Self-presentation is a fundamental aspect of social life, with myriad critical outcomes dependent on others’ impressions. We identify and offer the first empirical investigation of a prevalent, yet understudied self-presentation strategy: humblebragging. Across seven studies including a week-long diary study and a field experiment, we identify humblebragging — bragging masked by a complaint or humility — as a common, conceptually distinct, and ineffective form of self-presentation.
In this paper, we study within firm heterogeneity in the discounts offered to consumers. Utilizing transaction level data from a large home appliance retailer, we quantify the extent of both across and within-salesperson heterogeneity in the discounts they negotiate with consumers.
Negotiations are inherently dyadic. Negotiators’ individual-level characteristics may not only make them perform better or worse in general, but also may make them particularly well- or poorly-suited to negotiate with a particular counterpart.
This paper examines how tax uncertainty created by highly aggressive tax planning affects a firm's investment decisions. The tax uncertainty that we study arises from tax choices of such inadequate merit that the firms themselves believe that they will lose if audited. Consistent with a simple model that we develop, we find that investments in fixed assets and research and development are increasing, at a decreasing rate, in the tax savings from these aggressive plans.
The authors study the drivers and performance implications of retailers’ branding strategies for their premium and economy private-label tiers. Retailers can opt for store-banner branding and use their store-banner name and/or logo to reveal their ownership, or they can use stand-alone branding and avoid an explicit link between store brand and retail banner.
In this study, we conducted a meta-analysis to examine the moderating role of national culture on the relationship between perceptions of organizational politics and individual attitudes and behaviors.
In this study, the authors conduct a systematic investigation on the evolution in the effectiveness of two important marketing mix instruments, advertising and price, over the business cycle. Analyses are based on 163 branded products in 37 mature CPG categories in the UK, and this for a period of 15 years. The data are a combination of (i) monthly national sales data, (ii) monthly advertising data, (iii) data on the general economic conditions, and (iv) consumer survey data.
We undertake an empirical study of the impact of delay announcements on callers' abandonment behavior and the performance of a call center with two priority classes. A Cox regression analysis reveals that in this call center, callers' abandonment behavior is affected by the announcement messages heard.
We study a security design problem under asymmetric information, in the spirit of Myers and Majluf (1984). We introduce a new condition on the right tail of the firm-value distribution that determines the optimality of debt versus equity-like securities.
We revisit the relation between stock market volatility and macroeconomic activity using a new class of component models that distinguish short run from secular movements. We study long historical data series of aggregate stock market volatility, starting in the 19th century, as in Schwert (1989).
We study a new class of conditional skewness models based on conditional quantiles regressions. The approach is much inspired by work of Hal White. To handle multiple horizons I consider quantile MIDAS regressions which amount to direct forecasting—as opposed to iterated forecasting—conditional skewness.
On March 27, four of North Carolina’s immigrant business leaders will be featured as part of the 2018 Chandler Conversation in Southern Business History, entitled Making America: Immigration & Entrepreneurship in North Carolina. The event, sponsored by the Center for the Study of the American South, will be held at the FedEx Global Education Center at 301 Pittsboro Street in Chapel Hill, from 7:00 to 8:30 p.m.
We assess attenuating and augmenting effects of brand commitment on consumer responses when product recalls occur. Consistent with our theorization, results from a laboratory experiment and an event study show that high levels of brand commitment attenuate negative consumer responses in low-severity product recalls but augment them in high-severity product recalls.
Recognizing that initial public offerings (IPOs) represent the debut of private firms on the public stage, this study investigates how pre-IPO customer and competitor orientations (CCOs) affect IPO outcomes.
Professional psychologists are increasingly encouraged to document and evaluate the quality of the treatment they provide. However, there is a significant gap in knowledge about the extent to which extant definitions of treatment quality converge with patient perceptions. The primary goal of this study was to examine how adolescent substance users (ASU) and their caregivers perceive treatment quality.
This study presents a semi-parametric spatio-temporal regression model to understand how theater level differentiation affects the performance of independent and affiliate movie theaters. Independent movie theaters are privately owned and managed retail establishments, while affiliate theaters are managed by national-level chains such as AMC and Regal.
In this paper, we study the effect of a firm’s local channel exits on prices charged by incumbents remaining in the marketplace. Exits could result in higher prices due to tempered competition or lower prices due to reduced co-location or agglomeration benefits. The net effect of these two countervailing forces remains unknown. In addition, little is known about how this effect could change depending on incumbents’ geographic locations.
How long do nascent industries take to become commercially viable? This paper applies historical methods to the two contemporaneous cases of emergence of the airlines and insulin industry in the early 1900s.
From April 23 through April 25, 2018, the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise was proud to co-host the Black Communities Conference: A Conference for Collaboration at the Carolina Theatre of Durham, N.C. The event was put on by the institute’s affiliated center, NCGrowth, the Institute for African-American Research, the Southern Historical Collection and the Center for the Study of the American South.
With an average of 20 new residents a day, Durham, North Carolina is booming. And no wonder. The boarded-up storefronts and abandoned warehouses of decades past have been transformed into trendy eateries and gleaming high-rises. A vibrant cultural scene, a burgeoning commercial district and a reputation for hipness have turned the city’s downtown area into the very picture of urban success.