Experience Stern | News & Events

On May 9, 2014, the NYU Stern Center for Business Analytics, led by Professors Vasant Dhar and Anindya Ghose, hosted an all-day event to discuss trends and issues related to crowdfunding and crowdsourcing with industry experts and academics, including Stern Professors Ashwini Agarwal, Yannis Bakos, John Horton, Panos Ipeirotis, Natalia Levina and Arun Sundararajan, in the space.

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "The process for initial offerings has been evolving for centuries. Among the first IPOs in America was in 1791 for the Bank of the United States, started by Alexander Hamilton. The offering, made through newspaper advertisements, allowed the public the right to purchase a share for $25. 'In the early days of the U.S., there wasn’t such a developed investment-banking industry,' said Richard Sylla, chairman of the Museum of American Finance and an economics professor at New York University Stern School of Business."

Excerpt from CNBC -- "I think it's a great company. I was actually surprised by how much money the company makes. It's just a phenomenal moneymaker."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "The percentage of the traffic you get from Facebook to a retailer does not convert at a high rate. The traffic is what we could call low-grade traffic. Whereas, the traffic coming off of Instagram tends to convert at a high rate and have a higher average order value when people do buy."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "In the study, titled 'Evasive Shareholder Meetings,' David Yermack, a New York University professor of finance, and Yuanzhi Li, a finance professor at Temple University, said they used 'the geography of meetings as a proxy for the evasiveness of management.' Compiling data on nearly 10,000 annual meetings held by more than 2,300 publicly traded companies from 2006 to 2010, they found that companies that held meetings at least 50 miles away from their headquarters and 50 miles away from a major airport generally underperformed the stock market by about 7 percent over the next six months."

Excerpt from Gigaom -- "Part of a data scientist’s role is to automate his or her own work, leading to tools like prediction APIs. But these APIs are starting to replace data scientists in some areas, and that should be considered a good thing. We are now in the era of big data 2.0, as defined by Foster Provost and Tom Fawcett in Data Science for Business."

Excerpt from Next City -- "How does it feel to become the first public intellectual of the Age of the Sharing Economy? 'It feels good,' Sundararajan says with a laugh. It’s gratifying that his ideas are having an impact, but he sees in it a responsibility: More academics should think about shepherding 'good thinking' into public policy and social change. 'It’s something I’ve prioritized to some extent.'"

Excerpt from Forbes -- "From little butter almond flavored pastries that come free with each coffee at Financier shops in New York City, to free hemming of pants over $29.95 at Uniqlo, to free Cosmos served at Dashing Diva nail salons in New York City, customer touchpoints can be powerful differentiators vs. competitors and can also generate significant buzz and earned media!"

Excerpt from Irish Times -- "Investors liked Apple’s latest earnings report, driving the stock from $525 to $600 (€379-€433). The big question, according to renowned valuation expert Aswath Damodaran, is why. Damodaran, an Apple shareholder, valued the company at $649 prior to the earnings report and $648 afterwards. There was nothing new; it reported low revenue growth and continued pressure on margins while the announcement regarding stock buybacks and dividends had little impact on Damodaran’s valuation."

Excerpt from South China Morning Post -- "'When I look at China, to the extent that the data permits it, I look at the shifting structure of the economy and to the extent that one can do this from a distance sometimes, to look at the reforms that seem to me to be the critical underpinnings to support the structural transformation. At least on a short-term horizon, that is more important than the growth,' Spence said."

Excerpt from USA Today -- "After all, shares of Facebook, too, struggled following its first two lockup expirations. Shares of the social networking company fell 5% and 3% respectively following the first two lockup expirations, says Aswath Damodaran, professor of finance at the Stern School of Business at New York University."

Excerpt from CNNMoney -- "'High-frequency traders on May 6 accelerated the decline, while a specialist would have been prohibited from doing so,' said Joel Hasbrouck, a professor at New York University."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "We need to create a new regulatory framework for online service providers, balancing their lower risks with appropriately designed safeguards."

Excerpt from CKGSB Knowledge -- "We can quantify the dollar value of innovation. And I think that’s one of the major issues that many managers face. They have to find out whether they should to put more money into the R&D or stop it. That’s a major decision and that depends on expected value of that innovation which we can quantify."

Excerpt from The Chronicle of Higher Education -- "Listening to a topic like game theory in a bar made it seem less forbidding, said Makeda Yohannes, a Columbia freshman. The talk on game theory was delivered by Adam M. Brandenburger, a professor of business economics and strategy at NYU who spoke from behind a foosball table."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "'My estimate is that we are considerably better off than we would have been had the program not been implemented,' said Luís Cabral, a Portuguese economist and professor at New York University. 'The death spiral that was predicted for the Portuguese economy failed to materialize.'"

Excerpt from CNBC -- "Nouriel Roubini, the chairman of Roubini Global Economics a professor at the Stern School of Business at New York University, warned that global central banks could cause the next crisis if they continue to use monetary policy to stimulate growth. 'The risk is that they exit too late and they cause the mother of all bubbles," Roubini said. "We saw what happened last time around: Every boom and bubble eventually leads to a bust and a crash.'"

Excerpt from Fox Business -- "We hear every week of a new position taken by activist investors and we all know the names Ackman and Icahn. You have already said in the past that the value of such investors depends on the company and the situation. And, considering your decision in abstaining from the Coke vote, my question for you is: Under what circumstances would you decide to take an active role and why?"

Excerpt from The Boston Globe -- "Cryptocurrencies—virtual tokens that are generated through complex mathematical computing feats and traded online—are at an inflection point. There are more than 200 currently ranked on the website Crypto-Currency Market Capitalizations, with some 10 to 20 new ones, David Yermack of NYU’s Stern School of Business said, appearing every week."

Excerpt from Smart Company Australia -- "Drawing on a number of studies, Alter put forward the case that bursts of ‘artificial complexity’ can shake people out of their stupor. In a sense, the occasional wave in otherwise flat surf can force us to concentrate a little harder."

Excerpt from The Michael S. Robinson Show -- "Corporate social responsibility usually works well when it's also in the company's interest to do exactly what it is doing. A great example is Gap. Gap sources a lot of its clothes and materials and so on from Africa, so they had a CSR intiative towards improving the health of villages where they source some of their materials, which is a really good idea because it reduces some of their own healthcare spending, it reduced turnover in the company, it reduced employee mortality, all of which improved their bottom line in the longer term, but it was also extremely helpful to the community."

As part of an annual tradition, NYU Stern faculty and guests gathered to celebrate the School’s community of scholars and to recognize excellence in research and scholarship, innovation, teaching and mentorship, and influence in business and policy.

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "Renters, for example, don't pay property taxes, homeowner's insurance and, in most cases, maintenance costs. These expenses can cost homeowners about 3% of the price of their home annually, experts say. While those costs can be folded into monthly rent, apartment renters often pay a smaller share as landlords spread the costs among many tenants, says Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, director of the Center for Real Estate Finance Research at New York University."

Excerpt from MBA Programs News -- "Henry, whose research explores emerging economies, told Bloomberg Businessweek, 'At Stern we want to create leaders who say it is a corporate imperative that we train people who are as comfortable in the Middle East as they are in Manhattan.'”

Excerpt from Financial Times -- “'These companies are hot on the heels of Instagram, and keen for first-mover advantage in the nascent field of visual social commerce,' says Scott Galloway, founder of L2. 'Regardless, Instagram remains head and shoulders above the competition. In under two years, it has become the most powerful social media platform for visual-based branding in the world,' he said."