Faculty AI Research

Data assets are increasingly vital in modern economies, yet macroeconomic measurement is not well-adapted to capturing their value. Part of the problem is that data is an intangible asset: investments in data are missed in national accounts, and

Who behaves dominantly—and why? Much compelling prior research spotlights motivational sources. We focus here on beliefs, proposing that people are less likely to behave dominantly when they expect dominance to incur greater relationship costs. We posit that this situation-specific expectancy is shaped by a general competitive worldview, seeing the social world as a “competitive jungle.” In five preregistered studies, we tested whether those with a competitive worldview expected dominance to incur less relationship harm and whether expected relationship harm predicted dominance.

We study a regulatory spillover in which audit regulations for public firms can affect auditing practices for private firms through the channel of common partners—partners who audit both public and private firm clients. We exploit a regulation in China that applies only to public firm auditing and aims to enhance transparency and rigor in audit procedures. We find that audit partners are more inclined to issue modified opinions for private firm clients following the implementation of the regulation.

For general choice spaces, standard dynamic preference models cannot simultaneously satisfy the properties of time consistency, the separation of time and risk preferences, and the ability to accommodate an indifference to the timing of when risk is resolved. In the context of a consumption-portfolio choice problem often underlying asset pricing and macro models, we derive necessary and sufficient conditions such that all three properties are satisfied.

As generative AI systems rapidly improve, a key question emerges: how do users adapt to these changes, and when does such adaptation matter for realizing performance gains? This paper studies prompt adaptation—how users adjust their inputs in response to evolving model behavior—using a common experimental design applied to two preregistered tasks with 3,750 total participants who submitted nearly 37,000 prompts. We show that the importance of prompt adaptation depends critically on task structure.

Screening human capital based on signals such as job applications or entrepreneurial pitches is crucial for organizations. Signals are often informative insofar as they require differential knowledge and effort to produce. Generative AI (GAI) complicates screening by lowering the cost of producing impressive signals. We model the informational effects of GAI, showing that applicants' access to GAI can increase—but also decrease—an evaluator's screening mistakes. This result depends on how GAI affects experts' signals compared to non-experts'.

Climate-friendly technologies are the best way to stymie rising inflation — and will get better and cheaper over time.

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We explore how traders' equity capitalization influences asset prices in a framework that accounts for market power. In our model  traders with capital constraints engage in transactions in an imperfectly competitive market. We demonstrate that looser capital constraints elevate both asset prices and price impact, which diminishes market liquidity. Using Canadian Treasury auction data, we illustrate how to apply our model to quantify these effects. We estimate the shadow costs of capital constraints by exploiting a temporary policy exemption during 2020-2021.

Observers are often dissatisfied with punishments handed down by judges for low-level crimes. This dissatisfaction emerges from a perceived trade-off between deterrence and severity. On the one hand, observers believe that harsher punishments are effective at deterring future criminal activity, but also balk at excessively harsh punishments because of their undue harm on transgressors. On the other hand, observers critique less harsh—and even proportionate—punishments for their inability to deter future crime.

In evaluative contexts, evaluatees typically seek to present themselves in a favorable light, while evaluators ask penetrating questions to assess these claims. Here we develop a framework to identify curveball questions: ones that are on-topic yet perplexing (i.e., difficult to predict) relative to past discourse. We develop a language-based measure of curveball questions and apply it to a corpus of quarterly earnings calls.

Working from home resulted in a sharp contraction in office demand. We built a valuation model to find that the office stock lost about 45% in value. More for low-quality buildings and in cities with a larger IT sector and less for trophy buildings. We discuss the implications for mortgage lenders and the vitality of cities.

A growing body of research has revealed that firms leverage nationalism in their strategies. However, it is unclear why some firms are more likely to do so than others. This paper uses institutional theory to address this question and examines the influences of domestic and foreign customers. We study firms’ responses to nationalist movements, a type of sociopolitical mobilization arising in response to international controversies.

In the presence of aggregate risk, governments face a trade-off between insuring taxpayers or bondholders. The literature assumes that the government can finance deficits at the risk-free rate, protecting bondholders at the expense of taxpayers. We characterize the implications of this assumption on the surplus process. Under reasonable debt dynamics, counter-cyclical debt issuance that protects taxpayers against adverse macro-economic shocks is limited in time and scope, and comes at the expense of higher long-run risk.

This paper studies the implications of central bank credibility for long-run inflation and inflation dynamics. We introduce central bank lack of commitment into a standard non-linear New Keynesian economy with sticky-price monopolistically competitive firms. Inflation is driven by the interaction of lack of commitment and the economic environment. We show that long-run inflation increases following an unanticipated permanent increase in the labor wedge or decrease in the elasticity of substitution across varieties. In the transition, inflation overshoots and then gradually declines.

Organizations emphasize specific production practices to deal with authenticity pressures, but the practices that signal authenticity to audiences must be continually adapted when production environments are unstable. Changes in the environment can make production practices suddenly infeasible, compelling organizations to perform in different ways the highly visible practices that audiences have come to associate with authenticity.

We use topic modeling to construct novel news-based measures for tracking energy markets. Our parsimonious yet comprehensive set of indicators summarizes the information content of millions of news articles and forecasts oil spot, futures, and energy company stock returns, and changes in oil volatility, production, and inventories. Using an econometrically robust framework to evaluate both in- and out-of-sample predictive performance, we show that our measures are not spanned by existing text and nontext variables.

Entering new markets is crucial for technology startups to scale, yet these ventures often face high uncertainty about demand in these markets. This study examines how the composition of initial users shapes startups’ new market growth amid such uncertainty. It theorizes that startups face a learning tradeoff when targeting a foreign market: Local initial users, who are more familiar to the startups, provide clearer signals due to shared language and norms; however, more representative foreign users provide more transferable insights about the target market.

Cooperativeness is essential to individual and organizational success. We exploit a unique feature of conference calls to study individual executives’ cooperativeness, indicated by their directly inviting colleagues to respond to analysts’ questions, and its relation with their career outcomes and firm performance. After validating our measure, we find that cooperativeness is associated with relevant executive characteristics. Older, more senior, and more experienced executives are more likely to display cooperativeness.

Introduction: Research on MBA student performance typically relies on GPA as the primary indicator of success. However, business schools aim to develop future leaders for diverse career paths, which value multiple forms of performance. We examine whether performance is better understood as multidimensional, testing a longstanding distinction in MBA discourse between “poets” and “quants.” We also examine how different forms of admissions data (i.e.

The arts are widely recognized for their profound psychological and social benefits. Although historically viewed as a uniquely human pursuit, art is increasingly created with artificial intelligence (AI). In the current work, we explore whether AI-generated art evokes the same emotional reactions and inspires the same interpersonal benefits as human-created art. Integrating appraisal theories of emotion and philosophical accounts of the arts, we propose that art believed to be AI-generated elicits less awe than human-created art, which in turn diminishes empathy.

Elected officials are increasingly extreme. Research trying to understand this trend has tended to focus on structural factors, such as primary elections and changes in the supply of candidates. Less emphasis has been placed on psychological perspectives. The current research advances such a perspective. Leveraging research on attitudes, we investigate when and why people prefer extreme over moderate candidates from their own party. We posit that the identity relevance of people's attitudes plays a key role.

Individuals can construe the world around them more concretely or more abstractly, with consequences for their judgments and behaviors. With five studies involving 3,963 U.S. adult participants, we test whether people hold stereotypes about the tendency for different groups to think more concretely or more abstractly. Across Studies 1 to 3, individuals report explicit and consistent construal level stereotypes about social groups in various demographic, occupational, and non-human categories.

Constituency mobilization is a widely prevalent corporate political strategy, yet we lack systematic evidence on the scope of its effectiveness. One emerging form of constituency mobilization is user mobilization, wherein a company focuses on rallying political support among its users. This approach differs from traditional lobbying, which relies on tightly controlled insider strategies to exert influence over lawmakers. In our study of user mobilization by platform-based companies in the U.S.

Public financial information plays a critical role in the takeover market by helping acquirers search for and value potential targets. Using a difference-in-differences research design around a regulatory disclosure mandate that changed the granularity of financial disclosure for certain privately held banks, we find that banks with reduced disclosure are less likely to be targeted in M&A transactions. Acquirers adapt to information frictions arising from reduced disclosures by bidding for geographically proximate target banks and increasing the proportion of stock in their bids.

Global business often demands cultural accommodation, acting according to a host country’s norms. However, cultural accommodation is often deterred by the threat people can feel about betraying their heritage cultural identity. We investigate an important yet unrecognized antecedent of cultural accommodation: the ideologies that people hold about diversity, which we propose shape people’s notions that their cultural identity is changeable.

Behavioral economics plays a key role in explaining the lack of current climate action and in facilitating effective future interventions. For instance, it can help us evaluate the efficacy and efficiency of policy instruments and institutions, understand the effectiveness of “hard” and “soft” interventions, and estimate pro-environmental preferences. In this editorial, we provide examples for some of the contributions of behavioral economics to the study of climate action and review the eight studies published in this collection.

We construct a new quality-adjusted commercial real estate rent index for U.S. office, retail, and industrial markets using more than one million CompStak lease transactions from 2010-2025. A hierarchical hedonic framework with building-, block-, and ZIP-level fixed effects allows us to control for both observable and unobserved quality, producing quality-adjusted rent indices.

We develop a conceptual framework and an empirical methodology to analyze the effect of rising interest rates on the value of U.S. bank assets and bank stability. We mark-to-market the value of banks' assets due to interest rate increases from Q1 2022 to Q1 2023, revealing an average decline of 10%, totaling about $2 trillion in aggregate. We present a model illustrating how asset value declines due to higher rates can lead to self-fulfilling solvency runs even when banks' assets are fully liquid.

We examine frictions in dealer intermediation in durable consumer goods markets through the lens of “iBuyers,” technology-driven entrants that facilitate transactions via online platforms and algorithmic pricing. iBuyers provide liquidity to households by bypassing the lengthy household-to-household sale process and earn a positive gross spread. However, their intermediation is limited to relatively liquid and easier-to-value homes. We build and calibrate a dynamic search model with intermediaries facing adverse selection to quantify the economic frictions in this market.

This editorial examines the empirical foundations of Chinese management research through an analysis of data sources and research designs in all empirical papers published in Management and Organization Review (MOR) over the past five years. Our review shows that 53.2% of studies rely on archival or secondary data, with 37% of quantitative studies focusing on publicly listed firms. While established datasets provide consistency and comparability, their prevalence may limit opportunities to explore China’s diverse organizational ecosystem.

We study whether the quality of managers can affect public service provision in the context of public health. Using novel data from public hospitals in Chile, we show how the introduction of a competitive recruitment system and better pay for public hospital CEOs reduced hospital mortality by 8 percent. The effect is not explained by a change in patient composition. We find that the policy changed the pool of CEOs by displacing doctors with no management training in favor of CEOs who had studied management.

We examine whether the adoption of the Current Expected Credit Losses (CECL) model, which incorporates forward-looking information in loan loss provisions (LLPs), enhances banks’ information production. Consistent with better information production, we document significant changes in both financial reporting and operational outcomes following CECL adoption. First, CECL banks’ LLPs become timelier and better reflect future local economic conditions. Second, CECL banks experience lower rates of loan defaults.

A large portion of life as a consumer is spent mind-wandering from one off-task, spontaneous, and imaginative thought to the next. Psychology research has thoroughly documented the various characteristics of mind-wandering, showing that this default state of mind occupies much of our waking life and shapes outcomes ranging from goal pursuit and decision-making to present-moment experience. However, consumer research has largely overlooked mind-wandering as a phenomenon and mechanism that shapes consumption.

We combine insights from the medical and artificial intelligence (AI) literatures to propose a novel model, which suggests that the expansion of AI may exacerbate cognitive inequality. Information providers maximize profit by tailoring the complexity of content, offering less cognition-enhancing content to less able customers. While individuals with high cognitive abilities may benefit from this increased within-cognitive-group homogeneity, those with lower cognitive abilities—and even children—may suffer adverse effects.

The use of reflective aerosols in the upper atmosphere (stratospheric aerosol injections, SAI) to limit incoming sunlight has been proposed as a potential means of countering anthropogenic climate change. Such a strategy ideates from observed cooling effects due to sulfate aerosol formation following volcanic eruptions. Solid mineral candidates have been proposed as a sulfate alternative, potentially lowering environmental risks like ozone depletion and absorption of radiation.

What enables participation in highbrow cultural experiences such as opera, classical music, and art exhibitions? Drawing on Bourdieu’s framework of economic, cultural, and social capital, this research investigates the relative roles of these three forms of capital in shaping engagement in highbrow cultural experiences. Across studies in the United Kingdom (N56;935) and the United States (N5400), we find that cultural and social capital are more strongly associated with engagement in highbrow cultural experiences than economic capital.

Query Theory (QT) offers a psychological process theory of preference construction that shows how attentional processes and memory dynamics give rise to framing effects and other judgment and choice anomalies. These same anomalies are also modeled by Prospect Theory (PT) and its functional or "as-if" account, particularly through its feature of loss aversion.

Professional house price forecast data are consistent with a rational model where agents must learn about the parameters of the house price growth process and the underlying state of the housing market. Slow learning about the long-run mean generates overreaction to forecast revisions and a modest response of forecasts to lagged realizations. Heterogeneity in signals and priors about the long-run mean helps the model account for cross-sectional dispersion in forecasts. Introducing behavioral biases helps improve the model's predictions for short-horizon overreaction and dispersion.

Social media platforms have become vital channels for businesses to reach consumers through advertising. But in the United States, the digital advertising market in which these platforms operate is dominated by a few major players, raising concerns for antitrust regulators. In such a concentrated market, the entry or exit of a single platform can reallocate billions in ad spending, affecting businesses and users.

The relationship between social status and green consumption is pivotal in addressing the climate crisis, yet previous research reveals conflicting perspectives. We analyze a nationally representative panel survey of more than 63,000 British respondents, tracking their green consumption, attitudes, and behaviors across multiple years. The findings reveal a previously unidentified S-shaped relationship between social status and green consumption, challenging existing models that propose inverted U-shaped, negative linear, or positive linear associations.

Deciding which customer segment(s) to serve, or targeting, is a cornerstone of marketing strategy. While companies commonly target based on demographic characteristics, recent cultural movements (e.g., #MeToo, Black Lives Matter) have heightened sensitivity to the differential treatment of certain demographic groups. Yet research to date has not examined whether demographic targeting itself seems fair or appropriate.

Large language model (LLM)-based digital twin simulation, where LLMs are used to emulate individual human behavior, holds great promise for research in business, artificial intelligence, social science, and digital experimentation. However, progress in this area has been hindered by the scarcity of real individual-level data sets that are both large and publicly available. To address this gap, we introduce a large-scale public data set designed to capture a rich and holistic view of individual human behavior.