Strategy

This paper describes the motives that gave rise to the creation of the Federal Reserve System, summarizes the history of Fed monetary policy from its origins in 1914 through the Treasury-Fed Accord of 1951, and reviews several of the principal controversies that surround that history. The persistence of conceptual errors in Fed monetary policy — particularly adherence to the "real bills doctrine" — is a central puzzle in monetary history, particularly in light of the enormous costs of Fed failures during the Great Depression.

We review accounting principles related to the reporting of marketing activities and evaluate their implications for marketing research and practice. Based on our review, we argue that current accounting practices contribute significantly to the declining influence of marketing within organizations and the rise of myopic management. Financial reports misrepresent marketing contribution and impede its fair assessment. Changes to current marketing accounting practices are needed. Balance sheet recognition of all marketing-related intangibles emerged as the prevailing proposed solution.

What do economics and history have to tell us about the ways euro zone countries are likely to resolve their problems of fiscal unsustainability and banking system insolvency? In answering that question, I am among the most pessimistic observers of the likely future of the euro and its membership. In my view, the euro zone's likely failure to avoid at least some departures, if not total collapse, reflects its poor initial institutional design.

We study the bidding strategies of vertically differentiated firms that bid for sponsored search advertisement positions for a keyword at a search engine. We explicitly model how consumers navigate and click on sponsored links based on their knowledge and beliefs about firm qualities. Our model yields several interesting insights; a main counterintuitive result we focus on is the "position paradox." The paradox is that a superior firm may bid lower than an inferior firm and obtain a position below it, yet it still obtains more clicks than the inferior firm.

While millions of products are sold on its retail platform, Amazon.com itself stocks and sells only a very small fraction of them. Most of these products are sold by third-party sellers who pay Amazon a fee for each unit sold. Empirical evidence clearly suggests that Amazon tends to sell high-demand products and leave long-tail products for independent sellers to offer.

In 2009, a bipartisan Knight Commission found that while the broadband age is enabling an information and communications renaissance, local communities in particular are being unevenly served with critical information about local issues. Soon after the Knight Commission delivered its findings, The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) initiated a working group to identify crosscurrents and trends, and make recommendations on how the information needs of communities can be met in a broadband world.