Management Science

In online markets, consumers tend to search and purchase prominently positioned products. We develop an experimental paradigm to distinguish between two mechanisms driving this behavior: position-specific search costs and beliefs about expected returns to search. Using incentivized experiments, we find that both mechanisms exist, and short-term randomization of rankings alone does not separate th…

Firms increasingly rely on voluntary training programs to enhance employees’ skills, yet such initiatives often suffer from high dropout rates. We investigate whether providing employees with information about their relative training performance affects their persistence in voluntary training. Social comparison theory suggests that relative performance information (RPI) addresses employees’ inher…

We find that shifts toward more liberal (i.e., less probusiness) courts predict reductions in local small business activity. A one-standard-deviation increase in liberal ideology predicts a 1% reduction in firm count relative to bordering counties in different federal court jurisdictions. This effect has more than doubled since 2000 and is particularly pronounced in circuit-years with elevated sm…

We document that interactions with manipulated clinical decision support (CDS) systems can induce not only short-term, but also long-term changes in physicians’ opioid prescribing behavior. Physicians in our sample adopted electronic health record software from a list of federally certified vendors in 2011. Between 2016 and Spring 2019, one vendor secretly embedded a biased CDS function designed …

Credit card use among college students declined sharply following the enactment of the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility, and Disclosure Act of 2009. Title 3, Section 304 of the Act specifically restricted the marketing and sale of credit cards on college campuses. Using a difference-in-differences approach that treats incoming freshmen who would have been unaffected by this marketing as…

Randomized experiments have become the standard method for companies to evaluate the performance of new products or services. Beyond aiding managerial decision making, experiments mitigate risk by limiting the proportion of customers exposed to innovations. Because many experiments are conducted sequentially over time, an emerging strategy to further derisk the process is to allow managers to “pe…

We study the impact of inventory constraints on bundling in a dynamic pricing setting, challenging the classical view that bundling consistently enhances revenue. Traditional bundling theory, which typically assumes abundant inventory and static pricing, often asserts that bundling generates higher revenue than selling products individually. However, we show that limited inventory, in fact, disto…

We study randomized experiments in a service system when stochastic congestion can arise from temporarily limited supply or excess demand. Such congestion gives rise to cross-unit interference between the waiting customers, and analytic strategies that do not account for this interference may be biased. In current practice, one of the most widely used ways to address stochastic congestion is to u…

Adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) by authors has accelerated production of academic articles and increased submission rates to journals, thereby straining review capacity and hurting journal outcome metrics, such as turnaround time and decision accuracy. Academic journals face an imperative to improve review quality and productivity by incorporating generative AI tools in the review workfl…

Artificial intelligence is increasingly being proposed as a tool to improve the efficiency of academic peer review. While such applications may alleviate reviewer shortages and enhance productivity, they largely preserve the existing architecture of scientific publishing. In this commentary I propose that AI also creates an opportunity to reimagine more fundamental aspects of how knowledge is eva…

In a bug bounty program (BBP), organizations incentivize hackers—who could otherwise be “enemies”—to report security vulnerabilities by publicly offering monetary rewards. This paper develops an analytical framework to characterize BBPs and their strategic and economic impacts. Strategically, BBPs induce some hackers to self-select into cooperative vulnerability discovery and reporting, diverting…

Observable priority queues, where some customers are served ahead of others, are prevalent in many service systems, ranging from the entertainment industry to emergency departments (EDs). In this paper, we study the rational abandonment behavior of utility-maximizing customers in the context of an observable two-class priority queue and identify novel performance and pricing implications. We firs…

We present one of the first systematic audits of cryptocurrency market data quality across leading vendors. We document pervasive mislabeling, identifier instability, and large cross-provider discrepancies in prices, market caps, and volumes. To address these issues, we develop an aggregation method that yields asymptotically correct data by autonomously identifying and filtering unreliable obser…

The persistent imbalance between organ supply and demand poses a significant challenge for the lifesaving treatment of transplantation. This study introduces innovative targeted priority mechanisms inspired by the Eurotransplant Senior Program (ESP), designed to bridge the supply-demand gap while optimizing the matching between organs and recipients without mandating offer acceptance. These mecha…

We consider the problem of learning an optimal prescriptive tree (i.e., an interpretable treatment assignment policy in the form of a binary tree) of moderate depth from observational data. This problem arises in numerous socially important domains, such as public health and medicine, where interpretable and data-driven interventions are sought based on data gathered in deployment rather than fro…

Organizations rely on their employees to produce many high-quality ideas for the improvement of products, processes, and strategies. Evaluators such as managers and technical experts need to not only assess these ideas but also face expectations to contribute ideas of their own. We investigate this task duality by asking how idea evaluation activities affect evaluators’ ideation performance. Alth…

We analyze a model where dealers provide market liquidity by intermediating trades between clients. They exert unobservable search effort to improve intermediation profit. This moral-hazard friction limits their ability to raise external finance and compete with each other, constraining market liquidity even for safe assets and more so for those with higher search costs. Dealers mitigate this fri…

This paper examines how the need for immediate cash by smallholder farmers may lead to undesirable selling decisions that hurt their revenue and analyzes the efficacy of government loan policies in tackling this challenge. We develop a game-theoretic model to characterize the base scenario of no loan, uncovering the impacts of cash needs on farmers’ revenue. We then examine how a government loan,…

We analyze the market quality of centralized crypto exchanges and decentralized blockchain-based venues (DEXs) using a unique and comprehensive data set. Focusing on two fundamental aspects, transaction costs and deviations from the no-arbitrage condition, we estimate the causal effect of gas fees on DEX market quality. We show that these fixed costs impose a significant burden on relatively smal…

Do digital technologies reinforce managerial hierarchies or, instead, make them less relevant? We propose that the answer to this question depends on the nature of the technology: specifically, its relative impact on managers’ capacity to supervise and on subordinates’ need for supervision. Applying this framework to collaborative work management (CWM) technologies that facilitate real-time colla…