Essay 1: Shopping Goals, Goal Concreteness, and Conditional Promotions. We propose a two-stage model to describe the increasing concreteness of consumers' goals during the shopping process, testing the model through a series of field experiments at a convenience store. Using a number of...

Individuals are involved in daily decision making situations under varying levels of certainty and ease of gathering information, characterized by many factors such as the need to make payments, or the desire to fulfill goals. Essay 1 proposes that when individuals are faced with environments...

This thesis consists of three empirical essays on securitization and the resolution of financial distress, examining the information content of prices of mortgage-backed securities, the role of securitization in preventing mortgage renegotiation and the effect of minimum bids in ascending price...

This thesis consists of three essays examining issues related to human capital, careers, and financial economics. In the first chapter, I examine how the process of corporate bankruptcy varies by human capital intensity using a sample of 1,493 public firms that filed for Chapter 11 between 1980...

Venture capital has been an important factor in driving innovation and creating wealth in the US. Even outside the US, venture capital is playing an increasingly important role, influencing many aspects of start-up companies. While the US has traditionally been at the forefront of the venture...

Essay 1: Translation Errors in the Aggregation of Consumer Recommendations There has been a substantial increase of websites providing consumers with recommendations about products and services. These recommendations are usually presented in the form of verbal reviews and numerical ratings. It...

There is growing belief that countries with better financing environments are associated with higher economic growth because they facilitate entrepreneurship and hence the Schumpeterian process of 'creative destruction'. This dissertation explores this hypothesis in more detail by understanding...