Firms and individuals who sell opinions may bias their reportsfor either behavioral or strategic reasons. This paper proposesa methodology for measuring these biases, particularly whetheropinion producers under or over emphasize their privateinformation, i.e. whether they herd or exaggerate...

This paper models the incentives created by career concerns for opinion-producing agents. We find that career concerns can create an incentive for exaggeration or anti-herding, since high-ability agents will have opinions that are more different from the consensus on average and potential...

The migration of financial betting to prediction market exchanges in the last 5 years has facilitated the creation of contracts that do not correspond to a security traded on a traditional exchange. The most popular of these have been binary options on the closing value of Dow Jones Industrial...

Prediction markets are markets for contracts that yield payments based on the outcome of an uncertain future event, such as a presidential election. Using these markets as forecasting tools could substantially improve decision making in the private and public sectors. We argue that U.S....

We examine whether stock option and restricted stock grants motivate higher performance using employee-level data from Google. Employees who received more equity grants than peers hired at the same time and job grade perform slightly better in the future across a variety of measures. To attempt...

The UK and U.S. tobacco industries provide a particularly clean place to examine the impact of changes in market structure on firm conduct and productivity in a rapidly innovating industry. Both industries were competitive in the 1880s, and the U.S. appeared to have a slight lead resulting from...

Casual empiricism suggests that deceptive advertising is prevalent, and several classes of theories explore its causes and consequences. We provide some unusually sharp empirical evidence on the extent, mechanics, and dynamics of deceptive advertising. Ski resorts self-report 23 percent more...