This is a sample of what I have been doing so far:

Refereed Publications:

Money-Back Guarantees and Market Experimentation (with W. Novshek) - International Journal of Industrial Organization, vol. 22 (2004), pp. 983-996.
We study the use of money-back guarantees as a form of market experimentation in a market for experience goods with repeat purchases. We show that extending the customer base in the second period by using a money-back guarantee can be optimal only if a monopolist faces an uncertain distribution of buyers. Within the second period, a money-back guarantee allows the monopolist to discriminate between new and repeat purchasers while a pure price reduction does not. Thus, whenever money-back guarantees are feasible, an optimal experimentation strategy includes a money-back guarantee in the second period but not necessarily a price reduction.

The Impact of Culture on the Purchase of Life Insurance in Latin America and the Caribbean (with J. Eck) - International Business and Economics Research Journal, 5, 1 (Jan 2006), pp. 31-45.
This study attempts to determine the major reasons for the lack of success in marketing life insurance in Latin America and the Caribbean. Our results point at the importance of cultural variables of which the most significant is the percentage of the population that professes to be Catholic. We attribute this to a strong correlation between religious beliefs and risk preferences. The other major factor is the population's attitude toward financial instruments in general. Both results are robust to the model specification. The findings should be of interest to insurance companies attempting to market life insurance throughout the world.

To Disclose or Not? An Analysis of Software User Behavior (with M.Thursby) - Information Economics and Policy, 19 (1), 43-64.
Earlier versions available as Washburn School of Business Working Paper No. 41, proceedings of the 2005 Workshop on Economics of Information Security and an SSRN working paper.
This paper addresses the ongoing debate over disclosing information about software vulnerabilities through an open public forum. Using a game-theoretic approach, we show that full public disclosure may be an equilibrium strategy in a game played by rational loss-minimizing agents. We provide conditions under which full public disclosure of vulnerabilities is desirable from a social welfare standpoint. We analyze the effect of several vendor and product characteristics and the composition of the pool of software users on the decisions to disclose and on social welfare. We also examine models in which users may spend effort to develop a fix or threaten vendors to disclose after a grace period. We show that to the extent that users are able to develop fixes for discovered vulnerabilities without inordinate effort, welfare is further improved. This is more likely the more familiar users are with the details of software providing an argument for "open source" software.

Attackers' Motivation and Security Investment (with M.Cremonini)
In: Contributions in Game Theory and Management, School of Management, St. Petersburg State University, Russia, 2007.
Earlier versions available as Washburn School of Business Working Paper No. 68, and as 2006 Workshop on Economics of Information Security presentation.
We model economic behavior of attackers when they are able to obtain complete information about the security characteristics of targets and when such information is unavailable. We find that when attackers are able to distinguish targets by their security characteristics and switch between multiple alternative targets, the effect of a given security measure is stronger. That is due to the fact that attackers rationally put more effort into attacking systems with low security levels. Ignoring that effect would result in underinvestment in security or misallocation of security resources. We also find that systems with better levels of protection have stronger incentives to reveal their security characteristics to attackers than poorly protected systems. Those results have important implications for security practices and policy issues.

Risks and Benefits of Signaling Information System Characteristics to Strategic Attackers (with M.Cremonini) - Journal Of Management Information Systems, 26 (3), Winter 2010, pp. 241-274.
An earlier version is available as Washburn School of Business Working Paper No. 95.
The paper uses a game-theoretic setting to examine the interaction between strategic attackers who try to gain unauthorized access to information systems, or "targets," and defenders of those targets. Our analysis of the attacker-defender interaction shows that well- protected targets can use signals of their superior level of protection as a deterrence tool. This is due to the fact that, all other things being equal, rational attackers motivated by potential financial gains tend to direct their effort toward less-protected targets. We analyze several scenarios differing in the scope of publicly available information about target parameters and discuss conditions under which greater defenders’ ability to signal their security characteristics may improve their welfare. Our results may assist security researchers in devising better defense strategies through the use of deterrence and provide new insight about the efficacy of specific security practices in complex information security environments.

Work in progress:

- Reasons for Dumping, Demand Elasticity, and Exporter Responses to Antidumping Sanctions (with A. Skiba)
The most recent version is available as 2010 International Industrial Organization Conference presentation.
When an anti-dumping duty is imposed, a foreign exporting firm can either pay the duty or stop dumping by increasing the price of its product. An importing country’s welfare depends on the foreign firm’s decision. This paper presents a model of anti-dumping investigation which shows that the exporter’s response crucially depends on the elasticity of import demand. The firm is less likely to increase the price when the demand is more elastic. Theoretical prediction is supported empirically by relating product-level US import demand elasticities (estimated by Broda and Weinstein, 2006) and exporting firms’ reactions to duties inferred from a dataset on U.S. antidumping investigations during 1980-1995.

- Warranty Provision in a Competitive Environment - Washburn School of Business Working Paper No. 77.

- Empirical research on vulnerability disclosure practices, partially funded by Washburn Small Research Grant.

- Facilitating learning managerial economics with a team-based project

- Alcohol sales deregulation in Kansas: first results

- Diagrammatic analysis of exporting firm's responses to anti-dumping duties