Publications

SSRN

2011
Working Paper

Individual Rationality and Participation in Large Scale, Multi-Hospital Kidney Exchange

By: Itai Ashlagi and Alvin E. Roth

As multi-hospital kidney exchange clearinghouses have grown, the set of players has grown from patients and surgeons to include hospitals. Hospitals have the option of enrolling only their hard-to-match patient-donor pairs, while conducting easily arranged exchanges... View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Resource Allocation; Market Participation; Marketplace Matching; Organizations; Networks; Motivation and Incentives; Health Industry

24 Mar 2011
Working Paper Summaries

Individual Rationality and Participation in Large Scale, Multi-Hospital Kidney Exchanges

Keywords: by Itai Ashlagi & Alvin E. Roth; Health

Article

Visual Attention to Powerful Postures: People Avert Their Gaze from Nonverbal Dominance Displays

By: Elise Holland, Elizabeth Baily Wolf, Christine Looser and Amy Cuddy

This paper investigates whether humans avert their gaze from individuals engaging in nonverbal displays of dominance. Although past studies demonstrate that both humans and nonhuman primates direct more visual attention to high-status others than low-status others,... View Details

Keywords: Nonverbal Behavior; Eye-tracking; Dominance; Nonverbal Communication; Interpersonal Communication; Power and Influence

1977
Article

Individual Rationality and Nash's Solution to the Bargaining Problem

By: A. E. Roth

Keywords: Negotiation; Problems and Challenges

Research Summary

Choice, Rationality and Welfare Measurement

By: Jerry R. Green

For the past century, economists have used the hypothesis that individual choice is based on rationality in their calculations of individual and collective welfare. The central ideas are that actual market choice reveal underlying preferences, and with a good set of... View Details

2010
Working Paper

Overconfidence by Bayesian Rational Agents

By: Eric Van den Steen

This paper derives two mechanisms through which Bayesian-rational individuals with differing priors will tend to be relatively overconfident about their estimates and predictions, in the sense of overestimating the precision of these estimates. The intuition behind one... View Details

Keywords: Risk and Uncertainty; Measurement and Metrics; Game Theory; Forecasting and Prediction

May 2011
Article

Overconfidence by Bayesian Rational Agents

By: Eric J. Van den Steen

This paper derives two mechanisms through which Bayesian-rational individuals with differing priors will tend to be relatively overconfident about their estimates and predictions, in the sense of overestimating the precision of these estimates. The intuition behind one... View Details

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Forecasting and Prediction; Knowledge Acquisition; Risk Management; Prejudice and Bias

18 Nov 2013
Research & Ideas

Pulpit Bullies: Why Dominating Leaders Kill Teams

and in some cases, priming individuals to feel powerful and in some cases not. They found that in cases when someone felt powerful but was not recognized as being in a position of authority, team members were able to override that... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

June 2019
Article

Brokers vs. Retail Investors: Conflicting Interests and Dominated Products

By: Mark Egan

I study how brokers distort household investment decisions. Using a novel convertible bond dataset, I find that consumers often purchase dominated bonds—cheap and expensive versions of otherwise identical bonds coexist in the market. The empirical evidence suggests... View Details

Keywords: Brokers; Fiduciary Standard; Consumer Finance; Structured Products; Household; Investment; Decisions; Motivation and Incentives; Conflict of Interests

Purchase

Research Summary

"I Read Playboy for the Articles": Justifying and Rationalizing Questionable Preferences

When people behave in ways that might appear selfish, prejudiced or perverted, they engage a host of strategies designed to justify questionable behavior with rational excuses: “I hired my son because he’s more qualified.” “I promoted Ashley... View Details

2008
Chapter

I Read Playboy for the Articles: Justifying and Rationalizing Questionable Preferences

By: Zoe Chance and Michael I. Norton

When people behave in ways that might appear selfish, prejudiced or perverted, they engage in a host of strategies designed to justify questionable behavior with rational excuses: “I hired my son because he's more qualified”; “I promoted Ashley because she does a... View Details

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Ethics; Behavior; Strategy

2019
Working Paper

Design Rules, Volume 2: How Technology Shapes Organizations: Chapter 9 Organizing to Rationalize

By: Carliss Y. Baldwin

The purpose of this chapter is to explain what the technologies of flow production with stochastic bottlenecks require and reward in organizations. I argue that organizations successfully implementing these technologies are likely to have unified governance and... View Details

Keywords: Information Technology; Organizational Design; Management Teams; Business History

2011
Working Paper

How Foundations Think: The Ford Foundation as a Dominating Institution in the Field of American Business Schools

By: Rakesh Khurana, Kenneth Kimura and Marion Fourcade

The question of institutional change has become central to organizational research (Powell, 2008). Recent scholarship has demonstrated, often through carefully researched cases, that institutions can and sometimes do change. According to this research, there are two... View Details

Keywords: Change; Business Education; Business History; Organizations; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Structure; Relationships; Behavior

July 2017
Article

Inflation Expectations, Learning, and Supermarket Prices: Evidence from Survey Experiments

By: Alberto Cavallo, Guillermo Cruces and Ricardo Perez-Truglia

Information frictions play a central role in the formation of household inflation expectations, but there is no consensus about their origins. We address this question with novel evidence from survey experiments. We document two main findings. First, individuals in... View Details

Keywords: Inflation Expectations; Survey Experiment; Rational Inattention; Supermarkets; Macroeconomics; Household; Inflation and Deflation; Policy

September 2013
Article

Status Boundary Enforcement and the Categorization of Black-White Biracials

By: Arnold K. Ho, Jim Sidanius, Amy J.C. Cuddy and Mahzarin R. Banaji

Individuals who qualify equally for membership in more than one racial group are not judged as belonging equally to both of their parent groups, but instead are seen as belonging more to their lower status parent group. Why? The present paper begins to establish the... View Details

Keywords: Hypodescent; Social Dominance Orientation; Intergroup Threat; Hierarchy Maintenance; Equality and Inequality; Race; Rank and Position; Attitudes; Identity

February 2018
Article

Financial Disclosure and Market Transparency with Costly Information Processing

By: Marco Di Maggio and Marco Pagano

We study a model where some investors (“hedgers”) are bad at information processing, while others (“speculators”) have superior information-processing ability and trade purely to exploit it. The disclosure of financial information induces a trade externality: if... View Details

Keywords: Financial Disclosure; Information Processing; Liquidity; Market Transparency; Rational Inattention; Information; Financial Liquidity; Knowledge Use and Leverage; Corporate Disclosure; Financial Markets; Investment

06 Jun 2007
Research & Ideas

Behavioral Finance—Benefiting from Irrational Investors

of individual investors and 30 percent of institutional investors appear to be more inertial than logical. They take the default option, passively accepting the shares offered as consideration in stock mergers and acquisitions. In... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Hanna

07 Jun 2004
Research & Ideas

What Drives Supply Chain Behavior?

inventory management), production, and logistics. Many of these [academic] papers pursue an optimizing approach given the assumption of a completely rational decision maker. In a supply chain, however, these activities are usually spread... View Details

Keywords: by Sarah Jane Johnston

February 2004
Case

Note on Human Behavior: Reason and Emotion

By: Nitin Nohria and Bridget Gurtler

Human beings are driven by reasons and emotions. On the one hand, as rational choice theorists assert, human beings are resourceful and evaluative as they strive to maximize their own interests. An individual's interests can converge or diverge from the interests of... View Details

Keywords: Behavior; Cognition and Thinking; Emotions; Interests; Organizations; Organizational Design; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms