Experience Stern | News & Events

Sinan Aral, Assistant Professor of Information, Operations and Management Sciences, (@sinanaral) recently spoke at Data Gotham 2012 where he made one pitch: to be doing more causal influence in data sets, particularly in networks.

Excerpt from Financial Times -- "This kind of puzzle – call it the hotel mini-bar problem – was explored a few years ago by economists Xavier Gabaix and David Laibson. The question is, is there some more transparent pricing scheme that aims for the same level of profitability as the companies which prefer to spring surprises on their customers? The answer is: no."

Excerpt from Project Syndicate -- "To the extent that this is true of other advanced economies, the global economy faces an extended multi-year period of low growth, with residual downside risk coming from policy gridlock and mistakes in Europe, the US and elsewhere. That scenario implies slower growth – possibly 1-1.5 percentage points slower – in developing countries, including China, again with a preponderance of downside risk."

As part of the Himelberg Speaker Series, Brad Feld, co-founder of TechStars, a mentor-driven start-up accelerator program, addressed a packed Cantor Boardroom at NYU Stern. An early stage investor and entrepreneur for more than 25 years, Feld shared several pieces of advice with Stern’s entrepreneurial community.

Excerpt from Financial Times -- "The seven judges chose the shortlist – including Volcker, William Silber’s newly published life of Paul Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman, and Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson’s account of the life and work of the late chief executive of Apple – from 17 longlisted titles. Lionel Barber, the FT’s editor, called it “the strongest list in terms of quality” since the prize was launched in 2005."

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "'There is a common-law right to be in the banking business,' ... In 1916, he said there were 4,046 private banks in the U.S., but they fell out of favor after the Great Depression and with the advent of deposit insurance. Only a handful are left, said Mr. Sylla. 'It's not because they're illegal, but most people are going to prefer to deposit their money in an incorporated bank with deposit insurance,' he said. 'It's going to be more complicated for a private bank to get private insurance.'"

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "If Germany could credibly assure financial markets that the euro zone will not break up, then sovereign differentials would be reduced, bank balance sheets would be improved and prospects for future growth would rise. How could Germany convince financial markets? One way would be by committing to back eurobonds or similar forms of debt mutualization. If $2 trillion of eurobonds were authorized to recapitalize the banks—and the first tranches sold and used to rescue the weakest banks—then confidence in the market would do the rest."

The NYU Stern Center for Measurable Marketing conference will convene marketing leaders and top academics to explore the increasingly complex path-to-purchase, and the customer experience at the pre-purchase, at-purchase and post-purchase phases. Attendees will learn best practices along the path-to-purchase in measurement, digital, social and mobile, and hear from experts who are driving the new consumer journey.

Excerpt from Project Syndicate -- "Ineffective governments with weak leadership are at the root of the problem. In democracies, repeated elections lead to short-term policy choices. In autocracies like China and Russia, leaders resist the radical reforms that would reduce the power of entrenched lobbies and interests, thereby fueling social unrest as resentment against corruption and rent-seeking boils over into protest."

Excerpt from Science News -- “'Prior work on political mobilization and motivation for voting has been focused on the individual,' says information economist Sinan Aral of New York University. 'This paper presents really nice large-scale evidence that political mobilization is a peer-to-peer activity.'”

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "I think logically, everyone thinks it's headed towards a mobile web HTML 5 but so far people seem to like their apps and apps have maintained huge share."

Excerpt from Slate -- The research team—Romana Khan of Ozyegin University in Istanbul, Kanishka Misra of the London Business School, and Vishal Singh of NYU—collected scanner data from over 1,700 supermarkets for 2001 to 2006 to examine how milk-buying patterns differ around the country depending on whether lower-fat varieties of milk are cheaper than whole milk or exactly the same price.

As part of NYU Stern’s Block Lunch event series, hosted by the Dean’s Office, Hugo Lindgren, editor of The New York Times Magazine, engaged with more than 100 MBA students on September 10. Lindgren spoke candidly about his career, including a stint at Businessweek after the magazine was bought by Bloomberg. He also shared some of his strategic thinking for The New York Times Magazine, and offered some perspective on the challenges facing the print journalism industry in general today.

Professor Kim Schoenholtz of the NYU Stern Center for Global Economy and Business hosted a panel on the 2012 Economic Outlook with economists David Greenlaw, Jan Hatzius and Peter Hooper.

Excerpt from NetworkWorld -- "It's too early to tell whether the gamification trend has long-term potential, Sundararajan says. 'But there are a couple of reasons why I think it's promising.' The first is that employees are increasingly expecting to have technology at work that resembles what they use at home. 'They want the stuff that they see at work to be like Facebook, like Foursquare, like the iPhone,' he says. 'This is very different from 10 or 15 years ago, when there wasn't much technology developed just for the consumer.' And the trend is only accelerating, he adds."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- “'It makes no sense to ascribe intentions to a robot,' said an author of the study, Robert H. Frank, an economics professor at Cornell. 'But it appears we have certain postures and gestures that we interpret in certain ways. When we see them, whether it’s a robot or a human, we’re affected by it, because of the pattern it evokes in our brain responses.'”

Excerpt from Reuters -- "The important policy question to ask now is which structural reforms and investments in human capital can make our longer-term growth options better. If we focus on quick monetary or stimulus fixes rather than those questions, then we can’t expect anything better than this slow, painful recovery."

Excerpt from NBCNews.com -- "Paradoxically, the controversy possibly could help Hollister, said NYU Stern School of Business management communication professor Irving Schenkler. “I think there’s a category for certain brands known as rebellious brands,” he said, pointing out that retailers like Calvin Klein and Nike have embraced provocative images and figures."

Excerpt from Council of Foreign Relations -- "I think we have to expand the -- turn the tradable sector into an employment engine again, which it has not been for a while. And that means keeping the healthy parts of it and finding, through a combination of public policy and reforms and investment on the one hand, and private sector investment and dynamism on the other, places where we can invest and compete."

Excerpt from SmartMoney -- "The good news, says Anindya Ghose, co-director of the Center for Digital Economy Research at the NYU Stern School of Business, is that savvy citizens are already using the digital era's overwhelming supply of data to their benefit—finding better deals, unearthing smarter investments and holding companies accountable."

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "Whoever wins the election in November, high on the president's agenda must be the task of reviving a flagging economy. Just as important as figuring out what to do will be actually making it happen—getting something done despite the inevitable obstacles and infighting. William Silber's 'Volcker: The Triumph of Persistence' thus comes at the perfect time, for Paul Volcker is one of those rare Washington figures who know how to think shrewdly about the economy and also how to make broad intentions into hard political realities."

Excerpt from CNBC -- "Nouriel Roubini, chairman of Roubini Global Economics, told CNBC, 'I would say the US economy is weak enough and employment is high enough that the Federal Reserve will do QE3 eventually.'"

Kicking off the fall semester, ProMotion Pictures is announcing this year’s competition sponsor: The Innocence Project, which is dedicated to exonerating wrongfully convicted individuals in the US criminal justice system. At this year’s kick-off event, MBA students will have a chance to meet prospective teammates from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and to learn about leadership opportunities within the program.

Excerpt from The Guardian -- "Soon after Romer visited Tegucigalpa at the start of the year, the Honduran congress approved an enabling bill for the creation of economic development zones. Lobo has reportedly taken fact-finding delegations to Hong Kong, Singapore and Dubai to look at possible models."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "Clearly we have to do what we can to accelerate the deleveraging process and go back to something reasonably normal in the economy, but that won't be sufficient. It may generate growth, but it won't solve the employment problem."