Experience Stern | News & Events

Excerpt from The Huffington Post -- "Sundararajan argued that this business model is risky for Instacart and other firms like it because it hands over so much control to workers who don't feel particularly invested in the company's overall health. Workers have detailed similar experiences at other rapidly growing apps, Uber and HomeJoy among them. Sundararajan suggested that a company like Instacart consider, at minimum, pairing newbie shoppers with expert mentors when they are starting out. 'Eventually these companies’ brand comes from consistent high quality, and that rests almost entirely in the hands of freelance workers,' Sundararajan said. 'It’s simply smart capitalism to have a healthy workforce of people motivated to work for you.'"

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "'I wouldn't even call this a failure. I'd call it an assisted suicide,' says Scott Galloway, a professor of marketing at New York University's Stern Business School. 'It's amazing it's taken this long for this company to go out of business.'"

Excerpt from Forbes -- "The temptation in developing Super Bowl ads is to go part way: to create the ads that seem clever in some way, but not strategically sound or effective in achieving important brand objectives. Having been on both the client and agency side, I know first-hand that it can be a tricky balancing act managing the creative process between brands and agency creative teams. The challenge and management skill is to not ... stifle creativity, but also not to loose the incredibly valuable opportunity to increase positive brand understanding. In the end, advertising, no matter how subtle and two-way the communication, is about making more people want to buy, benefit from, or identify with brands."

Excerpt from BBC -- "When we came out of World War II in the 1940s and created the United Nations, the assumption was that governments were all-powerful; they could handle anything. And we live in a very different world today. ... If you look at the global economy, half of the world's largest economies today are actually not states. Half of the biggest economies are private companies. So, Walmart is the 31st biggest economy in the world, roughly the size of Belgium or Nigeria or the Philippines. And I think we haven't really adjusted to those changes."
 

Excerpt from Chicago Tribune -- "Buying stuff to make ourselves feel better after a failure is not only expensive but could backfire and lead us to think more about our shortcomings, according to the study, 'Perils of Compensatory Consumption,' by Rucker, the Northwestern professor, Monika Lisjak of Erasmus University, Andrea Bonezzi of New York University and Soo Kim of Cornell University. Just as bad, retail therapy can strip consumers of mental resources and impair their self-control, the study says. And less self-control has been shown to potentially lead to excessive spending."

Excerpt from Marketplace -- "When a company messes up, three things need to happen, Galloway says. 'The first is to acknowledge the issue, to basically admit that you made a mistake,' he says. 'The second is to have the top guy or gal make that admission – so to get the CEO front and center. And the third is to overcorrect. To offer consumers a better deal than they originally had. Those are the only three things you need to remember, and they are consistently ignored.'"

Excerpt from OZY -- "What no one is saying is this: We need more jobs — and capitalism creates them. If we continue on this trend of bashing capital and open markets, our labor markets don’t stand a chance."

Excerpt from Project Syndicate -- "Simply put, we live in a world in which there is too much supply and too little demand. The result is persistent disinflationary, if not deflationary, pressure, despite aggressive monetary easing. The inability of unconventional monetary policies to prevent outright deflation partly reflects the fact that such policies seek to weaken the currency, thereby improving net exports and increasing inflation. This, however, is a zero-sum game that merely exports deflation and recession to other economies."

Excerpt from New York Post -- "'The stagnation in wages is such a broader challenge for society than anything a minimum change in the minimum wage can ever address,' [Foudy] said. 'The only gift New Yorkers have gotten in the last couple of months is lower gas prices.'"

Excerpt from Bloomberg View -- "At most companies it is the chief executive officer on the line fielding questions, accompanied by the chief financial officer and sometimes other top managers. This is one of the only managerial tasks, New York University accounting professor Baruch Lev observed a few years ago, that almost never gets delegated."

Excerpt from BBC News -- "'When you look at fast casual as a category, it tends to offer the promise of fresher food that's prepared more on-site, that is sourced more sustainably,' says Hans Taparia, a professor at New York University's Stern School of Business. This model is particularly appealing to millennials, he adds, who tend to care less about price - the average 'fast-casual' meal is $7.50, compared to $5 for a meal at a chain like Wendy's - than about ethics. 'Every marketer is trying to get access to this millennial consumer - it's an 80-million person strong consumer base, the largest demographic alive today,' says Prof Taparia."

Excerpt from Paste Magazine -- "Led by Vishal Singh of New York University’s Stern School of Business, the project examined consumer tastes across 416 counties in the United States, measuring 26 product categories ranging from frozen pizza preference to toothpaste. Over six years, Singh and his associates analyzed data and came find that a consumer’s political subconscious affects brands and items."

Excerpt from TIME -- "'One hundred years ago there wasn’t a clear line between someone who ran a hotel and someone who let people stay in their homes. It was much more fluid,' says Arun Sundararajan, a professor at New York University Stern School of Business who studies the sharing economy. 'Then we drew clear lines between people who did something for a living and people who did it casually not for money. Airbnb and Lyft are blurring these lines.'"

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "'A big part of this is just cleaning the bank balance sheets after the sovereign debt crisis,' said Viral V. Acharya, professor of finance at Stern School of Business at New York University. But Mr. Acharya said central bank bond buying was an inefficient way to fix eurozone banks. At the rate that the European Central Bank plans to buy bonds, he said, it will take months for banks to unload their holdings."

Excerpt from CNBC -- "Bottom line: Cuba may well become a rising star in the region and an attractive economic partner for the U.S. if things are managed well. In financial terms, Cuba will be a 'buy' when the time comes."

Excerpt from Marketplace -- "Companies that generate most of their sales from one product can be risky, says J.P. Eggers, a professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business. But he thinks Apple’s narrow focus is a source of strength, because the company can work on innovating and improving a narrow range of products."

Excerpt from The Economist -- "Drs Chan and Ghose looked at HIV rates in 33 states between 1999 and 2008, mostly in America's central regions (Craigslist's spread to populous cities along coastal regions was much faster, muddying the data there). The arrival of Craigslist, they found, was correlated with an average increase of 15.9% a year in the number of HIV infections compared with what would have been expected had it not been launched; the pair estimate that the listing website was associated with between 6,130 and 6,455 extra infections a year throughout the country."

Excerpt from Fortune -- "If its creditor nations agreed to extend the maturities to 75 years, Greece could easily handle its current debt load. It might be enough for Syriza to withdraw its pledge to roll back previous reforms and to honor its debts in exchange for those longer maturities. 'I think they will make a u-turn,' says Economides. 'The money they need is so gigantic. They will not have a choice.'"

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "'I do think we are defining a new category of work that isn’t full-time employment but is not running your own business either,' said Arun Sundararajan, a professor at New York University’s business school who has studied the rise of the so-called on-demand economy, and who is mainly optimistic about its prospects. ... 'We may end up with a future in which a fraction of the work force would do a portfolio of things to generate an income — you could be an Uber driver, an Instacart shopper, an Airbnb host and a Taskrabbit,' Dr. Sundararajan said."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "In their 2014 paper, Talhelm and his co-authors hypothesize 'that liberals think more analytically because liberal culture is more individualistic, with looser social bonds, more emphasis on self-expression, and a priority on individual identities over group identities.' Conservatives, in this analysis, are more dedicated to their communities and to the idea of community than liberals."
 

Excerpt from Vox -- "Using barcode level price data from 2,400 US zip codes on a variety of products sold in grocery and drug stores, we estimate that when local house prices double, product prices will increase by 15 to 20 percent. That is, households living in locations with rapidly increasing real estate prices will also face rapidly increasing costs of goods purchased in local stores."

Excerpt from CNN -- "First of all, it's unrealistic to write off the [Greek] debt because if Greece receives an extra dollar, this dollar will have to be paid by the taxpayers of the other countries and I don't see any European leader who's going to impose on his taxpayers a gift that he is going to give to Greece. I also don't think that this is the main problem of Greece. Although the present government was elected saying that, the real problem of Greece is being able to deal with the conditions that have been imposed through austerity and not so much on the issue of debt... The most important thing is for Greece to grow and I'm afraid that the present government has, in general, an anti-business attitude which will not attract growth and will not reduce unemployment."

Excerpt from The Boston Globe -- "'There are some breakthroughs in technology that are going to endure whether bitcoin survives or not,' said David Yermack, a professor of finance at New York University’s Stern School of Business."

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "Researchers said they worked with Ashley Madison, a dating website for people seeking extramarital affairs, to analyze data on more than 8 million men who had registered with the site. The study was one of six published together in the journal 'Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences' in 2014 that examined when people make big life changes. It found 950,000 men were ages 29, 39, 49 or 59, or '9-enders,' and their numbers on the dating site were 18% higher than what would be expected by chance, according to the researchers from New York University’s Stern School of Business and the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles."

Excerpt from Bloomberg View -- "'Analytic cognition function appears to decline dramatically over the life-cycle, starting at age 20,' economists Sumit Agarwal, John C. Driscoll, Xavier Gabaix, and David Laibson wrote in a 2009 paper on financial decision-making. On the other hand, they found, experience is valuable. Studying customer behavior in across several different credit markets, they found people making the best decisions at about age 53. After that, things start to go downhill."