Columbia Business School Research

A set of recent papers attempts to explain the size and book-to-market anomalies with conditional CAPM or CCAPM models with economically motivated conditioning variables, or with factor models with economically motivated factors. The tests of these models, as presented, fail to reject the proposed model. We argue that these tests fail to reject the null hypothesis because they have very low statistical power against what we call the characteristics alternative.

This article presents a consumer-psychology model of brands that integrates empirical studies and individual constructs (such as brand categorization, brand affect, brand personality, brand symbolism and brand attachment, among others) into a comprehensive framework. The model distinguishes three levels of consumer engagement (object-centered, self-centered and social) and five processes (identifying, experiencing, integrating, signifying and connecting). Pertinent psychological constructs and empirical findings are presented for the constructs within each process.

The current research explores how roles that possess power but lack status influence behavior toward others. Past research has primarily examined the isolated effects of having either power or status, but we propose that power and status interact to affect interpersonal behavior. Based on the notions that a) low-status is threatening and aversive and b) power frees people to act on their internal states and feelings, we hypothesized that power without status fosters demeaning behaviors toward others.

The authors propose that a crowded product space motivates consumers to better discriminate between options of different quality. Specifically, this article reports evidence from three controlled experiments and one natural experiment that people are prepared to pay more for high-quality products and less for low-quality products when they are considered in the context of a dense, as opposed to a sparse, set of alternatives. To explain this effect, the authors argue that consumers uncertain about the importance of quality learn from observing market outcomes.

Purpose — This chapter provides a framework that captures the fundamental impacts of power at the individual, dyadic, small group, and organizational levels. Within each level, we trace the psychological, cognitive, and behavioral consequences of having or lacking power.

Approach — We integrate theoretical approaches from psychology, sociology, behavioral economics, and organizational theory to underscore the far-reaching effects that power has.

Groups are very prevalent in organizations and society. Previous experiments on groups have mainly investigated how "minimal groups," which are only arbitrary labels, like "red" and "blue" group, can influence prosocial behavior, like altruistic cooperation and norm enforcement. But real groups are often more than just a label; they also involve social interactions leading to social ties, i.e., emotional bonds, between group members. Our experiments compare randomly assigned minimal groups to randomly assigned groups involving real social interactions.

Past research in marketing and psychology suggests that pricing structure may influence consumers' perception of value. In the context of two commonly used pricing schemes, pay-per-use and two-part tariff, we evaluate the impact of pricing structure on consumer preferences for access services. To this end, we develop a utility-based model of consumer retention and usage of a new service. A notable feature of the model is its ability to capture the pricing structure effect and measure its impact on consumer retention, usage, and pricing policy.

This paper characterizes optimal policy when a government uses indirect control to exert its authority. We develop a dynamic principal-agent model in which a principal (a government) delegates the prevention of a disturbance — such as riots, protests, terrorism, crime, or tax evasion — to an agent who has an advantage in accomplishing this task. Our setting is a standard dynamic principal-agent model with two additional features. First, the principal is allowed to exert direct control by intervening with an endogenously determined intensity of force which is costly to both players.

Five experiments tested the hypothesis that there is a bi-directional link between ideological (multiculturalism and color-blindness) and self-regulatory (perspective-taking and stereotype-suppression) approaches to managing diversity. A first set of experiments found that exposure to multiculturalism facilitated perceptual and conceptual forms of perspective-taking.

Using informant reports on working professionals, we explored the role of listening in interpersonal influence and how listening may account for at least some of the relationship between personality and influence. The results extended prior work which has suggested that listening is positively related to influence for informational and relational reasons.

This research examines how two dimensions of moral intensity involved in a corporation's external crisis response — magnitude of effectiveness and interpersonal proximity — influence observer perceptions of and behavioral intentions toward the corporation. Across three studies, effectiveness decreased negative perceptions and increased pro-organizational intentions via ethical judgment of the response. Moreover, the two dimensions interacted such that a response high in proximity but low in effectiveness led to more negative perceptions and to less pro-organizational intentions.

"Much of what we experience in life results from a combination of skill and luck." — From the Introduction

The trick, of course, is figuring out just how many of our successes (and failures) can be attributed to each — and how we can learn to tell the difference ahead of time.

In the recent subprime crisis, many individuals defaulted on their loans. Though the institutional sources of defaulting and delinquencies were much debated in the aftermath of the crisis, much less attention was given to individual differences in defaulting behavior. How do individuals decide whether to repay borrowed money? The decision to default can be viewed as an intertemporal choice, as defaulting provides monetary benefits in the near future and costs in the more distant future (Chatterjee, Corbae, Nakajima, & Rios-Rull, 2007; Fehr, 2002).

We investigate whether progress towards an international treaty on greenhouse gas emissions could benefit from insights about tipping a non-cooperative game from an inefficient to an efficient equilibrium. Games with increasing differences have multiple equilibria and have a “tipping set,” a subset of agents who by changing from the inefficient to the efficient equilibrium can induce all others to do the same. We argue that international climate negotiations form such a game and so have a tipping set. This can provide a novel perspective on finding a way forward in climate negotiations.

In this chapter, we discuss and extend the findings of our recent research agenda that examines product mix adjustments by Indian firms during the 1990s. During this period, a large fraction of Indians added products to their product mix suggesting that these constraints felt by Mitter twenty years after his article appeared in press had been to some extent eased. This period of firm-level scope expansion coincided with India's large-scale trade liberalization.

Past research on pay dispersion has found that hierarchy hurts commitment, cooperation, and performance. In contrast, functional theories of social hierarchy propose that hierarchy can facilitate coordination and performance. We investigated the effects of hierarchical differentiation using a sample of professional basketball teams from the National Basketball Association (NBA). Analyses of archival data revealed that hierarchical differentiation in pay and participation enhanced team performance by facilitating intragroup coordination and cooperation.

It is self-evident that performing poorly on a task makes people dissatisfied relative to performing well. How can this negative affect be overcome? We provide an adaptive strategy for dealing with poor performance. Experiment 1 shows that poor performers tend to recruit the highest potential performance as a comparison standard and hence are dissatisfied. However, if they are reminded that they set their own low goals, and that these goals were met, they are as satisfied as better performers.

Political theorists of globalization have argued that foreign inflows to a society can give rise to collective-identity closure — social movements aiming to narrow the in-group, and exclude minorities. In this research we investigate whether exposure to the mixing of a foreign culture with one's heritage culture can evoke need for closure, a motive that engenders ethnocentric social judgments.

Objective: To reconcile empirical inconsistencies in the relationship between emotionally-negative families and daughters' abnormal eating, we hypothesized a critical moderating variable: daughters' vulnerability to emotion contagion.

Default options exert an influence in areas as varied as retirement program design, organ donation policy, and consumer choice. Past research has offered potential reasons why no-action defaults matter: (i) effort, (ii) implied endorsement, and (iii) reference dependence. The first two of these explanations have been experimentally demonstrated, but the latter has received far less attention. In three experiments we produce default effects and demonstrate that reference dependence can play a major role in their effectiveness.

Are teachers' impacts on students' test scores ("value-added") a good measure of their quality? This question has sparked debate largely because of disagreement about (1) whether value-added (VA) provides unbiased estimates of teachers' impacts on student achievement and (2) whether high-VA teachers improve students' long-term outcomes. We address these two issues by analyzing school district data from grades 3–8 for 2.5 million children linked to tax records on parent characteristics and adult outcomes.

The 2007-2009 financial crisis that started in the summer of 2007 had its origins in the US housing policies, the subprime mortgage market in particular, and the end of the real estate bubble in the US. Careful consideration of the causes, consequences and policy responses suggest that various factors contributed to the severity of the 2007-08 crisis, and experts disagree about the weights to attach to each in explaining what is now regarded as the most significant economic contraction since the Great Depression.

Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs) are state-owned investment funds with combined asset holdings that are fast approaching four trillion dollars. Recently emerging as a major force in global financial markets, SWFs have other distinctive features besides their state-owned status: they are mainly located in developing countries and are intimately tied to energy and commodities exports, and they carry virtually no liabilities and have little redemption risk, which allows them to take a longer-term investment outlook than most other institutional investors.

Defaults arising from illiquidity can lead to private workouts, formal bankruptcy proceedings or even liquidation. All these outcomes can result in deadweight losses. Corporate illiquidity in the presence of realistic capital market frictions can be managed by a) equity dilution, b) carrying positive cash balances, or c) entering into loan commitments with a syndicate of lenders. An efficient way to manage illiquidity is to rely on mechanisms that transfer cash from "good states" into "bad states" (i.e., financial distress) without wasting liquidity in the process.

We propose a model of dynamic corporate investment, financing, and risk management for a financially constrained firm. The model highlights the central importance of the endogenous marginal value of liquidity (cash and credit line) for corporate decisions.

Particle learning provides a simulation-based approach to sequential Bayesian computation. To sample from a posterior distribution of interest we use an essential state vector together with a predictive and propagation rule to build a resampling-sampling framework. Predictive inference and sequential Bayes factors are a direct by-product. Our approach provides a simple yet powerful framework for the construction of sequential posterior sampling strategies for a variety of commonly used models.

A perennial question facing managers is how much decision latitude to give their employees at work. The current research investigates how decision latitude affects employees' perceptions of managers' personalities and, in turn, their leadership effectiveness. Results from three studies using different methods (two experiments and a survey) indicate an inverted-U shaped relationship between degree of decision latitude and leadership effectiveness perceptions.

This research documents an intriguing empirical phenomenon whereby states of relaxation increase the monetary valuation of products. This phenomenon is demonstrated in six experiments involving two different methods of inducing relaxation, a large number of products of different types, and various methods of assessing monetary valuation. In all six experiments participants who were put into a relaxed affective state reported higher monetary valuations than participants who were put into an equally pleasant but less relaxed state.

Leading up to the recent crisis, government encouraged risky lending, and failed to measure banks' risks credibly or to require sufficient capital. Regulators also failed to losses or enforce intervention protocols for timely resolution. This paper proposes radical policy changes to prevent a recurrence. The need is not for more complex rules and more supervisory discretion, but rather for simpler rules that are meaningful in measuring and limiting risk, hard for market participants to circumvent and credibly enforced by supervisors.

A growing literature suggests that even in the absence of any ability to predict returns, holding options on the benchmarks or trading frequently can generate positive alpha. The ratio of alpha to its tracking error appraises a fund's performance. This paper derives the performance-maximizing strategy, which turns out to be a variant of a buy-write strategy, and the least upper bound on such performance enhancement. If common equity indices are used as benchmarks, the potential alpha generated from trading frequently can be substantial in magnitude, but it carries considerable risk.

Over the past decade, cognitive and neuroscience research have made significant methodological progress in studying insight from three different angles.  First, psychology experiments show that subjects solve problems better after sleep than subjects who focus continuously on the problems.  Second, research on arousal and stress shows that the physiology of the relaxed mental state fosters this kind of ‘offline’ problem-solving.  Third, cognitive neuroscience provides preliminary evidence that defocused attention contributes to flashes of insight.  This chapter provides an overview of recen

Firms are increasingly seeking to harness the potential of social networks for marketing purposes. Therefore, marketers are interested in understanding the antecedents and consequences of relationship formation within networks and in predicting interactivity among users. The authors develop an integrated statistical framework for simultaneously modeling the connectivity structure of multiple relationships of different types on a common set of actors.

Power and choice represent two fundamental forces that govern human behavior. Scholars have largely treated power as an interpersonal construct involving control over other individuals, whereas choice has largely been treated as an intrapersonal construct that concerns the ability to select a preferred course of action. Although these constructs have historically been studied separately, we propose that they share a common foundation — that both are rooted in an individual's sense of personal control.