Arbitration, as an alternative to litigation for contract disputes, reduces costs and time. While it has frequently been thought of as a substitute to pretrial bargaining and litigation, in fact, parties may be able to reach a settlement privately while engaged in the arbitration process....

We consider a bargaining environment where there is asymmetric information regarding whether the two players have common or conflicting preferences. If the cost of strategic communication is independent of the state, then signaling is not expected to be effective. If the uninformed agent...

Popular elections are used to select prosecutors in most U.S. states. It has been questioned whether voters have the knowledge or incentive to identify quality individuals. In 2011, New York state instituted a series of salary increases for judges. Prosecutors' salaries are tied to judicial...

The HIV/AIDS pandemic has caused numerous deaths. One consequence of this is the prevalence of orphanhood. We investigate whether individuals who were orphaned as a child suffer long-term consequences through an underinvestment in social capital. We conduct a lab-in-the-field experiment in rural...

I use daily Google search data on the keyword "Coronavirus" to track early resident interest in the novel Coronavirus pandemic. I ask whether governors are responding to heightened interest (i.e., following) or if their decisions are independent of citizen sentiment (i.e., leading). I show that...

I use a computational linguistic algorithm to measure the topics covered in textual descriptions of wine. I ask whether there is information in the text that consumers value. Wine is a prominent example of an experience good. There is substantial product differentiation in the market and...

We use a computational linguistic algorithm to measure the topics covered in the text of school teacher contracts in Ohio. We use the topic modeling metrics in a calculation of the concentration of topics covered. This allows us to assess how expansive each contract is. As a proof of concept, we...

Bargaining is an essential activity in management and a central area of emphasis for economics. Game theorists have developed numerous theories regarding how institutional features of the negotiation affect the outcome. While empirical studies have validated these ideas, a substantial amount is...

Are NFL betting markets efficient? The 2012 labor dispute between the NFL and the referees is used as a quasi-experiment to assess whether the betting markets are able to achieve accurate “prices” in an uncertain environment. While the total points scored and, hence, the accuracy of the...

Social preferences and formal contract enforcement are two mechanisms that facilitate performance of an agreement. The standard argument is that formal contracting substitutes when social preferences are lacking. We, alternatively, explore the hypothesis that social preferences and contract...