Office: 463 RBC Phone: 610-758-5129 Fax: 610-758-4677 Email: jad8@lehigh.edu Applied Microeconomics Analysis Game Theory Micreconomic Theory Competitor Analysis Quantitative Marketing Analysis

Department of Economics:  Professor and Chair

Education
-  Muhlenberg College, A.B.
-  Pennsylvania State University, Ph.D.

James Dearden is a specialist in game theory, he investigates economic incentives and contracts, cost sharing of collective actions, negotiation, and advertising. His most recent research interests include:  the strategic interactions among universities to improve their ranks in publications such as U.S. News &World Report’s:  America’s Best Colleges and Universities; state employee pension fund portfolios; and corporate governance and firm performance. 

Professor Dearden has published papers on these topics in journals including American Economic Review, RAND Journal of Economics, International Economic Review, Journal of Public Economics, International Journal of Research in Marketing, and Economic Theory. Professor Dearden is co-editor of the new Berkeley Electronic Press journal, Journal of Industrial Organization Education (http://www.bepress.com/jioe/).  In addition, Dearden writes the weekly Wall Street Journal Microeconomics Educators Review and is on the advisory board of the Wall Street Journal. Professor Dearden teaches microeconomics, Ph.D. microeconomics, game theory, quantitative marketing analysis, and competitor analysis.  Professor Dearden began his academic career in 1987 at The American University and has been a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Economic Research, Tilburg University, The Netherlands.

Research Interests

• The use of merit aid to improve university ranks; and the dynamics of university ranks.  Empirical analysis of ranking dynamics and theoretical, and empirical analysis of merit aid competition.    
• Public employee defined benefit pension systems:  The effect of surplus sharing contracts and stakeholder influence on investment strategies.  Contract theoretic and empirical analysis of pension plan asset allocations.   
• Corporate governance and firm performance:  the effect of executive compensation contracts and director networks on firm performance.  Agency theoretic analysis of the interplay between monitoring and auditing executive actions and high-powered incentives; and empirical analysis of director networks.       
• Pharmaceutical detailing:  Strategic interaction among pharmaceutical companies.

Publications and Working Papers

• "Public Employee Defined Benefit Pension Systems: The Impact of Explicit Surplus Sharing Contracts and Stakeholder Influence on Investment Strategies," (with J. Richard Aronson and Vincent G. Munley).
• "Merit Aid Management and Competition in the University Marketplace," (with Rajdeep Grewal and Gary L. Lilien).
• "The University Rankings Game: Modeling the Competition among Universities for Ranking" (with Rajdeep Grewal and Gary L. Lilien), forthcoming in The American Statistician. 
      - Technical Appendix to The University Rankings Game
• "To Innovate or Not to Innovate: Incentives in Hierarchies," (with Barry Ickes and Larry Samuelson), American Economic Review 80, 1990, 1105-1124.
• "Efficiency and Exclusion in Collective Action Allocations," Mathematical Social Sciences 34, 1997, 153-174.
• "Serial Cost Sharing: General Cost Functions," Economic Theory 12, 1998, 189-198.
• "Capacity Cycles in Non-Differentiated Product, Oligopolistic Markets, " (with Gary Lilien and Eunsgang Yoon), International Journal of Research in Marketing, 16, 1999, 57-74.
• "Advertising Coopetition: Who Pays? Who Gains?" in M. Baye and J. Nelson (with Gary Lilien), Advertising and Differentiated Products, JAI Press, 2001.
• "Contracting, Gatekeepers, and Unverifiable Performance" (with Dorothy Klotz), RAND Journal of Economics, 33, Winter 2002, 723-740.

Links

Curriculum Vitae
Alvin Roth's game theory and experimental economics web page (includes links to a large number of sites of interest to game theorists)
http://kuznets.fas.harvard.edu/~aroth/alroth.html
The TV Food Network (one of my favorite sites)
http://www.foodnetwork.com/
Wall Street Journal Educator Reviews
http://info.wsj.com/professor/educatorsReviews.html
Lemons Problem Question and Answer
(Zipped folder. Need Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player to view recording. Once files are extracted, click through to IE icon. Double click on icon.)