Short sellers have been known to uncover companies that engage in financial. Indeed, several activist short sellers like Muddy Waters Research and Citron Research make a name for themselves by proactively targeting fraudsters, bringing their misconducts to light, and profiting from their price decline. Not surprisingly, managers should consider the cost and ... Read More

In an earnings conference call with investors in 2008, Edward J Shoen, chief executive officer and chairman of U-Haul International, Inc., lamented that the Avis Budget Group, Inc., its main competition in one-way, do-it-yourself moving rental trucks, had failed to match U-Haul’s recent decision to raise prices. Calling the lack of response ‘unfortunate for ... Read More

We develop a flexible content-based search model that links the content preferences of search engine users to query search volume and click-through rates. Content preferences are defined over latent topics that describe the content of search queries and search result descriptions. Moreover, our model allows content preferences to vary systematically based on ... Read More

Our paper studies whether language patterns elicited by a different level of stimulus during earnings conference calls are informative about firms' earnings. Executives endure various levels of pressure when presenting a scripted managerial discussion and spontaneous answering to analysts' scrutinized questions. Such stimulus induces evasive answers ... Read More

Amid the turbulence in stock markets, retail investors continue to look for investment ideas. With thousands of publicly-traded stocks available, many retail investors often resort to their recent personal experiences when deciding on which stocks to buy or sell. In a recent paper, we find a predictable, recurring, and robust pattern between investor ... Read More

This paper develops a new algorithm for increasing the revenue in a dynamic product assortment problem. Then, it identifies the challenges faced by managers in practice and discusses the conditions under which workers follow the algorithm. To do so, I conducted a field experiment with a beverage vending machine business. The experiment shows that, on average ... Read More

The old adage, “You can catch more flies with honey than vinegar,” suggests that it is easier to get what we want by being nice and flattering to others, than it is to be tough and demanding. We explored whether this rule of thumb holds true in a negotiation context. In four experiments, both in the laboratory and in the field, we find that negotiators who ... Read More

The paper looks at how superstitions affect financial markets by examining limit orders (an offer to trade shares at a given price) in the Taiwanese stock market. The authors measured the strength of traders’ superstitions by the regularity with which they chose prices ending in eight, and how strenuously they avoided the number four. Institutional investors ... Read More

Marketers and other agents use a variety of tactics to influence us. One commonly-used persuasion tactic is flattery. But does flattery really work, or do we see right through it? Professor Jaideep Sengupta draws on his extensive research on persuasion techniques to present insights into this topic. He highlights the unexpected long-term effects of flattery ... Read More