John Morgan

John Morgan is the Gary and Sherron Kalbach Professor of Business Administation at the Haas School of Business School and the Department of Economics, University of California, Berkeley.

Morgan is also the Founding Director of Xlab, Berkeley's laboratory for economic experiments.

Morgan is also the co-Director of the Fisher Information Technology Center. 

Prior to joining Haas, Dr. Morgan was at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University.

Professor Morgan holds a Ph. D. in Economics from The Pennsylvania State University) and is a CPA. He is an alumnus of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Professor Morgan's research concerns three questions central to many businesses

• How can a firm successfully  compete in the online marketplace?

• How should a firm organize so those with authority possess the necessary information to make good decisions?

• How can a firm successfully compete in an auction?

The Enron/Andersen debacle is an unfortunate but classic illustration of the importance of  Morgan's research on how firms should organize to "marry" information and decision making authority.

In a series of papers, Morgan explores key business issues such as how to select top advisors to aid in making strategic decisions, how to structure the "debate" over issues in corporate meetings so that they produce mission-critical information, and how to write effective incentive contracts with outside consultants to get the desired results.

Outside of purely business settings, Morgan's research in this area has important policy relevance. Obtaining relevant information on policy consequence of legislation is a continuing problem in government. Morgan's has applied his framework on expertise and authority to derive important findings about how the structure of legislative "rules" in the US House of Representatives impacts information available to legislators.

The work also applies to individuals making investment decisions. Morgan has applied his expertise framework to the  much-publicized debate about undue influence of investment banking interests on the reports of stock market analysts.

Economists have increasingly recognized the limitations of theory and field data in understanding how markets and firms are organized. The tools of controlled experiments offer a way to overcome these limitations. Morgan has been in the forefront in using controlled experiments to better understand the online marketplace.

Morgan's experimental research on price dispersion tests various economic theories regarding the competitiveness of firms in online markets.

Morgan's field experiments on online auction sites such as eBay and Yahoo have helped to deepen our understanding of auctions as well as to highlight important discrepancies between auctions in theory and auctions in practice.

The use of economic experiments is not simply helpful in testing theory; however. Morgan has applied the tools of experimental economics to help online firms make better decisions about pricing. Experiments also feature prominently in Morgan's teaching in the MBA classroom. His innovative teaching methods using experiments received accolades in teaching in day, evening, weekend, and executive programs.