Experience Stern | News & Events

On November 20, Adam Brandenburger, Vice Dean for Innovation; Vasant Dhar, Professor and Chair of Stern’s IOMS group and Co-director of Stern’s Center for Business Analytics; Arun Sundararajan, Professor of Information, Operations and Management Sciences and NEC Faculty Fellow; and Mandy Osborne, with the Center for Business Analytics, hosted a symposium, The Future of Higher Education in a Digital Age.

A team of five NYU Stern MBA students won the Third Annual Interactive Launch Competition by presenting a business analysis and marketing strategy for multi-screen “TV anywhere” technology offered by ARRIS, a leading video technology supplier.

Excerpt from Financial Times -- "Indeed, [the wealthy] even handled the crisis of 2008 somewhat worse than the average investor. That is the message from a study of the portfolios of 115 wealthy US households, with an average net worth of $90m, from 2000 to 2009, carried out by a group of academics including Enrichetta Ravina of Columbia Business School, Luis Viceira of Harvard University and Ingo Walter of New York University’s Stern School of Business."

Excerpt from Marketplace -- “'Some of these products, DVD players for $9.99, certain video games and so forth, those attract the right kind of people, so that’s where the competition is,' says Vishal Singh, marketing professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Singh says shopper data show people pick up other things along with those video games, making up for the markdowns. Price combat takes a toll on companies. But there’s a key difference from real war. Civilian bystanders in price wars do well."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "Aswath Damodaran, a New York University finance professor who blogs at Musings on Markets, has a good piece aimed at knocking down misconceptions about valuing young companies: 'While it is true that there is more uncertainty about the future prospects of a young company than for a mature business, you can still make estimates of expected earnings and cash flows into the future and value the company, as I tried to do in these spreadsheets to value Tesla and Twitter. You can and should take issue with my assumptions and come up with your own values for both companies, but you cannot argue that these companies cannot be valued.'”

Excerpt from CNBC -- "The decline of the vacation day can be chalked up to the bad economy and rapid changes in the structure of the workforce, said Anat Lechner, a clinical associate professor of management and organizations at New York University's Stern School of Business. 'I think it's pure fear,' she said. 'And there's a very good reason for that.' The changes in the workforce have made many workers afraid that taking vacation days will make them vulnerable. 'Can they do without me?' workers might ask. Other factors are likely in play, she said. 'I'm not sure people can afford to go on vacations,' she said referring to the Staycation trend."

Excerpt from Mobile Commerce Daily -- "During the 'Mapping the mobile path-to-purchase' session, a professor from UNC Kenan-Flagler along with executives from Sequent Partners and Kantar Retail discussed how mobile impacts consumers’ daily lives and how retailers can integrate mobile into both in-store and online efforts."

Excerpt from Project Syndicate -- "The growth map of the global economy is relatively clear. The US is in a partial recovery, with growth at 1.5-2% and lagging employment. Europe as a whole is barely above zero growth, with large variations among countries, though with some evidence of painful re-convergence, at least in terms of nominal unit labor costs. China’s growth, meanwhile, is leveling off at 7%, with other developing countries preparing for higher interest rates."

Excerpt from Entrepreneur -- “'Convertible debt at this later stage sends a signal that [Foursquare’s] business model is still not proven enough, and they still need to work on it and significantly ratchet it up,' says Ari Ginsberg, professor of Entrepreneurship and Management at New York University's Stern School of Business. But he noted that this may have been Foursquare’s best option at the time -- else it fork over a greater percentage of the company's equity due to a potentially reduced valuation. 'It would have been far worse to have to bite the bullet of valuation," adds Ginsberg. 'If they landed at a lower valuation they would have done far more damage.'"

Excerpt from Business Standard -- "The main recent constraints on growth I think are policies that caused a temporary loss of investor confidence, now being reversed, public sector investment levels, and inflexibility in labor markets that get in the way of structural change in the economy and especially in the expansion of the tradable side of the economy. The Indian economy with some important growth drivers in the tradable sector is still not exploiting it to the full. This by the way, is not unique to India."

Dean Peter Henry and Professors Michael Spence and Michael Posner joined thought leaders from around the globe at the World Economic Forum Summit on the Global Agenda in Abu Dhabi.

Excerpt from Bloomberg TV -- "We talked about [Alan] Mulally being the favorite candidate [for CEO] because he's a turnaround guy. But the question here is, is Microsoft really a turnaround? They missed the three biggest innovations. They missed social, they missed mobile and they missed search. But meanwhile... revenue is up fourfold and profit's up double. Is this really a turnaround or is it a company that needs better vision and more innovation?"

Excerpt from CNET -- "Arun Sundararajan, a professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, said all peer-to-peer companies are challenged with making people relate to these new services."

Excerpt from Mobile Marketer -- “'Mobile ads often get a bad flack,' said Anindya Ghose, professor at NYU Stern School of Business, New York. 'Every now and then you’ll hear that mobile ads don’t work. 'Oftentimes we’re missing the fact that mobile ads can lead to clicks on mobile devices but the final conversion might happen on PC,' he said. 'There are these spillovers that are important for us to quantify. If you only look at attribution through one channel you don’t get the whole story.'"

David Nenke, category leader for Grocery & Gourmet Food at Amazon.com, spoke with first-year MBA students for a special Block Time discussion titled, “The Amazon Way: Innovating at High Speed.”

Excerpt from Crain's New York -- "'[Hearst] is sort of the General Electric of the media business,' said Scott Galloway, a professor of marketing at the NYU Stern School of Business. 'They produce, recruit and support very competent managers.'"

Excerpt from Los Angeles Times -- "The tech industry may not be in another bubble, said Aswath Damodaran, professor of finance at the Stern School of Business at New York University, referring to the rapid rise and fall of Internet companies in the late 1990s and early 2000s. But these paper valuations are a 'form of delusion,' he said."

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "One implication of their research is that it is important not to rely on our memories when comparing different periods' sentiment levels. Not only are our memories short, we also tend to rewrite history to make the past appear different than it really was. If you are basing your investment strategy on swings in investors' mood between bearish and bullish extremes, it pays to rely on objective measures and a long-term perspective. Messrs. Wurgler and Baker developed five indicators that were well correlated with periods of speculative excess over the past 50 years. None of them currently is detecting the levels of exuberance that prevailed at the top of the Internet bubble."

Excerpt from USA Today -- "'There's no policeman, really,' said Marti Subrahmanyam, a finance and economics professor at New York University's Stern School of Business. 'These things have sort of fallen through the cracks. Foreign exchange is really nobody's kind of baby.'"

The NYU Stern Center for Business Analytics and Center for Measurable Marketing are co-hosting Mapping Mobile @NYU Stern, which will feature industry experts including Professors Anindya Ghose and Russ Winer.

Excerpt from The New Yorker -- "Why do investors, many of whom painstakingly dissect reams of data to understand companies’ finances, also base their decisions in part on a stock’s ticker symbol? The answer is that reading pronounceable ticker symbols is slightly less mentally taxing; people generally prefer objects and events that are more 'cognitively fluent,' or easier to process."

Excerpt from CNBC -- "'Investors need to be asking themselves, can all these companies coexist at the same time and make as much money as they are making now?' Damodaran said. 'There will be winners and losers. It could be Twitter, Facebook, Google or someone we haven't heard of yet.'"

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- “'The mandate is just a mistake,' Lawrence White, a professor at New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business, who has testified before Congress on ratings companies, said in a telephone interview. 'It generates a check-the-box-type process, which can lead to major mistakes and unfortunately that’s what happened' in the last crisis."

Excerpt from Yahoo News -- "Nominated for the 2013 Thinkers50 Global Solutions Award for his Global Connectedness Index, Ghemawat (11) is based at New York's Stern school and IESE Business School in Spain. Prior to that he was the youngest full professor at Harvard Business School. His 2011 book 'World 3.0' won the Thinkers50 Book Award."

Excerpt from Marketplace -- "In monetary policy, hawks have a laser-like focus on inflation. Keeping that under control is one of the Fed’s two mandates. And doves? They’re concerned with the other mandate. 'The dove, being a little bit softer, might be more concerned about what is going on in labor markets, the rate of growth, and the unemployment rate,' says Paul Wachtel, a professor of economics at NYU’s Stern School of Business. Doves are not happy, because unemployment is at 7.3 percent. And hawks? As Wachtel puts it, 'there aren’t too many hawks out there nowadays.'”