Decision Making & Negotiations

Using the staggered adoption of universal demand (UD) laws in the United States, we study the effect of shareholder litigation risk on corporate disclosure. We find that disclosure significantly increases after UD laws make it more difficult to file derivative lawsuits. Specifically, firms issue more earnings forecasts and voluntary 8-K filings, and increase the length of management discussion and analysis (MD&A) in their 10-K filings. We further assess the direct and indirect channels through which UD laws affect firms' disclosure policies.

Expectancies play an important and understudied role in influencing a negotiator's decision to be deceptive. Studies 1a–1e investigated the sources of negotiators' expectancies, finding evidence of projection and pessimism; negotiators consistently overestimated the prevalence of people who share their views on deception and assumed a sizable share of others embrace deceptive tactics. This phenomenon generalized beyond American samples to Chinese students (Study 1d) and Turkish adults (Study 1e).

We find that voters who associate themselves with the "winning team" in election, i.e., Leave voters in the 2016 UK Brexit vote and Trump voters in 2016 US presidential election, substantially increase their expectations for the stock market, but change their expectations of their household economic wellbeing only modestly. Respondents who associate themselves with the "losing team" are more varied in their responses, but the overall impact of the election outcome on this group is more muted.

The paper draws on Mohanty and Sundaresan (2018) to explore the effects of bankruptcy laws on the ex ante incentive for firms to hedge FX exposures. We use a simple model in which the bankruptcy code may result in deadweight losses, and may allow equity holders a share of residual value of the firm's assets in the bankruptcy proceedings. The paper predicts that, while value-maximising firms promise to hedge a higher fraction of the value of their FX exposure when the debt is issued, they may renege subsequently and take on some FX exposures at the expense of foreign creditors.

Recent evidence suggests that investors are inattentive to their portfolios and hire expensive portfolio managers. This paper develops a life-cycle portfolio-choice model in which the investor experiences loss-averse utility over news and can ignore his portfolio. In such a model, the investor prefers to ignore and not rebalance his portfolio most of the time because he dislikes bad news more than he likes good news such that expected news cause a first-order decrease in utility.

Students who want to work in business are well served by taking anthropology courses and earning anthropology degrees. Their anthropological education can be applied in a broad array of businesses: marketing, advertising, marketing research, design, new product development, organizational culture and change, sustainability, risk management, and more.

We present a model in which asset managers design their contracts to attract flows of investor capital. We find that they make their contracts depend on public information, e.g., credit ratings or benchmark indices, as a way to attract flows, rather than as a way to mitigate incentive problems, as has been emphasized in the literature. Unfortunately, asset managers' competition for flows triggers a race to the bottom: asset managers use public information in their contracts even though it is socially inefficient.

In incentive-aligned choice experiments, each decision is realized with some probability, Prob. In three eye-tracking experiments, we study the impact of varying Prob from 0 (as in purely hypothetical choices) to 1 (as in real-life choices) on attention, information processing, and choice. Consistent with the bounded rationality literature, we find that as Prob increases from 0 to 1, consumers process the choice-relevant information more carefully and more comprehensively.

We propose new metrics for investment performance based on short-run trading profitability. Since investment opportunities are scarce and value-relevant information decays over time, marginal decisions made by fund managers (i.e., trades) should provide more accurate signals about underlying skill than portfolio alphas, which are contaminated by the returns on "stale" positions.