Latest Research Publications

This paper studies whether firms opportunistically make proprietary claims in mandatory environmental disclosure programs with trade secret exemption rules. Examining the mandatory chemical disclosure program in the fracking industry, I find evidence of opportunistic withholding of information among operators that are less likely to have trade secrets. Specifically, I find that these operators claim fewer chemicals as trade secrets when the operating site is in close proximity to water quality monitors. This is only observed among publicly traded operators that face a higher cost of societal backlash when disclosing pollutant information. Further analyses suggest that these operators are concerned about external environmental monitoring, which deters them from opportunistic information withholding. Regarding public and…

This paper studies how social media affects the dynamics of protests and strikes in China during 2009–2017. Based on 13.2 billion microblog posts, we use tweets and retweets to measure social media communication across cities and exploit its rapid expansion for identification. We find that, despite strict government censorship, Chinese social media has a sizeable effect on the geographical spread of protests and strikes. Furthermore, social media communication considerably expands the scope of protests by spreading events across different causes (e.g., from anticorruption protests to environmental protests) and dramatically increases the probability of far‐reaching protest waves with simultaneous events occurring in many cities. These effects arise even though Chinese social media barely circulates content that explicitly helps organize…

Online video platforms face the challenge of balancing the needs of their users with those of their advertisers. Although users typically prefer to have less intrusive ads, advertisers aim to effectively catch user attention. This paper investigates how the provision of ad choice affects the effectiveness of video advertising. We argue that allowing users to choose an ad to view may trigger a “conjecture-formation-and-confirmation” process that motivates users to pay more attention to the selected ad. Two online experiments and four laboratory experiments are conducted to test the theorized underlying mechanism of the ad choice effect. Study 1 finds when users are unfamiliar (versus familiar) with the content of ad options (i.e., they need to make conjectures about ad content), ad choice is more likely to increase user attention to…

We build on AGM belief revision (Alchourrón et al. (1985)) and propose a class of updating rules called pragmatic rules. Pragmatic updating applies to multiple priors and requires that the agent's posteriors be the subset of her priors under which the realized event occurs with probability 1, if such priors exist. We construct a propositional language based on qualitative probability and demonstrate the strong relation between belief updating rules and belief revision rules in this language. We show that an updating rule is consistent with AGM belief revision if and only if it is pragmatic. While maximum likelihood updating is pragmatic in general, full-Bayesian updating is not. We characterize maximum likelihood updating within the AGM framework, and show that full-Bayesian updating can be obtained by dropping one of AGM's…