＂; Folk Theorem; Private Monitoring; Observation Lag; Game Theory

Research Summary

I give therefore I have: Philanthropy and Prosperity

We suggest and document a surprising means by which people can feel wealthier: giving their money away. We suggest that just as acts of conspicuous generosity signal wealth and power to others, they trigger feelings of subjective wealth and power in the giver--despite... View Details

April 7, 2017
Article

Signs You’re Losing Control of Your Family Business

By: Josh Baron and Rob Lachenauer

These red flags signal the need to reassert authority. View Details

17 Dec 2015
Working Paper Summaries

Observability Increases the Demand for Commitment Devices

Keywords: by Christine Exley & Jeffrey Naecker

July 2014
Article

Accounting for Crises

By: Venky Nagar and Gwen Yu

We provide among the first empirical evidence consistent with recent macro global-game crisis models, which show that the precision of public signals can coordinate crises (e.g., Angeletos and Werning, 2006; Morris and Shin, 2002, 2003). In these models,... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Disclosure; Mathematical Methods; Game Theory; Financial Markets; Forecasting and Prediction; Accounting; Financial Crisis

SSRN

February 2025
Article

Seeing the Whole: Configurational Cognition and New Venture Resource Mobilization

By: Goran Calic, François Neville, Santi Furnari and C. S. Richard Chan

Research is scant on how multiple venture attributes combine as “whole packages” of signals (or cognitive configurations) in resource holders’ eyes, shaping a venture’s ability to mobilize resources. Drawing on a Qualitative Comparative Analysis of 1,395 crowdfunding... View Details

Keywords: Crowdfunding; Mission and Purpose; Entrepreneurship; Communication; Perception

2023
Working Paper

Culture as a Signal: Evidence from a Natural Field Experiment

By: Wei Cai, Dennis Campbell and Jiehang Yu

The importance of culture as an informal management control system is increasingly acknowledged in academia. While prior research mainly focuses on the value of culture on internal stakeholders (e.g., employees), we examine whether culture serves as a credible signal... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Culture; Groups and Teams; Customer Focus and Relationships

SSRN

11 May 2020
Op-Ed

Immigration Policies Threaten American Competitiveness

It is no secret that immigration has reshaped American innovation. Immigrants are the backbone of America’s most innovative industries, provide a quarter of our patent applications, and are numerous among our science and engineering superstars. Taken from World... View Details

Keywords: by William R. Kerr

November 1989 (Revised August 1994)
Supplement

Du Pont's Titanium Dioxide Business (C)

Provides students the opportunity to track industry evolution over time, to explore the role that signaling may play in such evolution, and to construct and validate industry scenarios. View Details

Keywords: Analysis; Supply and Industry; Chemical Industry

19 Dec 2014
Research & Ideas

China’s Complicated Relationship With Mother Nature

Despite its name, the Great Wall of China began as a series of smaller, isolated defensive fortifications. Those structures grew and were later unified into the imposing structure that exists today. The Great Wall is a great metaphor for the Chinese economy. By... View Details

Keywords: Re: William C. Kirby; Manufacturing

January 1996
Background Note

The Motivation for Creativity in Organizations

By: Teresa M. Amabile

People will be most creative when they feel motivated primarily by the interest, enjoyment, satisfaction, and challenge of the work itself--when they are driven by a deep involvement in their work and a passion for it. This note describes the ways in which creativity... View Details

Keywords: Compensation and Benefits; Managerial Roles; Organizations; Creativity; Motivation and Incentives; Satisfaction

Educators

summer 2003
Article

Patents, Invalidity, and the Strategic Transmission of Enabling Information

By: James J. Anton and Dennis A. Yao

The patent system encourages innovation and knowledge disclosure by providing exclusivity to inventors. Exclusivity is limited, however, because a substantial fraction of patents have some probability of being ruled invalid when challenged in court. The possibility of... View Details

Keywords: System; Innovation and Invention; Knowledge Dissemination; Courts and Trials; Competition; Patents; Corporate Disclosure

2025
Working Paper

Incentive-Compatible Recovery from Manipulated Signals, with Applications to Decentralized Physical Infrastructure

By: Jason Milionis, Jens Ernstberger, Joseph Bonneau, Scott Duke Kominers and Tim Roughgarden

We introduce the first formal model capturing the elicitation of unverifiable information from a party (the "source") with implicit signals derived by other players (the "observers"). Our model is motivated in part by applications in decentralized physical... View Details