Experience Stern | News & Events

Excerpt from Los Angeles Times -- "As agencies scrutinize Uber's background checks, Arun Sundararajan, a professor of business at New York University, said they also should evaluate the effectiveness of taxi driver screening. 'If people say Uber missed a certain fraction of drivers, how frequently does this happen with government regulators?' said Sundararajan, who studies the sharing economy. 'Are they perfect? Or do they sometimes miss this?'"

Excerpt from Marketplace -- "'We generally don't start by saying let's get the government involved,' says Arun Sundararajan, professor of information, operations and management sciences at New York University's Stern School of Business. 'In the American economy, what we've traditionally done is let the market provide what it can and then have the government step in and surgically correct market failures.'"

Excerpt from PolitiFact -- "Lawrence White, an economist at New York University, doesn’t see Glass-Steagall playing any role in the financial crisis whatsoever. He pointed to the crisis’ biggest culprits: firms such as Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs and AIG, to name a few. He added that much of the crisis hinged on activity by these institutions that would have been possible with or without Glass-Steagall, such as mass investment in notoriously bad mortgage loans. (Clinton’s staff linked us to commentary by several other experts who share White’s view.)"

Excerpt from USA Today -- "'It's almost like he's designing what a great company should look and operate like, as opposed to just gunning for profits at all costs,' says Sundararajan, who teaches business at New York University. 'His philosophy seems to be guided by how to build another Facebook or Google.'"

Excerpt from The Conversation -- "We give our data to marketers (both willingly and inadvertently), and in return we expect to receive highly curated and personalized offers on our smartphones. Many consumers have even become resigned to the idea that they have little control over their data, and that this is the future of the world we will inhabit."

Excerpt from CBS -- "'The disadvantage of having them be W-2 employees is simple. It's cost. It's more expensive,' NYU Stern School of Business professor Scott Galloway said. It's expensive but a great marketing strategy, according to Galloway. 'Consumers claim they are very concerned about the well-being of the employees at a company,' he said."

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "Ultimately, the test of the model is its correspondence with the world. If we use certain frameworks, you can understand a much richer set of facts about the world. Growth is a difficult area to work because you’re addressing questions about the very long run, so you don’t have an abundance of data. You’re trying to invoke evidence from history over the very long run. We needed to come up with a way to think about all of these facts about the broad sweep of human history."

Excerpt from Livemint -- "'I do believe that collectively, the markets that are being used to justify these valuations  (online advertising in particular) are not big enough to justify the prices being paid, which I guess is a backhanded way of saying that the stocks are collectively overpriced,' [Damodaran] said in an interview."

Excerpt from The Boston Globe -- "'The basic dilemma is build or buy,' said C. Samuel Craig, director of the Entertainment, Media and Technology Initiative at New York University’s Stern School of Business. 'It’s very difficult for large companies to build internally because the corporate structure is risk-averse, and it’s hard to move quickly. If you see something out there that’s already working, the temptation is to buy or buy in.'"

Excerpt from Bloomberg View -- "Here are Stephen Cecchetti and Kermit Schoenholtz on liquidity. Their analysis includes the sentence 'We can separate claims about a loss of bond market liquidity into two fairly distinct categories: those about U.S. Treasury bonds and those regarding corporate bonds,' so I like them already. I feel like 90 percent of what I read about bond market liquidity treats Treasuries and corporates interchangeably, and as far as I can tell those markets have opposite liquidity problems (too much decentralized trading of Treasuries, too little of corporates)."

Excerpt from KIRO Radio -- "The idea that words are so dangerous, that anything could hurt anyone, and words are so dangerous in books that we need trigger warnings... this is new. And this is totally incompatible with the idea of a university, which is free speech, free thought... you should be able to say anything. ... Once you start saying that words are violence, that then can justify literal violence in response. So this is a very, very dangerous move. And it's only a few years old."

Excerpt from WWD -- "'Firms and organizations that compete on price — Amazon, China, Wal-Mart, McDonald’s — will view employees as a cost and the majority of innovation will be around how to get more, for less, from them,' said Scott Galloway, New York University marketing professor and founder of L2 Inc. 'This leads to companies that can be brutal places to work.'"

Excerpt from AdAge -- "As for the psychology of the whole business, Tom Meyvis, professor of marketing at the Stern School of Business at New York University, says it is likely there isn't 'too much research going on' when developing IVRs. 'The large aim of this business is to control cost,' he said. 'That's why we don't have live operators right away.'"

Excerpt from Forbes -- "At valuation conferences and in valuation treatises, we spend our time immersed in valuation details including how best to estimate cash flows, discount rates and deal with valuation loose ends, but we seldom talk about the bias, uncertainty and complexity. Valuation practice will be better served if we had an honest and open discussion of how we deal with these structural problems, because they remain the biggest barriers to good valuations."

Excerpt from HuffPost Live -- "The basic psychological point that I think is the crux of our article is that human psychology is as follows: There's a wonderful book by Nassim Taleb called 'Anti-Fragile.' It's about things that actually get stronger when you bump 'em around. My first book was on ancient wisdom and the ancients all got this one right. So here's a quote from Mencius, the ancient Chinese philosopher: 'When heaven is about to confer a great responsibility on any man, it will exercise his mind with suffering, subject his sinews and bones to hard work, expose his body to hunger,' et cetera... The point is, people are anti-fragile. You have to give them trials and tests. They have to suffer, they have to overcome it. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger."

Excerpt from The Huffington Post -- "It may seem counterintuitive, but in order to inspire free thinking, the first step is often to set some limits. While some academics and consultants advocate not restricting brainstorming creativity in any way, I've found allowing infinite options with few guidelines can paralyze innovation. Creativity flourishes when some parameters exist for what brands stand for and the brand equity elements that marketing tactics and line-extensions must protect and extend. Apple is a great example of a brand that adheres to a strong identity and vision for what it stands for, and the company continues to innovate while staying true to their brand parameters."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "The vote 'showed that the government coalition is very significantly weakened,' said Nicholas Economides, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. 'Elections are very likely in early fall. The most difficult part of the agreement, its implementation, will fall to a new government, to be elected in the fall.'"

Excerpt from Financial News -- "...US public infrastructure (highways, bridges, airports and so on) is paid for by user taxes and tolls that politicians are loath to raise, or by direct government grants that are equally unpopular. Thus it is continually under-depreciated, under-maintained, and under-financed."

Excerpt from Bloomberg View -- "Students demanding that campus life be bowdlerized to preserve their peace of mind seem to believe that the best way to deal with trauma is to avoid any mention of it. But [Greg] Lukianoff and [Jonathan] Haidt argue that this is exactly backward; chronic avoidance breeds terror. The current climate on campus is a recipe for producing fearful adults who are going to have difficulty coping in an adult world. It's as if we were trying to prepare the next generation of American citizens by keeping them in kindergarten until the age of 23."

Excerpt from TIME -- "The cybersecurity law will also have a chilling effect on privacy in China by building a single nationwide ID system that ties the online identity of citizens to their physical identity. Chinese officials insist that anonymity online allows terrorists and criminals to operate in the shadows–and that anonymity must be eliminated to protect Chinese citizens. Foreign companies will have to help manage these threats–even when they don’t agree with Beijing on what constitutes 'terrorism' or a legitimate threat to national security. The cybersecurity law also provides a legal basis for the government to shut down the Internet in the event of serious social unrest."

Excerpt from Marketplace -- "'America and consumers love to forgive,' says Galloway. 'It’s like a relationship. When your spouse gets angry at you, the easiest way to end the issue, "You’re right, I’m sorry. This is what I’m going to do to address the issue." It’s the same thing in the world of business.'"

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "It looks like there are going to be laws passed in Greece, the agreement laws... But then the laws have to be implemented, and that will happen sometime in the fall and that will be problematic. Additionally, there is a very important political wrinkle in this problem that the ruling coalition government does not have enough votes to pass these laws because some of their own deputies are going to vote against them, so these laws are going to pass with the opposition votes, which puts the government in a very precarious position. And it makes very likely that in early fall, this government will look for elections... as a way out of its problems."

Excerpt from PaRR -- "White noted that Libor is a collaboratively determined interest rate — a price, but it is an interest rate. However, according to Judge Buchwald, this interest rate is separate from the marketplace where people were buying and selling securities or mortgages or other products, and thus there was no collusion in those markets, he said. Buchwald 'didn’t see the collaborative effort in setting the Libor interest rate as a market antitrust issue,” White said. 'My personal belief is she is wrong and eventually is going to get overturned, either by the Second Circuit or the Supreme Court,' he added."

Excerpt from MarketWatch -- "...we have no choice but to conclude that we’re not in another bubble like it [the Internet bubble]. That...is the conclusion I reached upon grading the current market according to five dimensions of investor sentiment that were devised by the authors of perhaps the leading academic study of stock market bubbles. Those authors are finance professors Jeffrey Wurgler of New York University’s Stern School of Business and Malcolm Baker of Harvard Business School."

Excerpt from The Atlantic -- "Universities themselves should try to raise consciousness about the need to balance freedom of speech with the need to make all students feel welcome. Talking openly about such conflicting but important values is just the sort of challenging exercise that any diverse but tolerant community must learn to do. Restrictive speech codes should be abandoned."