Experience Stern | News & Events

Excerpt from TechCrunch -- "The difficulty with learning machines arises because they train themselves on what they see, the 'training data,' that cannot completely represent situations the machine will see in the future. These are sometimes called 'edge cases' or 'Rumsfeldian unknowns,' in that they are unknowable in advance. Humans typically deal with such edge cases remarkably well with no prior 'training' by applying common sense or finding analogies and learning from these samples of one."

Excerpt from Dagens Nyheter - "The world's cities are expected to grow by two and a half billion people by 2050. The US economist Paul M. Romer have a suggestion on how we can solve the challenges of overpopulation and migration: Create new sanctuaries where people are given the opportunity to test new ways of living."

Excerpt from NPR -- "'It was truly remarkable how much more effect Mrs. Obama had on the commercial fashion industry that almost any other celebrity you could find in any other commercial setting,' Yermack says. And it wasn't just a freak blip on the graph: 'This would be a very permanent thing,' Yermack emphasized. 'The stocks would not go down the next day. So to put a number on it for just a generic company at a routine event, it was worth about $38 million to have Mrs. Obama wear your clothes.'"

Excerpt from BusinessBecause -- "'Data is their business. It's the growth path for all of them,' said Vasant Dhar, NYU Stern professor of business and data science, and editor of the Big Data journal. 'The advice I give students these days is to take as many courses as possible that require working with real data,' he added."

Excerpt from Fortune -- "Governments should view Uber and Lyft as friends, not enemies. As I argue in my book ‘The Sharing Economy,’ society’s interests are served well when governments partner with platforms in the creation and enforcement of regulation rather than treating them as its target."

Excerpt from Thinkers50 -- "Perhaps we need additional frameworks. But I think we probably need a little bit of attention to what kind of criteria we might be able to use to separate interesting frameworks from frameworks that in some essential sense, really don't meet the test of history based on frameworks we've seen come and go."

Excerpt from New York Magazine -- "Humans don’t, as a general rule, do well with ambiguity. We like to tell clear, coherent stories about the world we see in front of us, and success is no exception. Hindsight bias, which is — and I’m just going to go with the Wikipedia definition here, because it’s good — 'the inclination, after an event has occurred, to see the event as having been predictable, despite there having been little or no objective basis for predicting it,' can partly explain how we come up with stories that cause us to discount the role of luck. Frank provided two examples of how hindsight bias warps our understanding of success in this manner: the Mona Lisa and Bryan Cranston."

Excerpt from The Huffington Post -- "There is an enormous gap between free trade as it is taught in textbooks and advocated by those who benefit from it and free trade as it is actually practiced in today’s world. Textbooks still unabashedly teach the virtues of free trade, but their arguments assume a world of pure market forces. But the American people don’t live in a world that is anything like that."

Excerpt from The Economic Times -- "It can be nice to imagine the much-derided banking industry unmoored from our daily needs, left to scramble for business like other non-essential industries. Of course, our transaction histories would be much more visible to governments than they are today . This imaginary world of effectively socialized money is being seriously discussed by researchers and central bankers alike. In a new paper, Max Raskin and David Yermack of New York University talk about it as a distinct possibility, albeit a radical one that 'carries significant risks for the rest of the financial system.'"

Excerpt from Techonomy -- "There's a number of different ways in which IoT and the sharing economy are going to interface. As you sort of start to give a household device, for example, the ability to know where it is, the ability to know how much is being used, and in some sense, the ability to call on transport when it needs it, you dramatically increase the potential for peer-to-peer rental marketplaces."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "Helping establish a guild is a savvy decision by Uber, said Arun Sundararajan, a professor at New York University’s business school who’s writing a book titled 'The Sharing Economy.' 'They’re nurturing their relationship with their drivers,' he said. 'It seems like a smart move.'"

Excerpt from Fortune -- "The trouble comes if Cirrix buys too many of LendingClub’s loans, which is possible with Lending Club as a partial investor. 'If 80% of [Cirrix’s] portfolio is in LendingClub, it is very dangerous,' says Aswath Damodaran, professor of finance at the Stern School of Business at New York University. 'You become almost a quasi-bank, and you need to worry about all the things that banks do.'"

Excerpt from The Huffington Post -- "It’s basically an issue of supply and demand, Lisa Leslie, an associate management professor at New York University and one of the paper’s authors, told The Huffington Post. 'There’s a market for high-potential women. If you want them in senior ranks, you’ll have to pay them more,' she said."

Excerpt from the Financial Times -- "'This is a bold move. It’s a bit like if Apple changed its name to "innovation", because one of the core associations of (Budweiser) is already America,' said Scott Galloway, a professor at New York University. 'It could be a stroke of genius, but I think it’s a risky change … to what is arguably one of the world’s greatest brands.'"

Excerpt from Quartz -- "Roy Smith, an ex-Goldman Sachs partner and a professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business, says Goldman, which declined to comment for this article, has plenty of incentive to put technology to work. 'Under the [financial] burden of regulation, firms have to evolve into things that use big technology more than they did in the past,' he says, adding that Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein 'is also saying [the firm] may get into some businesses that can be operated technologically, without many human beings involved.'"

Excerpt from amNewYork -- "There is 'a lot of information that individual citizens have that often stays with them,' says Arun Sundararajan, professor at the Stern School of Business at New York University and author of 'The Sharing Economy.' That information, from potholes to trash pick-up, can be funneled to local government. Other easy uses of a digital mentality, says Sundararajan, could include digitally-enabled ridesharing that would allow people to share NYC taxis a la UberPool, saving time and reducing road-hours."

Excerpt from Quartz -- "'Startup devaluations…can be a blessing in disguise, in the sense that it makes the company leadership take a close hard look at the current monetisation model, re-evaluate any fragilities and make strategic and tactical adjustments accordingly,' Anindya Ghose, director of New York University’s Center for Business Analytics said."

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "It is unusual for public officials to call for a weaker dollar, even if a cheaper currency makes U.S. exports cheaper, said Richard Sylla, an economist at New York University. Advocating for a stronger dollar 'assures both people at home and foreigners that the U.S. is wanting to run sound fiscal policies and sound monetary policies,' he said."

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "I came to believe that fundamental changes are needed in the way we think about macroeconomics, as well as the way central banks manage their economies. A key role of a market economy is to link the present and the future, and to coordinate decisions about spending and production not only today but tomorrow and in the years thereafter."

Excerpt from Harvard Business Review -- "Our findings document a pay premium for high-potential women that is driven by the widespread adoption of organizational diversity goals. Although diversity is a strategic goal in many organizations, women remain severely underrepresented in executive positions. As a result, executive women offer significant value to these organizations and receive a pay premium relative to executive men. We find that the female premium applies to all high-potential women in companies with diversity goals — both those who have already reached the executive ranks and those deemed likely to do so in the future."

Excerpt from Business of Fashion -- "Clothing and accessories often have high value but low usage — characteristics of other items that have proved popular in sharing consumption models, explains Arun Sundararajan, a professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business. 'It’s quite common to have clothing that costs three figures or four figures,' he says, many of which are bought and worn only occasionally. In the US alone, over $8 billion worth of clothing sits in closets, unworn, according to a report by online thrift store ThredUp."

Excerpt from Forbes -- "VIX is a trademarked ticker symbol for the CBOE Volatility Index. It measures the predicted volatility of the stock market over a certain period in the future. According to Wikipedia, it was first developed and described by Menachem Brenner and Dan Galai in 1986."

Excerpt from CNBC -- "'In my academic research and industry consulting, I have seen tremendous benefits accruing to firms, organizations and consumers alike from the use of data-driven decision-making, data science, and business analytics,' Anindya Ghose, the director of Center for Business Analytics at New York University's Stern School of Business, said."

Excerpt from Seeking Alpha -- "In a study done by Masakazu Ishihara from New York University, it was found that as the price of new games increased, the average profits per game would fall by 10% while if title prices decreased, the average profits per game actually increased by 19%."

Excerpt from The Washington Post -- "Arun Sundararajan, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, who will soon release a book about the sharing economy, said the approach has a lot of potential. 'The pure peer-to-peer rental model works well when you have high-value assets that aren't being utilized at capacity,' he explained. One of the reasons services like Airbnb and Uber have taken off is because they’ve let normal people make money from their biggest investments — their cars and homes, he said."