Strategy

We propose a model of asset management in which benchmarking arises endogenously, and analyze its unintended welfare consequences. Fund managers' portfolios are unobservable and they incur private costs in running them. Conditioning managers' compensation on a benchmark portfolio's performance partially protects them from risk, and thus boosts their incentives to invest in risky assets. In general equilibrium, these compensation contracts create an externality through their effect on asset prices.

The Business Roundtable’s Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation, delivered in August 2019, reflected a pronouncement of a new paradigm for business.

We explore why and how corporations seek to build community resilience as a strategic response to grand challenges. Based on a comparative case study analysis of four corporations strategically building community resilience in five place-based communities in South Africa, as well as three counterfactual cases, we develop a process model of corporate practices and contingent factors that explain why and how some corporations commit to community resilience building and whether they try to do so directly or indirectly.

We examine the microeconomics of using algorithms to nudge decision-makers towards particular social outcomes. We refer to this as "algorithmic social engineering." In this article, we apply classic strategic communication models to this strategy. Manipulating predictions to express policy preferences strips the predictions of informational content and can lead decision-makers to ignore them. When social problems stem from decision-makers’ objectives (rather than their information sets), algorithmic social engineering exhibits clear limitations.

Qualitative research is often used by marketers to develop new brand positionings. This case illustrates how two sequentially applied qualitative approaches were used to generate positionings for a pet food brand. The methods included psychologically oriented focus groups and anthropologically informed ethnographies. When implemented independently by a single market research company, the two approaches inspired highly distinctive brand positionings.

Consumer research often fails to have broad impact on members of our own discipline, on adjacent disciplines studying related phenomena, and on relevant stakeholders who stand to benefit from the knowledge created by our rigorous research. We propose that impact is limited because consumer researchers have adhered to a set of implicit boundaries or defaults regarding what we study, why we study it, and how we do so. We identify these boundaries and describe how they can be challenged.

Amazon's entry into Finland had been expected for years by S Group, Finland's largest retailer. Now that the company's arrival in their home market was imminent, S Group needed to decide quickly on the best strategy for survival and the optimal path to future growth. The company's executive board had several options: staying focused on the Finnish market, expanding into global markets, or tapping their world-class data and logistics expertise to forge another path.

The Emerging Video Cloud System

Few questions are fraught with more long-term implications than the way we shape our communications system. If the medium is indeed the message, and if these messages influence people and institutions, then tomorrow’s media, and today’s media policies, will govern future society, culture, and economy.