Experience Stern | News & Events

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "It is easy to be skeptical about disclosure requirements of this kind. Will consumers pay any attention? It turns out that many of them do so. Sumit Agarwal of the National University of Singapore (along with co-authors from the University of Chicago, New York University and the U.S. Treasury Department) finds that the consequence of the nudge was to reduce interest payments by $74 million a year."

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "Executives in the class will identify and challenge conceptual frameworks about products and pricing that have restricted their creativity and have kept them thinking about business the same way for years. For example, if a cellphone doesn't work, a traditional assumption would be that its battery needs to be recharged. Mr. Williams wants his students to reject traditional assumptions and think in terms of 'unreasonable provocation'—thoughts that will get creative juices flowing. A better question, he says, could be why a cellphone needs a battery at all."

Excerpt from Bloomberg TV -- "There's only really been one platform that I would argue has the most robust revenue model that's been able to charge their users, and that's LinkedIn. LinkedIn gets 53% of their revenue from the tools that recruiters use, 20% from people like you and me who want to InMail more people, and then 23% from advertising, so they're really the only platform that's been able to charge users."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- “'Bernanke was suggesting in his own way that too much importance is given to gold, it’s too hyped,' said Nouriel Roubini, professor of economics and international business at New York University. 'Gold is not a currency.'”

Excerpt from Crain's New York -- "'It isn't possible to sustain the type of growth rate you see early on with startup companies, yet management grows up in an environment where they expect to,' said ­Jeffrey Carr, clinical professor of marketing and entrepreneurship at NYU Stern School of Business, noting that even big companies, such as Apple and Microsoft, can run into problems managing growth."

Excerpt from Seeking Alpha -- "If you are an investor or even a corporate manager, you may believe that these brand name rankings matter little, since all they do is parse the value of a company into its component parts. These rankings do, however, raise interesting questions about the power of a brand name and how it manifests itself in earnings power and in value."

Excerpt from The Economist -- "A 2013 study found that publicly quoted companies where executive compensation is linked to the stockmarket invest considerably less than private firms and are less responsive to new investment opportunities. The authors state that 'our results are most consistent with the view that public firms’ investment decisions are affected by managerial short-termism.'”

Excerpt from WIRED -- "Watson is a thinking machine that needs supercomputers at the moment (this isn’t a theoretical requirement). Google is a retrieval machine with a scalable architecture of massive amounts of simple processors and storage. Together, these IT competencies would provide a formidable combination of a machine that can remember, know, and think. Interestingly, IBM has the capability—despite the reality that IT-based competencies are not easy to replicate—to assemble a “good enough” version of such a search engine. And while Google could probably build a Watson, it would take years to do so, and Google isn’t used to playing catch-up (not to mention this kind of approach goes against its DNA for how it thinks about search)."

Excerpt from Financial Times -- "The correlations between the shocks are time varying and modeled using the dynamic conditional correlation model of Engle (2002)."

Excerpt from Bloomberg TV -- "I think these guys [at Twitter] have carved out a really nice niche for themselves, and again to go from 30 million to half a billion [in revenue] in three years? This is an impressive company. One of the things to mention: 2,000 employees. They've been hiring 50 people a month for the last three years."

Excerpt from PBS -- "I'm like Warren Buffett. I don't buy something if I don't understand it. And for all I know, the person who created Bitcoins would be like King Henry VIII in Britain, who decided suddenly to double the amount of British money units around, and there was a big inflation."

Excerpt from China Daily -- "'The supply side shifts are important and necessary, but for China not sufficient. The demand and income side restructuring is also a key component,' [Spence] says. He agrees that there should not be major credit expansion to fuel consumption but higher domestic consumption is a fundamental part of rebalancing the economy."

Excerpt from Bloomberg TV -- "There are spillover effects [from the government shutdown] on growth, especially in relatively weak areas these days such as Europe, but in the far east as well. So growth is going to slow down worldwide because of the government shutdown. And there is also the impending risk of the debt ceiling not being raised in time."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "The best science book I read was Adam Alter’s 'Drunk Tank Pink,' which is a really provocative look at how much our behavior is contextually determined."

Excerpt from This View of Life -- "NYU Stern’s Business & Society Program and the Evolution Institute co-hosted a one-day symposium 'Darwin's Business: New Evolutionary Thinking About Cooperation, Groups, Firms, Societies' featuring an international roster of experts on evolution, economics, and human nature. Participants and audience members assessed the possible applications of evolutionary thinking for business and business ethics."

Excerpt from Xinhua -- "If the U.S. government couldn't pay the obligations or at least not on time, the holders would not be sure if they want to continue to hold U.S. treasury bills, which could be really disruptive, said White."

Excerpt from BBC Capital -- "'With an election, there's a lot of anticipation ahead of time,' said Lawrence White, professor of economics at New York University's Stern School of Business. 'Markets try to anticipate elections by looking at the polls and trying to anticipate the consequences of the future.'"

Excerpt from Harvard Business Review -- "We analyzed the earnings calls of 2,113 publicly held U.S. firms based in the Eastern and Central time zones from January 2001 to June 2007—a total of 26,585 calls. We used linguistic algorithms to measure positivity, negativity, and uncertainty during the Q&A. Tone grew more negative and less resolute as the morning progressed and improved slightly at midday, presumably because participants recharged at lunch. Negativity increased during the afternoon but fell off after the market’s closing bell—probably because the close reduced participants’ stress. Overall, calls originating late in the afternoon were more negative, irritable, and combative than calls made early in the morning, even after controlling for factors such as industry norms, financial distress, growth opportunities, and the news that companies were reporting."

Excerpt from CreditCards.com -- "The Credit CARD Act of 2009 succeeded in cutting fees for cardholders to the tune of about $20 billion per year -- without boosting interest rates or drying up the availability of credit, according to a new study based on 150 million accounts. 'We find that regulations to limit fees were highly effective,' said the authors of the working paper posted online Sept. 26 by the National Bureau of Economic Research."

Excerpt from Bloomberg TV -- "Big companies typically don't want to disrupt themselves. I would argue both Steve Jobs and Ballmer were innovators. Constant product innovation that they were able to get a higher price. But the problem is when you raise your prices faster than inflation...you make yourself vulnerable to startups who will come in and give you a bad version of Word, in the Cloud, for free. Free is a really attractive price. Those disruptors go after the customers that Microsoft doesn't want and slowly start nipping at their heels and nipping at their shins and before they know it they're taking the whole torso into the great white shark of a disruptor. So both companies [Apple and Microsoft] are vulnerable to disruption."

Excerpt from Adweek -- "The increased visibility of social also amplifies the potential risk of such deals. For one, it raises the bar for what passes as a convincing celeb-marketer marriage, said Chris Raih, managing director of Los Angeles agency Zambezi, which this summer launched a Popchips ad starring Katy Perry (an investor and creative partner in the company). Or a brand may find itself entangled in a fiasco on the scale of the Mountain Dew-Tyler, the Creator dustup, the Rick Ross lyrics controversy or the Paula Deen meltdown. Still, 'it doesn’t happen that often,' said C. Samuel Craig, professor of marketing at NYU’s Stern school, plus brands can usually distance themselves quickly."

Excerpt from Project Syndicate -- "A little more than a year ago, in the summer of 2012, the eurozone, faced with growing fears of a Greek exit and unsustainably high borrowing costs for Italy and Spain, appeared to be on the brink of collapse. Today, the risk that the monetary union could disintegrate has diminished significantly – but the factors that fueled it remain largely unaddressed."

Excerpt from Los Angeles Times -- "Years of experience with Amazon.com have accustomed us to transacting business online, and eBay has given people confidence that a business deal 'doesn't have to have a brand name on the other side,' says Arun Sundararajan, an expert in digital technologies at New York University."

Excerpt from Reuters -- "Separately, an academic study said people reacted best to the challenge of climate change if it was not presented as doom and gloom. 'The best way to encourage environmentally friendly behavior is to emphasize the long life expectancy of a nation, not its imminent downfall,' according to the study of 131 nations led by NYU Stern Professor Hal Hershfield."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore are the only economies that have moved from middle-income to developed nation status while maintaining relatively high growth rates, according to Nobel laureate Michael Spence, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business."