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Strategic Similarity and Emergent Conventions: Evidence from Similar Stag Hunt Games

This paper reports evidence on the origin of convention in laboratory cohorts confronting similar but not identical strategic situations repeatedly. The experiment preserves the action space of the game, while randomly perturbing the payoffs and scrambling the action labels in an effort to blunt the salience of retrospective selection principles. Hence, the similarity between stage games is reduced to certain strategic details, like efficiency, security, and risk dominance. Nevertheless, we do observe conventions emerging in half of the laboratory cohorts. When a convention emerges subjects's behavior conforms to the selection principles of efficiency rather than security or risk dominance. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: C72, C78, C92, D83.     

Single Stock Futures as a Substitute for Short Sales: Evidence from Microstructure Data

Abstract:  We examine how the introduction of single-stock futures impacts short sale costs and short interest levels in the underlying spot market. We find that short selling in the underling securities declines, after futures are introduced, the cost of borrowing stock for short sales declines and the available unborrowed supply of lendable shares increases. These results are consistent with futures exchanges providing a low-cost substitute market for establishing short positions. Microstructure evidence also suggests that the lower cost and greater ease of short selling via futures markets draws informed traders from the spot market.     

Auditor Fees, Market Microstructure, and Firm Transparency

Abstract:  Auditors, as corporate insiders, have access to private information regarding the firm's financial and business opacity that is unavailable to outside investors. We test whether auditors price their knowledge of firm opacity in their audit fees by examining two competing hypotheses. The first states that higher audit fees may reflect the greater risk that the auditor faces in auditing an opaque firm. Under this hypothesis, market based measures of opacity will be positively correlated with higher fees. The second hypothesis states that firms buy reputational capital from their auditor by paying high fees in an attempt to improve the market's perception of the firm's transparency. In this case, higher audit fees are negatively correlated with market based measures of opacity. Our results are consistent with the first hypothesis, that auditors price opacity risk into their fees.     

Trajectories of Internationalization: Knowledge and National Business Styles in the Making of Two Dutch Publishing Multinationals, 1950-1990

The internationalization of business is the subject of an extensivetheoretical literature as well as a growing number of historicalstudies. Historians have paid relatively little attention tothe development of multinationals in the service sector, andstudies about international publishing are especially scarce.This article discusses the early internationalization of twoDutch publishing firms, Kluwer (now Wolters Kluwer) and Elsevier(now Reed Elsevier) and confronts these case histories withthe evolutionary theory of internationalization. The Dutch casesunderline the important role of experience, knowledge and learningas well as of the national context in which companies develop.They also show that these factors allow for very different trajectoriesof internationalization within the same branch of business andthe same country.     

On Opposition to Rent Seeking: Implications for Developing Countries

A model is developed to study the implications of the presence of rent-opposing activities for the measurement of deadweight losses and for cost–benefit analysis. The analysis provides an upper bound on the social cost of rent-seeking in the presence of potential rent-opposers. Remarks are offered on the interactions between merits and skills in the determination of success in rent-seeking, and on the pervasiness of corruption in developing economies.