Decision Making & Negotiations

Marketing research and advertising strategic planning offer viable and financially attractive career options for anthropologists because many businesses seek deep understandings of consumer lifestyles and brand use. As professionally trained anthropologists operating in the corporate world, we see a bright future for anthropologists, but we believe that there are merits in broadening the typical anthropological approach to incorporate additional theory and methods from other social and behavioral sciences, particularly psychology.

We develop a dynamic incomplete-markets model of entrepreneurial firms, and demonstrate the implications of nondiversifiable risks for entrepreneurs' interdependent consumption, portfolio allocation, financing, investment, and business exit decisions. We characterize the optimal capital structure via a generalized tradeoff model where risky debt provides significant diversification benefits.

Using data on repurchase agreements by primary securities dealers, we show that three classes of securities (Treasury securities, securities issued by government-sponsored agencies, and mortgage-backed securities) can be formally ranked in terms of their collateral values in the general collateral (GC) market.

Focus groups are the most used and abused qualitative marketing research method. Refocusing Focus Groups by Robert J. Morais lays out, in simple terms, the best practices for planning, designing, conducting, and interpreting focus groups. The book draws upon perspectives and techniques from psychology and anthropology, along with decades of the author's and other experts' experience.

Hospital ambulance diversions are prevalent and increasing nationwide as emergency departments experience growing congestion. Using negative binomial regressions, this paper links the number of acute myocardial infarction (AMI) deaths to the level and extent of diversion in the five boroughs of New York City. The results indicate that both high levels of ambulance diversion and simultaneous diversion across hospitals are associated with increasing numbers of deaths from AMI.

Financial crises appear to be a common and fairly constant feature of the economic cycle. Banking crises, a distinct subset of financial crises, consist either of panics, moments of temporary confusion about the unobservable incidence across the financial system of observable aggregate shocks, or severe waves of bank failures which result in aggregate negative net worth of failed banks in excess of one percent of GDP.

Lawrence Glaubinger, a Columbia Business School alumnus, became increasingly involved in running his 100-acre Christmas tree farm after he retired in 1992. Between 1993 and 2008, Glaubinger sold Ponderosa pines through an arrangement with Green Acres, a large retailer that bought Glaubinger's trees to sell at its nurseries. While Glaubinger Tree Farm sold the trees to Green Acre at a wholesale price based on its marginal cost, the retailer independently set retail pricing. Glaubinger suspected his tree farm could have shown higher profits if it had sold directly to consumers.