Experience Stern | News & Events

Excerpt from Yahoo! Finance -- "The problem with Icahn’s plan is that such financial machinations can be a distraction for a technology company that needs to focus on developing innovative new products, according to Arun Sundararajan, professor of information sciences at New York University. 'This kind of financial engineering isn't in the long-term interest of Apple's shareholders,' he says. 'They're still a tremendously valuable company, but stock price boosts from financial engineering shouldn't distract from the fact that their business model doesn't look as solid and dominant as it did four years ago.'"

Excerpt from Financial News -- "Surveying executives across industries, they asked how many had issues and concerns at work that they did not articulate. The answer came back: 85%. By anyone’s measure, that’s a lot of silence. What it means is that we go to enormous time, trouble and expense to hire smart people – and then they shut up."

Excerpt from Project Syndicate -- "Without dismissing the downside risks, I remain cautiously optimistic about the global economy’s prospects. With greater clarity in terms of Chinese and US policy, both economies should gain momentum. That will give developing countries (many of which face difficult domestic policy choices) a tailwind, while making the substantial challenges in Europe and Japan easier to address."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- “'Recent regulatory changes will cause dealers to reduce risk and to make markets less aggressively,' Bruce Tuckman, senior fellow of financial markets research at the non-profit Center for Financial Stability and a finance professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, said in an Aug. 14 telephone interview. 'End users will lose some liquidity as dealers adjust to higher risk capital mandates, lower leverage limits, and increased margin requirements.'”

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "When a Fed chairman doesn't command strong majorities, it undermines his voice domestically and globally and creates uncertainty about policy, said William Silber, who documented those episodes in the Volcker biography, 'Volcker: The Triumph of Persistence.' 'Disagreement is healthy,' Mr. Silber said. 'Uncertainty is universally bad. It raises the cost of everything.'"

Excerpt from Financial Times -- "Ms Martin-Leke was keen to create the missing link between Africa’s abundant raw materials, being used by local artisans, and the international market. 'I wanted to preserve African craftsmanship - combining artisan with contemporary and timeless products,' she says. She believed the best way to do this would be through a luxury brand: 'The luxury industry conveys culture and identity. It is a country’s or continent’s image presented to the world - what better way to make an impact and change [perceptions].' Nine months after graduating from TRIUM in September 2012, she launched Yswara, a luxury retailer of African products, setting up an all-female workforce to give opportunities to local women."

Excerpt from CNBC -- "'My guess is that there is no mercy for someone who earns $10 to $20 million,' said Baruch Lev, a professor at New York University Stern School of Business. 'The risk, people think, is commensurate with the compensation and perks.'"

Excerpt from Bloomberg TV -- "The reality is Icahn has enough power within the organization at this point through ownership that the firm would not be able to ignore him completely. And [Apple CEO Tim] Cook will certainly have to at least have some serious conversations. What will come out of that? We'll have to see. It really depends, I think, how much Cook has a clear plan in his mind for the cash that he's sitting on and doesn't want to give it away versus he's kind of uncertain, in which case he's going to be more willing to give that cash back to Icahn at this point."

Excerpt from Bloomberg TV -- "I think what's going on a Cisco is a larger metaphor for what's happened in the economy over the last 5 years, and that is, if you look at shareholder growth, or earnings growth, it's largely been a function of cost-cutting, not revenue growth or innovation."

Excerpt from The Week -- "If all the factors responsible for the massive decline of the newspaper industry, Craigslist, the internet's free classifieds page, has long attracted a big share of the blame. So it's no surprise that a new study by Robert Seamans of New York University's Stern School of Business and Feng Zhu of the Harvard Business School seems, on its face at least, to back up the blame-Craigslist argument. What is surprising is the actual numbers. Analyzing how 1,000 newspapers reacted to the rise of Craigslist from 2000 to 2007, the professors estimated that classified ad buyers saved $5 billion by posting free listings on Craigslist instead of buying ads in newspapers. The obvious corollary here is that newspapers lost the $5 billion that consumers saved, and saw their classified ads business — one of three longstanding revenue pillars, along with circulation revenue and more traditional ads — all but decimated."

Excerpt from Forbes -- “A new study by two business school professors examined the issue and concluded that, indeed, Craigslist took a giant bite out of newspapers’ revenues — some $5 billion between the years 2000 and 2007. And that’s not even looking at the Times, the Wall Street Journal or USA Today, which the authors left out in order to have a more homogeneous sample. 'Our study definitely suggests that Craigslist has had a huge effect on newspapers,' says Robert Seamans, an assistant professor of management and organizations at the NYU Stern School of Business. Coauthored with Feng Zhu of Harvard Business School, the paper will be published by the journal Management Science."

Excerpt from Bloomberg TV -- "Boards are meant to be assets, not liabilities and recently [the JCPenney board] has become a liability. They need to just get out of the way of the CEO, be supportive of the process, and let those good people try and get back to work on what is a very, very challenging position for JCPenney. They're kind of stuck in the middle. This is a difficult time for JCPenney."

In a new study, Robert Seamans, assistant professor of management and organizations at the NYU Stern School of Business, and Feng Zhu at Harvard Business School, examine the impact of Craigslist, a website providing classified-advertising services, on local US newspapers during the 2000s.

Excerpt from Bloomberg TV -- "They say a picture is worth a thousand words and a video is worth a million words. So as we've gotten more broadband, more technology and more ability to deliver great content and also get great content from our users, these visual platforms and video platforms have really taken root. And what's exciting about them is advertisers love them. A video is a fantastic emotional, very visceral medium, so they attract dollars, and these platforms are going to where the dollars are."

Excerpt from MarketWatch -- “'[The High Line has] had a deep impact, but it was facilitating a transformation that was already happening,' says Joseph Foudy, an economics professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. 'Cities around the world are going to have to be very careful about what neighborhoods can actually be transformed.'”

Excerpt from Minnesota Public Radio -- "Some of these new sharing economy companies are sort of like the rental business on steroids. You used to rent a car for a day, now you can rent it for an hour. There are bike share programs where sort of a fleet of bikes is provided by the city, like in Minneapolis or CitiBike in New York City now, which has gained tremendous popularity over the last few months. But the more interesting models are actually the ones like airbnb and RelayRides where the sharing is person-to-person, so it's not a company that is providing a suite of apartments or a fleet of cars, it's individuals saying, well, if I own something that other people can use, here is a marketplace on which I can actually commercially lend it to them. So we're not creating a whole new set of assets that are then shared by people."

NYU Stern’s Berkley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation recently hosted a new workshop series entitled, "Lean Startup Summer Boot Camp." The five-session series explored human-centered research, divergent thinking and problem solving to validate or invalidate startup or product ideas early on.

Excerpt from Bloomberg TV -- "What Greece needs is a certain amount of money that it will be free to invest and that needs to be found somewhere. And in my opinion, the best way to get this money is to get a grace period from the European Union of 3-5 years and not pay interest on the inter-government loans for those years and these loans are $5-6 billion in interest per year so if Greece takes this money and invests it in infrastructure projects, then you will see suddenly the unemployment rate go from 26 or 27% down at least ten points so you won't fix the whole unemployment problem of Greece, but you'll fix, very significantly, parts of it."

Excerpt from the Village Voice -- "New York University economist Arun Sundararajan calls PAVE's investment-based model one 'whose time has come.' He predicts that soaring debt will not only drive students to seek alternatives to college—most notably Massive Open Online Courses—but to consider alternate forms of financing their education."

Excerpt from CKGSB Knowledge -- "Durairaj Maheswaran, the Paganelli Bull Professor of Marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business, sees the globalization of companies in terms of a 'Five C' model of competitive advantage. In simple terms, this model examines how a company’s core benefit, competition, culture, corporate structure and country of origin impact its globalization strategy."

Professor Russ Winer, chair of NYU Stern’s Marketing Department, along with Stern PhD student Stephanie Tully, examine the willingness to pay for socially responsible products in their new paper, "Are People Willing to Pay More for Socially Responsible Products: A Meta-Analysis."

Excerpt from San Jose Mercury News -- "'It's a groundbreaking new economic paradigm,' said Arun Sundararajan, a professor at New York University's Stern School of Business who studies digital economies. 'This isn't just a recession-era phenomenon. It's a technology-driven change.'"

Excerpt from Bloomberg TV -- "CBS has more customers now. We're basically price takers with Time Warner Cable or whatever you have in New York. You have to take whatever they offer you and every year your bill's gone up more than inflation, and you ask yourself, has there really been any innovation? There's been so much innovation on our phone, very little innovation around the TV. I think what you're going to see here with TV is that less is more, and then people are going to have the opportunity for the first time to pick the 10 to 15 to 20 channels they actually watch and just pay for those channels, similar to what happened with music and iTunes."

Excerpt from All Things Digital -- "A study conducted by NYU think tank Luxury Lab (or L2) stated that 35 percent of “prestige brands” were active on Vine, while the same report said about 26 percent of those prestige brands were experimenting with Instagram video."

Excerpt from Bloomberg TV -- "The study we did at NYU shows that less than 3% of the traffic that brands and retailers who were generally large advertisers in any medium...less than 3% of the traffic they're getting is actually coming from social media versus 33% for search. So, placed in context, social media isn't having as large an impact as originally thought on the business world."