S tudies of online word of mouth have frequently posited—but never systematically conceptualized and explored—that the level of disagreement between existing product reviews can impact the volume and the valence of future reviews. In this study we develop a theoretical framework of disagreement in online WOM and test our predictions in a dataset of nearly 300,000 online reviews for 425 movies o...

The sound of Sam’s pager suddenly awakens him. A third-year medical student, Sam is in the midst of his trauma surgery rotation. He rushes to the trauma department and learns that his next patient, Justin Lewis, is a 20-year-old male who was in a major automobile accident. Tested en route to the hospital, Justin had a Glasgow coma scale score of 3. As Justin is brought to the trauma room, the p...

Some have argued that the possibility of faultless disagreement gives relativist semantic theories an important explanatory advantage over their absolutist and contextualist rivals. Here I combat this argument, focusing on the specific case of aesthetic discourse. My argument has two stages. First, I argue that while relativists may be able to account for the possibility of faultless aesthetic ...

We construct a coupling of two distinct Gibbs measures for Markov random elds with the same speciications, such that the existence of an innnite path of disagreements between the two conngurations has probability 0. This shows that the independence assumption in the disagreement percolation method for proving Gibbsian uniqueness, cannot be dropped without being replaced by other conditions. A s...

A seemingly mild assumption of the standard alternating offers bargaining model under risk is that the breakdown event is not strictly worse than the worst agreement. When this assumption is relaxed the structure of the equilibrium set of agreements changes in an interesting way. We analyse the effect of disagreement on equilibrium, and relate our result to a class of outside option models. Jou...

Managers often face a choice between authority and persuasion. In particular, since a firm’s formal and relational contracts and its culture and norms are quite rigid in the short term, a manager who needs to prevent an employee from undertaking the wrong action has the choice between either trying to persuade this employee or relying on interpersonal authority. Herbert Simon (1947) noted, for ...

We explore the analyst earnings forecasts data to study the interactive effect between disagreement and underreact to earnings news on asset prices. We find that (1) changes in the mean of forecasted earnings as an underreaction measure positively predict future returns, that (2) changes in the standard deviation of forecasted earnings as a disagreement measure negatively predict future returns...

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Can two negotiators fail to agree when both the size of the surplus and the rationality of the negotiators are common knowledge? We show that the answer is affirmative. When the negotiators can make irrevocable commitments at a low but positive cost, the unique symmetric equilibrium entails disagreement with high probability. In the unique pair of pure strategy equilibria, one party gets all th...

In this study, groups who could not reach a consensus were investigated using the group polarization paradigm. The purpose was to explore the conditions leading to intragroup disagreement and attitude change following disagreement among 269 participants. Analysis indicated that the probability of consensus was low when the group means differed from the grand mean of the entire sample. When smal...