Michael Waldman

Cornell University | CU · Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management

In many real-world settings, an action that affects the value of a product or service is self-reported rather than publicly observable. We investigate self-reporting when self-reports serve as a signal of sender productivity. In our model, a sender chooses an action and then sends a message concerning the action to multiple receivers. Receivers the...

In many real-world settings, an action that affects the value of a product or service is self-reported rather than publicly observable. We investigate self-reporting when the action serves as a signal. In our model, a sender chooses an action, and then sends a message concerning the action to multiple receivers. Receivers then bid for the sender's...

A classic issue in behavioral economics is the extent to which agents who make systematic mistakes have large effects on market outcomes. One perspective is that agents who make systematic mistakes have large effects on outcomes in settings characterized by strategic complementarity, but not in settings characterized by strategic substitutability....

In a world characterized by asymmetric learning, promotions can serve as signals of worker ability, and this, in turn, can result in inefficient promotion decisions. If the labor market is competitive, the result will be practices that reduce this distortion. We explore how this logic affects human capital investment decisions. We show that, if com...

This paper studies the link between lateral mobility and promotions. The first part of the paper extends the theoretical literature by incorporating lateral moves into a job assignment model with task-specific human capital accumulation. The model thus predicts that workers who are laterally moved in one period are more likely to be subsequently pr...

Standard models of promotion tournaments do not distinguish between wages and bonuses and thus cannot explain variation in the use of bonuses. We combine classic and market‐based tournament theories to develop a model in which wages and bonuses serve distinctly different roles. We use this model to derive testable predictions which we test employin...

The psychology and behavioral economics literatures show that real world decision making at the individual level is frequently inconsistent with the rational actor model. An important question is therefore the extent to which a proportion of agents who make mistakes affects market level outcomes. Previous theoretical and experimental research showe...

We provide an explanation for tying not based on any of the standard arguments: efficiency, price discrimination, or exclusion. In our analysis a monopolist ties a complementary good to its monopolized good, but consumers do not use the tied good. The tie is profitable because it shifts profits from a complementary good rival to the monopolist. We...

This paper explores interactions between the two main avenues through which worker ability is signaled in the labor market — education signaling and promotion signaling. The framework assumes that workers are endowed with values for both academic ability and productive ability, where these abilities are positively correlated but are not identical....

Beginning with Waldman, Michael. 1984a. “Job Assignments, Signalling, and Efficiency,” 15 Rand Journal of Economics 255–67, it is well understood that in a world characterized by asymmetric learning promotions can serve as a signal of worker ability which can, in turn, lead to an inefficiently small number of promotions. In this article, we explore...

Robert Bork was one of the key proponents of the traditional Chicago school view of tying and antitrust, which is that tying can never be used to extend or leverage market power from one market to another, so it should also never be an antitrust violation. In this paper, we review the traditional Chicago school perspective and, in particular, Bork’...

There has been substantial growth in rates of new-car leasing over the last few decades. Building on recent theoretical research, we construct a model of the leasing decision in which leasing mitigates adverse selection and reduces transaction costs, but moral hazard limits its use. In our model, the prevalence of leasing is related to new-car reli...

As initially formulated in the seminal analysis of Lazear and Rosen (1981), an important perspective for understanding the role of promotions in firms is the tournament perspective. That is, a promotion and, in particular, the wage increase associated with a promotion is a prize that serves as an incentive for workers to exert effort and take other...

This article investigates the role of product upgrades and consumer switching costs in the tying of complementary products. Previous analyses have found that a monopolist of one product will not increase its profits and reduce social welfare by tying and leveraging its monopoly position into a complementary market if the initial monopolised product...

Tirole has written an excellent primer focused on what is known about tying and what he believes is desirable antitrust policy concerning the practice. Although the authors agree with most of Tirole’s arguments, there are two topics for which our perspective is somewhat different.

An extensive literature in medicine investigates the health consequences of early childhood television watching. However, this literature does not address the issue of reverse causation, i.e., does early childhood television watching cause specific health outcomes or do children more likely to have these health outcomes watch more television? This...

An extensive theoretical literature investigates the role of promotions as a signal of worker ability. We extend the theory by focusing on how the signaling role of promotion varies with education and then investigate the resulting predictions using a longitudinal data set that contains detailed information concerning the internal-labor-market hist...

This article develops a theory concerning the choice between standard promotion practices and up-or-out contracts. Our theory is based on asymmetric learning and promotion incentives. We find that firms employ up-or-out contracts when firm-specific human capital is low and standard promotion practices when it is high. We also find that, if commitme...

A number of recent papers have analyzed leasing in the new-car market as a response to the adverse-selection problem in the used-car market originally explored in the seminal 1970 paper by George Akerlof. In this paper we consider a model characterized by both adverse selection, as in these earlier papers, and moral hazard concerning the maintenanc...

A number of recent papers have analyzed leasing in the new-car market as a response to the adverse-selection problem in the used-car market originally explored in the seminal 1970 paper by George Akerlof. In this paper we consider a model characterized by both adverse selection, as in these earlier papers, and moral hazard concerning the maintenanc...

To investigate empirically the possibility of an environmental trigger for autism among genetically vulnerable children that is positively associated with precipitation. We used regression analysis to investigate autism prevalence rates and counts first in relation to mean annual county-level precipitation and then to the amount of precipitation a...

In response to the "standardless" approach used in LePage's v. 3M, the Antitrust Modernization Commission (AMC) and others advocate using a discount allocation approach to assess whether bundled loyalty discounts violate Section 2 of the Sherman Act. This approach treats loyalty discounts like predatory pricing. The analogy to predatory pricing is...

An extensive literature has developed that argues that in many settings the social welfare costs of copying or piracy are limited because of the presence of indirect appropriability. Indirect appropriability is the idea that original good producers can appropriate some of the value derived by the consumers of copies because of the return that buyer...

There is an extensive literature on durable-goods markets that starts with the work of Akerlof, Coase, and Swan in the early 1970s. In this entry I survey the literature by starting with the three theoretical building blocks of time inconsistency, adverse selection, and substitutability between new and used units. I then focus on our understanding...

The courts and analysts continue to struggle to articulate safe harbors for a wide variety of common business pricing practices in which either a single product is sold at a discount if purchased in bulk or in which multiple products are bundled together at prices different from the ones that would emerge if the products were purchased separately....

This paper provides a new explanation for tying that is not based on any of the standard explanations -- efficiency, price discrimination, and exclusion. Our analysis shows how a monopolist sometimes has an incentive to tie a complementary good to its monopolized good in order to transfer profits from a rival producer of the complementary product t...

A number of branches of the literature on internal labor markets have matured to the point that there is now a healthy two-way interaction between theory and empirical work. In this survey I consider two of these branches: i) wage and promotion dynamics; and ii) human-resource practices. For each case I describe the empirical and theoretical litera...

An extensive theoretical literature investigates the role of promotions as a signal of worker ability. In this paper we extend the theory by focusing on how the signaling role of promotion varies with a worker’s education level, and then investigate the resulting predictions using a longitudinal data set that contains detailed information concernin...

A number of branches of the literature on internal labor markets have matured to the point that there is now a healthy two-way interaction between theory and empirical work. In this survey I consider two of these branches: i) wage and promotion dynamics; and ii) human-resource practices. For each case I describe the empirical and theoretical litera...

Significant attention has been paid to why a durable-goods producer with little or no market power would monopolize the maintenance market for its own product. This paper provides an explanation for this practice that is based on consumer switching costs and the choice of consumers between maintaining and replacing used units. In our explanation, i...

This paper formally explores the optimal length of copyright protection when the value of an intellectual work changes over time due to depreciation and value-enhancing ex-post investments. The first main finding is that, in the case of a single project, granting infinitely-lived copyright protection maximizes social welfare when the return on ex-p...

In most firms a worker in any period is either promoted, left in the same job, or fired (demotions are typically rare), and there is no specific date by which a promotion needs to occur. In other employment situations, however, up-or-out contracts are common, i.e., if a worker is not promoted by a certain date the worker must leave the firm. This p...

Most standard conclusions in antitrust are based on models without switching costs, but consumer switching costs are important in many real-world settings. In this paper I argue that this is an important omission because the inclusion of switching costs can change the conclusions concerning optimal antitrust policy in various settings. I illustrate...

In previous work, we showed that a model that integrates job assignment, human capital acquisition, and learning can explain several empirical findings concerning wage and promotion dynamics inside firms. In this article, we extend that model in two ways. First, we incorporate schooling and derive further testable implications that we then compare...

This article develops a theory concerning the choice between standard promotion practices and up-or-out contracts. Our theory is based on asymmetric learning and promotion incentives. We find that firms employ up-or-out contracts when firm-specific human capital is low and standard promotion practices when it is high. We also find that, if commitme...

The year 2005 brought record numbers of hurricanes and storm damages to the United States. Was this a foretaste of increasingly destructive hurricanes in an era of global warming? This study examines the economic impacts of U.S. hurricanes. The major conclusions are the following: First, there appears to be an increase in the frequency and intensit...

This paper first reviews economic theories for why firms tie their products and then discusses our views concerning what this review implies concerning optimal antitrust policy for tying cases. The review considers efficiency rationales for tying, price discrimination rationales, and various exclusionary rationales that have recently been put forth...

This paper investigates the role of product upgrades and consumer switching costs in the tying of complementary products. Previous analyses of tying have found that a monopolist of one product cannot increase its profits and reduce social welfare by tying and monopolizing a complementary product if the initial monopolized product is essential, wher...

A recurrent theme in the literature on business cycle fluctuations is the importance of expectational shocks that change the beliefs of agents concerning the future level of aggregate activity, but that do not reflect real movements in the fundamentals. This paper employs the ASA-NBER Survey of Forecasts by Economic Statisticians to measure expecta...

Durable-goods producers frequently choose to monopolize the maintenance markets for their own products. This paper shows that, similar to leasing, one reason a firm may employ this practice is that it reduces or even eliminates problems due to time inconsistency. We first demonstrate this result in a setting closely related to Bulow's (1982) classi...

We provide an explanation for tying not based on any of the standard arguments: efficiency, price discrimination, or exclusion. In our analysis a monopolist ties a complementary good to its monopolized good, but consumers do not use the tied good. The tie is profitable because it shifts profits from a complementary good rival to the monopolist. We...

The early 1970s witnessed three major advances in durable-goods theory--Swan (1970, 1971) and Sieper and Swan (1973) on optimal durability, Coase (1972) on time inconsistency, and Akerlof (1970) on adverse selection. This paper surveys durable goods theory starting with these three contributions, where much of the focus is on recent literature and...

In his seminal article of 1970, Akerlof argued that the used-car market is not efficient because adverse selection causes too little trade. We construct a competitive model of the new- and used-car markets and investigate the relationship between new-car leasing and adverse selection. Our analysis yields a number of interesting results, including t...

A firm deciding on its promotion practices will be concerned both with the efficient assignment of workers to tasks and with rewarding prior performance. This can result in a time-inconsistency problem because the promotion rule that is optimal at the time of the promotion decision may differ from the rule that is optimal before performance is dete...

This article investigates how the tying of complementary products can be used to preserve and create monopoly positions. We first show how a monopolist of a product in the current period can use tying to preserve its monopoly in the future. We then show how a monopolist in one market can employ tying to extend its monopoly into a newly emerging mar...

Consider a durable goods producer that potentially has market power in the aftermarkets associated with its products. An important question is to what extent, if any, should the antitrust laws restrict the firm's behavior in these aftermarkets? In this paper we explore a number of models characterized by either competition or monopoly in the new-un...

We survey the theoretical literature on careers in organizations, focusing on models that address detailed evidence or stylized facts. We begin with what we call building-block models: human-capital acquisition, job assignment, incentive contracting, efficiency wages, and tournaments. We then show how these building blocks can be combined and enric...

We show that a framework that integrates job assignment, human-capital acquisition, and learning captures several empirical findings concerning wage and promotion dynamics inside firms, including the following. First, real-wage decreases are not rare but demotions are. Second, wage increases are serially correlated. Third, promotions are associated...

We attempt to explain employment practices in internal labor markets using models that combine job assignment, on-the-job human-capital acquisition, and learning. We show that a framework that integrates these familiar ideas captures a number of recent empirical findings concerning wage and promotion dynamics in internal labor markets, including th...

This paper investigates how the tying of complementary products can be used to both preserve and extend monopoly positions. We first show how a firm that is a monopolist of a product in the current period can use tying to preserve its monopoly position in future periods. We then show using related arguments how a monopolist in one market can employ...

There are a number of prominent specific instances in which a durable goods manufacturer with significant market power employed a lease-only policy: (i) United Shoe in the market for shoe machinery, (ii) IBM in the market for computers, and (iii) Xerox in the market for copiers. The obvious question that arises is, Why would such a firm prefer leas...

There are a number of prominent specific instances in which a durable goods manufacturer with significant market power employed a lease-only policy: United Shoe in the market for shoe machinery, (ii) IBM in the market for computers and (iii) Xerox in the market for copiers. The obvious question that arises is, Why would such a firm prefer leasing o...

Becker's (1962) seminal article on human capital drew attention to the two polar types of human capital, which he called general and specific. In this paper we consider an intermediate type of human capital which we call quasi-specific. In particular, we consider environments in which the value placed on human capital by alternative employers is hi...

This article considers a durable goods monopolist's choice of price and durability in a setting where durability choice controls the speed with which quality deteriorates. This article derives three main results: the price at which old units trade on the secondhand market limits what the firm can charge for new units; because of this linkage betwee...

A worker's current employer will typically acquire information concerning that worker's productivity that is not directly available to other potential employers. A number of papers have considered this idea and argued that in such a setting these other firms will utilize the actions of the current employer as signals of productivity. In this paper,...

By investing in R&D, a durable-goods monopolist can improve the quality of what it will sell in the future, and in this way reduce the future value of current and past units of output. This article shows that if the firm sells its output, then it faces a time inconsistency problem; i.e., the R&D choice that maximizes current profitability does not...

This paper derives two main results. First, in a world where inheritance is sexual as opposed to asexual, second-best adaptations can be evolutionarily stable. That is, the adaptation selected need not be the optimal solution to the evolutionary problem at hand. Second, the author applies this result to show that natural selection provides a potent...

A number of studies have employed strategic complementarity to show that many features of the Keynesian framework can be captured in models consistent with the microfoundations approach. The authors argue that strategic complementarity is an important factor in understanding why an economy may exhibit a slow return to steady-state behavior after a...

This paper considers environments in which the population consists of a mix of altruists and egoists, and asks under what situations do altruists have a disproportionately large effect on equilibrium, and under what situations is it the egoists. We begin by presenting a general framework for answering this question. We then apply the framework to t...

A number of authors have recently considered whether the free rider problem is exhibited in models characterized by multiple potential entrants/sequential entry. Bernheim (1984) and Eaton and Ware (1987) find that the free rider problem is not an important factor, while McLean and Riordan (1989) find that it is. In this article I identify a general...

This paper considers the implications of a particular type of heterogeneity--one which characterizes a large number of economic environments, but that has not received any systematic treatment in the literature. The authors refer to this heterogeneity as responders versus nonresponders. The paper begins by providing a general framework for the anal...

This paper considers a world in which firms invest in the production of information concerning workers, where this information is used to help allocate workers among tasks. The question addressed is, does the firm have an incentive to make a socially efficient investment? The analysis derives three major results. First, if information produced is n...

A familiar result in the economic theory of the family is Becker's rotten-kid theorem. This theorem states that altruism by a family member will lead other selfish members to act efficiently from the family viewpoint. We extend Becker's one-period model to two periods and show that parental altruism can result in an inefficiency known in other cont...

Suppose that the government were to announce the economy will be booming in six months, and this announcement is based on false data. What effect would such an announcement have on future aggregate activity? This paper employs revisions of the series of leading economic indicators to test the hypothesis that such an announcement would have a positi...

A firm will typically gather information concerning its own workers that is not available to other potential employers, while other firms will attempt to reduce this information asymmetry by observing the actions of the initial employer. The author argues that this process can be important in environments characterized by up-or-out contracts in tha...

This paper considers the implications of heterogeneity in information-processing abilities for macroeconomic models that exhibit “strategic complements.” The latter is the same concept that has received much attention in the recent macro literature under the headings Keynesian coordination problems and positive trading externalities. We consider en...

This paper investigates the relationship between the way rational expectations is employed in practice and the argument initially put forth to justify its use. In practice, rational expectations has meant that the expectations of each agent taken separately is consistent with the predictions of the theory. This is different than the argument freque...

Previous authors who have considered the issue of noncooperative entry deterrence have not found the free rider problem to be a significant factor. These authors, however, have only considered models in which the exact investment needed to deter entry is known with certainty. In this paper I add uncertainty to the models investigated by these previ...

The past few decades have seen dramatic advancements in the technology of copying and the diffusion of copying technology to the general public. This paper surveys some of the recent academic literature dealing with this issue. We focus on (i) the effect of varying the extent of property rights enforcement by the government, and (ii) possible respo...

In recent years a large literature has developed that investigates the role of insurance in labor market contracting. Papers in this literature typically assume that workers are completely restricted from borrowing. The authors argue, and to some extent demonstrate, that in many environments capital market imperfections do not lead to a no-borrowin...